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Flying robots, the builders of tomorrow

Two charts on technological unemployment Source: Washington's Blog I find this chart very interesting, because it shows how low unemployment was in the early 1900s. I suspect most people don't know this. Here is a chart I put together from ILO data which suggests that even the proportion of the global workforce in work can fall during periods of global GDP growth: And as I have posted elsewhere, the natural level of unemployment, which is a measure of the supposed healthy amount of unemployment in an economy, has been climbing over the last 100 years too. Food for thought I hope.

Les drones du Sud Ouest | Photos et vidéos aériennes en toute liberté ! Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do By Vinod Khosla FORTUNE -- Healthcare today is often really the "practice of medicine" rather than the "science of medicine." Take fever as an example. For 150 years, doctors have routinely prescribed antipyretics like ibuprofen to help reduce fever. So when something as basic as fever reduction is a hallmark of the "practice of medicine" and hasn't been challenged for 100+ years, we have to ask: What else might be practiced due to tradition rather than science? Today's diagnoses are partially informed by patients' medical histories and partially by symptoms (but patients are bad at communicating what's really going on). The net effect is patient outcomes that are inferior to and more expensive than what they should be. Healthcare should become more about data-driven deduction and less about trial-and-error. Replacing 80% of what doctors do? Computers are better at organizing and recalling complex information than a hotshot Harvard MD. Don't expect ace diagnosis systems overnight.

Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour UPDATE: To read more about how workers will be affected by automation technology, check out Hub's follow up post Burger Robot Poised to Disrupt Fast Food Industry No longer will they say, “He’s going to end up flipping burgers.” Because now, robots are taking even these ignobly esteemed jobs. Alpha machine from Momentum Machines cooks up a tasty burger with all the fixins. With a conveyor belt-type system the burgers are freshly ground, shaped and grilled to the customer’s liking. And while you fret over how many people you invited to the barbecue, Alpha churns out a painless 360 hamburgers per hour. San Francisco-based Momentum Machines claim that using Alpha will save a restaurant enough money that it pays for itself in a year, and it enables the restaurant to spend about twice as much on ingredients as they normally would – so they can buy the gourmet stuff. Source: Momentum Machines You think Americans are obese right now? Peter Murray Peter Murray was born in Boston in 1973. Related

The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It | Wired Opinion Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web. The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream, a phenomenon that I (with Eric Freeman) predicted in the 1990s and shared in the pages of Wired almost exactly 16 years ago. This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. It’s a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: Picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment … Until you touch it, and then, the page-turning stops. Today, this diary-like structure is supplanting the spatial one as the dominant paradigm of the cybersphere: All the information on the internet will soon be a time-based structure. The web will be history.

Massive Airship Off to a Flying Start Blimps and zeppelins plied the skies in the early part of the 20th Century, carrying passengers and cargo and even serving as military aircraft during the World Wars. But it didn't take long for airplanes to replace dirigibles for commercial and military flight and by the middle of the 20th Century, airships were mostly use for advertising, sightseeing and surveillance. But blimps may be back. "This vehicle doesn't need infrastructure," Munir Tojo-Verge, the flight control systems engineer at Aeros, told Discovery News. PHOTOS: Blimplike Craft Hauls Tons of Cargo Anywhere The Aeroscraft could serve both military and humanitarian efforts, delivering extremely heavy loads to areas without transportation infrastructure, such as roads, train tracks or airports. Aeros recently tested a 230-foot-long prototype and has received $35 million from DARPA and NASA to get a full-sized version off the ground. NEWS: Schools of Sleeper Drones Could Swim Future Seas

Wood pulp extract stronger than carbon fiber or Kevlar The Forest Products Laboratory of the US Forest Service has opened a US$1.7 million pilot plant for the production of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) from wood by-products materials such as wood chips and sawdust. Prepared properly, CNCs are stronger and stiffer than Kevlar or carbon fibers, so that putting CNC into composite materials results in high strength, low weight products. In addition, the cost of CNCs is less than ten percent of the cost of Kevlar fiber or carbon fiber. These qualities have attracted the interest of the military for use in lightweight armor and ballistic glass (CNCs are transparent), as well as companies in the automotive, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, and medical industries. View all Cellulose is the most abundant biological polymer on the planet and it is found in the cell walls of plant and bacterial cells. Cellulose structures in trees from logs to molecules Micrographs of cellulose fibers from wood pulp Source: US Forest Service

