Scientists Develop Solar Panel Material 100 Times Thinner Than a Human Hair

…e light-absorbing layers to boost the range of sunlight they can absorb. At 100 times thinner than a human hair, according to CNN, or 150 times thinner than the silicon wafers used in traditional solar panels, it’s more of a coating than a hard material, which comes with a host of advantages: it’s flexible, it can be easily applied to existing objects, and doesn’t require huge amounts of exclusive space to get the job done. Instead of having an en…

Scientists Just Cracked One-Way Superconductivity, Thought Impossible for Over 100 Years

…system. These devices are known as Josephson Junctions and are a critical component in both quantum sensors and quantum computers that use superconducting qubits. The researchers’ innovation was to replace the insulating layer found in a Josephson Junction with a 2D quantum material with unusual properties. The result is that when a current is applied to the device in one direction it is superconducting, but when the current runs in the opposite…

Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming – by Sohail Inayatullah

…ploy more people than those three industries combined (May and Jones, 2001)[1]. Since the 1990s, it has been women-run small businesses that have been the dynamo of growth in the USA: Since 1997, women-owned firms have grown at nearly twice the rate of all firms (17 percent vs. 9 percent). Growth in employment by women-owned firms has been even more dramatic – 24 percent compared to 12 percent for all firms. The number of women-owned firms with em…

Bridging the gap: How the world is becoming a better place

…on of the immense challenges that remain.   This is part of a post by Peter Diamandis, the full version of whch can be seen here: https://www.diamandis.com/blog/scaling-abundance-series-18…

Humans will achieve immortality in 7 years, says futurist

…sabled move, communicate, and restore vision. It’s another story that U.S regulators shot down his bid for Neuralink’s human trial. the original story can be found here: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/immortality-in-7-years-says-futurist  …

A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness

…tivity. We can just find correlations to these experiences. After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. So how could it be that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity? This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult probl…

Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect

…microns. And there was already enough of the gas in the atmosphere to trap 100% of the 15-micron light Earth emits, so adding more CO2 would do nothing. What Ångström missed was that CO2 can absorb wavelengths slightly shorter or longer than 15 microns, though less readily. This light gets captured fewer times along its trip to space. But that capture rate changes if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles. Now the light has twice the molecules to d…

How Gen Z Fixes The Future

…ploration of inner and outer worlds. Young adults in this phase are independent, confident, educated and free to explore various aspects of life. Their curiosity-driven nature fuels activism and drives them to question everything. It can feel scary to hire someone straight out of college, but Gen Z’s innate curiosity can help you fill holes in your business you may have never known were there. They are eager to learn, find creative solutions to in…

Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct – Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse

…ries, the population will soon be half the current value. People are now becoming worried about underpopulation. As a paleontologist, I take the long view. Mammal species tend to come and go rather rapidly, appearing, flourishing and disappearing in a million years or so. The fossil record indicates that Homo sapiens has been around for 315,000 years or so, but for most of that time, the species was rare—so rare, in fact, that it came close to ext…

Can artificial intelligence really help us talk to the animals?

…“To our knowledge, no one has done this end-to-end detangling [of animal sound] before,” says Raskin. The AI-based model developed by ESP, which was tried on dolphin signature whistles, macaque coo calls and bat vocalisations, worked best when the calls came from individuals that the model had been trained on; but with larger datasets it was able to disentangle mixtures of calls from animals not in the training cohort.Another project involves usin…

The world’s in a ‘polycrisis’ — and these countries want to quash it by looking beyond GDP

…th renewable or low or zero-carbon energy sources and that is harder to do [and] it is going to take longer to do if we have constantly growing energy demand,” Steinberger said. “That’s the climate case for it.” The South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu last month became the first country to use the U.N.’s annual climate summit to push for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. The European Parliament, the Vatican and WHO have all backed the prop…

Cornstarch-inspired material promises tougher electronic wearables

…ng 2024 meeting of the American Chemical Society, marking a significant step forward in material science innovation. the original article appeared here: https://www.impactlab.com/2024/04/17/cornstarch-inspired-material-promises-tougher-electronic-wearables/…

Brain-Based Strategic Foresight: Enhancing the Capability and Capacity to Think about the Future (PART 1)

…al is a linked in post by: Tyler Mongan Facilitating Leadership Future Intelligence | Brain-Based & Tech-Augmented Strategic Foresight | Exploring Web3 Gamified Learning   and can be accessed here:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/brain-based-strategic-foresight-enhancing-capability-capacity-mongan%3FtrackingId=HctBtom9eVi1Pf%252BgR0Grmg%253D%253D/?trackingId=HctBtom9eVi1Pf%2BgR0Grmg%3D%3D…

CSIRO roadmap charts Australia’s food and nutrition security by 2050

…ty and resilience will help us protect our food security into the future.” Download the roadmap, Reshaping Australian Food Systems. Additional quotes: Paul Denny, Assistant Secretary for food policy, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, said the document will be an important resource for building sustainable food systems for the future. “The roadmap will shape thinking about food systems and assist stakeholders along the entire food…

Food Trends 2023: The Future of Food and Eating

…and products. In the medium term, regenerative agriculture methods will become a component alongside further important cultivation techniques, such as organic agriculture, permaculture and low-tech methods, which all make a contribution to the bigger, urgently needed transformation of agriculture. The importance of healthy soil and humus has been brought more sharply into focus through popularisation by community supported agriculture, DIY-cultiv…

Inside the Global Race to Turn Water Into Fuel

…end.In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and in dozens of spots around the globe endowed with abundant wind and sun, investors see an opportunity to generate renewable electricity so cheaply that using it to make green hydrogen becomes economical. Even if only some of the projects come to fruition, vast stretches of land would be duly transformed.The project is one example of a global gamble, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, being ma…

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