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Earth :: an animated map of global wind and weather. Spurious Correlations. 27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012. We may never have our flying cars, but the future is here. From creating fully functioning artificial leaves to hacking the human brain, science made a lot of breakthroughs this year. 1. Quadriplegic Uses Her Mind to Control Her Robotic Arm At the University of Pittsburgh, the neurobiology department worked with 52-year-old Jan Scheuermann over the course of 13 weeks to create a robotic arm controlled only by the power of Scheuermann’s mind.

The team implanted her with two 96-channel intracortical microelectrodes. Placed in the motor cortex, which controls all limb movement, the integration process was faster than anyone expected. 2. Once the robot figures out how to do that without all the wires, humanity is doomed. 3. Photo Courtesy of Indigo Moon Yarns. At the University of Wyoming, scientists modified a group of silkworms to produce silk that is, weight for weight, stronger than steel. 4. 5. 6. ReCell by Avita Medical is a medical breakthrough for severe-burn victims. 7. 8. 10. 11.

eLearning, Education Technology and Teacher Blog - InformED : These 31 charts will destroy your faith in humanity. Earlier this week, Rob Wile of Business Insider posted his graph-heavy opus: "31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity. " Naturally, we here at Wonkblog were all eager to see the results.

But we'd quibble a bit with Wile's interpretations of the data. His charts all struck us as horrible news. So we're re-analyzing them here with the proper, gloom-heavy spin: 1) Inter-state wars are on the rise since 2002. Zoom in on that pink line: Systemic Peace 2) Dictatorships still exist: 3) We haven't eradicated human slavery: It's Getting Better All The Time / Stephen Moore & Julian Simon 4) People around the world are becoming just as lazy as the French: "The Improving State of the World" (c) Cato Institute 2007. 5) Look at all the frivolous crap we're spending money on: 6) Pretty much everyone in the United States can now read Fifty Shades of Grey: 7) More 77-year-olds are dying than ever before: 8) We vanquished infectious disease only to find more horrible ways to die: Citi 24) Lady nerds, even: Factory-in-a-Day project aims to deploy work-ready robots within 24 hours.

Industrial robots have proven useful in reducing production costs in large factories, with major enterprises enlisting their services to execute repetitive tasks. The Factory-in-a-Day project, which kicked off in October, aims to also make robotic technology beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by developing adaptable robots that can be integrated with workplace systems within 24 hours. Until now, SMEs have not been well suited to the benefits of robotic technology as, compared to enterprises of larger size, they rely on a more agile workforce made up of few large machines and many humans completing simple repetitive tasks.

Common short-duration batch operations in SMEs, such as packing or checking the quality of seasonal fruit, only have small production periods. As developing and training a robot to execute these tasks can take weeks or even months, the expense generally outweighs the money saved in labor costs. Source: Factory-in-a-Day. Most Exciting Technology/Company At EVS27 -- EP Tender. Cars Published on December 8th, 2013 | by Zachary Shahan There were some pretty wicked cars at EVS27, cool wireless charging technology, Brammo electric motorcycles, and more, but the technology offering that excited me the most was what EP Tender is looking to bring to market. It’s nothing scientifically revolutionary. Actually, it’s quite simple. Below is a video of the interview I conducted with founder/CEO Jean-Baptiste Segard, which includes pretty much all of the details, but following the video is also a text summary of what EP Tender is looking to bring to market.

The EP Tender website actually very succinctly states what this contraption is (in French, but the translation from Google looks quite good): “in plain language: a generator mounted on a small trailer and available for rent (Tender’Lib ® ) …” As Jean-Baptiste notes, an electric vehicle is a completely adequate vehicle — an excellent vehicle even — almost every day of the year for most people — 360 days a year, as he says. Can We Create a Network of 100 Sharing Cities by 2015? Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November during Shareable's worldwide Map Jam.

This is just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network - an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities by 2015. A Sharing City is a city where housing, food, transportation, energy, and money are locally owned and democratically governed. Where we create our own meaningful and dignified work together and creatively play in community centers, urban farms, makerspaces and art collectives. Where we share material resources and skills through peer-to-peer exchanges, lending libraries and gifting. The Sharing Cities Network is a grassroots network for sharing innovators to discover together how to create as many of these sharing cities around the world as fast as possible. The Sharing Cities Network will scale up and replicate successful sharing models by: To accomplish this our initial plans are to:

Sustainable Man | Promoting Sustainable Lives & Communities. Vending Machines. Scientific Method Educational Videos. Contact Support. Home - Springer. Scientific Method Educational Videos. Science | Watch Free Documentaries Online. Scientific Method. The Collective Evolution II: The Human Experience. 'The Collective Evolution II: The Human Experience' is a documentary focused on showing each of the dimensions to the experience we call life. Its intention is to provide the viewer with the tools and understanding needed to step out of current limitations and instead experience the infinite potentiality we are all capable of. The documentary concludes by addressing the shift in consciousness that has already begun and continues to intensify on the planet. “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

-Mark Twain “We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” FLUORIDE: The Hard to Swallow Truth is a short documentary that looks at the initial theories behind the effectiveness of fluoride and where it originated. July 2012 NEWS: Harvard Study Finds Fluoride Lowers IQ - Published in Federal Govt Journal “In point of fact, fluoride causes more human cancer death, and causes it faster than any other chemical.” Related Posts. Stop Railing on the Unemployed; Our Problems Are Structural. – 27 June, 2013Posted in: Articles, Equality In western cultures it is all to easy to finger point and rail on the unemployed. Due to us living within the confines of a work to earn to pay to live system we find ourselves in a position of needing some form of employment.

This sets us up into an environment of structural violence and desperate competition against each other in class warfare, which is a race to the bottom to see who can accumulate the most before we die. So long as we operate under this antiquated and outmoded system we will have a certain level of unemployment that is only likely to grow as our population expands. Currently there are nowhere near enough full-time employment opportunities and part time jobs not only result in underemployment, but still leave people dependent on the social welfare system.

“The research evidence suggests that when someone is unemployed long-term they become much less employable,” Nicholas Gruen Related posts: About Challenged Species. List of 9 free educational websites. By: True Activist. With internet, access to free education is possible, but with increasingly restrictive copyright laws and incompatible technologies its potential is hindered.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. It is vital to have access to free education so below we created a list of nine websites where you can access these free resources. When educational resources are digital and openly licensed under Creative Commons licenses, they can be shared with everyone for the marginal cost of $0. Many institutions have recorded on-campus lectures and published them as OER licensed with Creative Commons. 1. Open Yale Courses (OYC) provide lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses licensed using Creative Commons. 3. 4. Searching for open textbooks? 5. 6.Open Stax College 7. 9. These 31 charts will destroy your faith in humanity. Watch Free Science Documentaries Online at www.videoneat.com.

Recommended Books and DVDs. Cleantech News — Solar, Wind, EV News (#1 Source) | CleanTechnica. 10 TED Talks on predicting the future. Art Playlist: 9 talks that give a new view of nature Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist — no two pieces the same. In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Greenberg […] Playlist A TEDx playlist: 6 talks that became phenomena As of this week, more than 20,000 TEDxTalks have been given at 5,000+ events held in 137 countries around the globe.

MyScienceAcademy. Artificial Intelligence News. Artificial Intelligence News & Articles. Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology. Sites anglophones. Robotics and Automation: 06/24/11. Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence.

Science and Technology News, Science Articles | Discover Magazine.