Lighter-than-air material discovered | euronews, science German material scientists from Kiel University and the Hamburg University of Technology have created the world’s lightest material, dubbed aerographite. One cubic centimeter of aerographite weighs just 0.2 milligrams, which is four times lighter than the previous record holder, 5,000 times less dense than water, and six times lighter than air. Aerographite is so light that it is difficult to work with it in a normal lab. “If you wanted to have one kilogram of this material it would be five cubic metres large. Aerographite is a mesh of carbon tubes, each around 15nm in diameter, interwoven at the micro and nano-scale level. The material is created by putting zinc oxide crystals in special ovens and then heating them to 900 degrees Celsius. The material was presented to the scientific community, and the public, in an article in the publication “Advanced Materials” in July of this year.

Researchers Use Liquid Metal to Create Wires That Stretch Eight Times Their Original Length Researchers from North Carolina State University have created conductive wires that can be stretched up to eight times their original length while still functioning. The wires can be used for everything from headphones to phone chargers, and hold potential for use in electronic textiles. To make the wires, researchers start with a thin tube made of an extremely elastic polymer and then fill the tube with a liquid metal alloy of gallium and indium, which is an efficient conductor of electricity. The tube, filled with liquid metal, can be stretched many times its original length. (Click to enlarge image.) “Previous efforts to create stretchable wires focus on embedding metals or other electrical conductors in elastic polymers, but that creates a trade-off,” says Dr. “Increasing the amount of metal improves the conductivity of the composite, but diminishes its elasticity,” Dickey says. -shipman- Note to Editors: The study abstract follows.

Company To Make Anti-Drone Tech Available To The Masses Tired of skies filled with robots? Okay, that hasn't happened yet, but the Federal Aviation Authority expects that by 2020, American skies will have up to 30,000 drones operating domestically, so the possibility of a robot-crowded sky in the near future is very real. Domestic Drone Countermeasures, LLC, is planning to sell commercial anti-drone equipment aimed at protecting private citizens from prying eyes. Founded in February, DDC was created by the same people behind defense contractor Aplus Mobile, which makes ruggedized computers for other defense contractors. Using knowledge gained from its military contracting work, DDC says it has developed countermeasures that are "highly effective and undefeatable by most current domestic drone technologies." How does the technology work? More to the point, DDC's system has some sort of software that's programmed to conspire against camera- and infrared-equipped drones. As for how a user would be notified of a drone's presence:

Graphene aerogel takes world’s lightest material crown Not even a year after it claimed the title of the world’s lightest material, aerographite has been knocked off its crown by a new aerogel made from graphene. Created by a research team from China’s Zhejiang University in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering lab headed by Professor Gao Chao, the ultra-light aerogel has a density lower than that of helium and just twice that of hydrogen. Although first created in 1931 by American scientist and chemical engineer, Samuel Stephens Kistler, aerogels have recently become a hotly contested area of scientific research. Now a new title-holder has been crowned, with the graphene aerogel created by Gao and his team boasting a density of just 0.16 mg/cm3. “With no need for templates, its size only depends on that of the container,” said Prof. The result is a material the team claims is very strong and extremely elastic, bouncing back after being compressed.

Quantum Stealth; The Invisible Military Becomes A Reality Quantum Stealth; The Invisible Military Becomes A Reality By Guy Cramer, President/CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp. (October 19, 2012, Vancouver, B.C.) Hyperstealth is a successful Canadian camouflage design company with over two million military issued uniforms and over 3000 vehicles and fighter jets using their patterns around the world. Quantum Stealth is a material that renders the target completely invisible by bending light waves around the target. Two separate command groups within the U.S. For reasons of security, I can’t discuss details about how it accomplishes the bending of light but I can explain how it might be used. Scenario 1: A pilot ejects over open terrain in enemy territory, his parachute that deploys is made of the Quantum Stealth material to hide his fall. Scenario 3: The next generation of combat aircraft is undergoing trials, in the past these secret aircraft had to be moved into hangers whenever a spy satellite passed overhead.

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