How Medical Technology Is Saving Lives in Afghanistan

At Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany, Air Force personnel explain how they keep wounded soldiers alive on the flight back from Afghanistan.

Would You Ride the ‘World’s Lightest Electric Vehicle?’

Boosted Boards promise to provide light, easy electronic transport. But is it a sustainable way of getting around the city?

Touchscreen interface for seamless data transfer between the real and virtual worlds

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word. Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.

This technology measures the shape of real-world objects, and automatically adjusts the coordinate systems for the camera, projector, and real world. In this way, it can coordinate the display with touching, not only for flat surfaces like tables and paper, but also for the curved surfaces of objects such as books.

Matternet Founder Paola Santana Wants To Replace The Postal System With Drones

Imagine a world where drones fly the skies - but the drones aren’t for warfare. Instead they’re delivering packages, leapfrogging traditional infrastructure to create a world connected by tiny, nonviolent drones. In the U.S., such drones could replace the aging postal system; in developing countries, the drones could connect rural communities to markets, alleviating poverty and delivering badly needed supplies and medicines.

Imagine that world - and imagine the woman trying to make it a reality. That’s Paola Santana, a former lawyer from the Dominican Republic, who founded the startup Matternet in 2011 with four other immigrant entrepreneurs. Her journey began when she got a scholarship to study with NASA and met three other scholars - Andreas Raptopoulos, Dimitar Pachov and Darlene Damm. The four decided to try to bring about major change. For Santana, it was like starting from scratch.

“I’m talking to you about 2010, two years ago, 1.5 years ago, I didn’t know this word entrepreneur, either in English or Spanish,” she recently recalled. “I didn’t understand what this word was talking about.”

Santana and her co-founders got their first break at Singularity University, where they were challenged to “come up with an idea that could solve a big world problem, using technology that could have an impact on over one billion people in 10 years.” They founded Matternet Inc. after developing the fundamental business concepts as part of a larger team, and received enthusiastic support from Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, both founders of the university.”

Genetic Impact of Culturally-Based Mating Systems

For many species, including humans, matings occur among a restricted pool of partners. In humans, restrictions on the choice of partners are culturally determined and frequently are the result of homophily, namely, contacts among individuals that are similar on some dimension.

Marcus Feldman, Stanford University, discusses how the dimension may itself be culturally transmitted, and its transmission may affect the transmission of other characters, which may be genetically determined, but have nothing to do with the dimension on which the mating choice is based. Socioeconomic choice of consanguineous marriage is an example; it has important consequences for genetic variation in many populations around the world. 

Plastic Bottles go Solar in Philippines

In the Philippines’ urban slums, families are unable to afford electricity and often have no access to the grid anyway. But Filipino actor Illac Diaz is looking to change that. With his organization My Shelter Foundation, he’s come up with an innovative idea: turning empty plastic bottles into lamps.

Building a museum of museums on the web

Imagine being able to see artwork in the greatest museums around the world without leaving your chair. Driven by his passion for art, Amit Sood tells the story of how he developed Art Project to let people do just that.

Suppressed Ancient Discoveries From Around the World

Explorer and archaeologist Jonathan Gray discussed discoveries that demonstrate advanced ancient technology. Because such artifacts don’t match current academic beliefs they are often suppressed, with evidence destroyed or hidden, he said, citing the Smithsonian Institution, and countries such as Peru, America, Israel, New Zealand, France, and Australia as being involved in covering-up evidence.

Singapore’s 21st-Century Teaching Strategies

By cultivating strong school leadership, committing to ongoing professional development, and exploring innovative models like its technology-infused Future Schools, Singapore has become one of the top-scoring countries on the PISA tests.

25,000 LEDs Illuminate The San Francisco Bay Bridge

The Bay Lights project on the San Francisco Bay Bridge is the world’s largest LED sculpture thanks to artist Leo Villareal and his custom algorithms that ensure the patterns won’t repeat for two years.