Lynne Kiesling Check out this very cool idea for reinventing capacitors with nanotubes to provide energy storage for portable devices. The capacitor, a 300-year-old technology for modulating current flow by storing small amounts of energy, stores energy via electrodes that separate a charge and thus maintain potential. But it can only store energy in proportion …
Michael Giberson You have read about prediction markets, maybe you have even participated in one, and now you want to go to the next level. You have an idea for a market, but you don?t know how to make one. Even if you have the technical know how to set up a market, if you …
Michael Giberson In fact-checking myself on ?Rivers of Babylon? (discussed in the continuation of my previous post), I saw in the Wikipedia entry that Sublime covered the tune too. I had just used the Wal-mart.com website to download the Virginia CutUps version of the tune ? yeah, I?m not too hip to download music from …
Lynne Kiesling From Technology Review today, news of new research from Penn State on liquid fuel from coal: Schobert and his colleagues make the fuel using refined coal oil, which is a byproduct of coke manufacture; the byproduct is mixed at an oil refinery with a product of crude oil called light cycle oil. This …
Lynne Kiesling Researchers have used a nematode to clone pigs that produce meat that is high in omega-3 fatty acids (see articles from Wired and the International Herald Tribune, for example). Yay, bacon as a health food! The Wired article notes how consumer tastes are driving this research: Hoping to create healthier, cheaper and tastier …
Lynne Kiesling Courtesy of Londonist, check out the fascinating Digitally Distributed Environments. It’s the blog of Andy Hudson-Smith, from University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. He can take historic information about a city, in this case London, and import it into Google Earth to see how London would look if it still retained …
Lynne Kiesling In his last column in Technology Review in December 2004, Michael Schrage talked about the importance of the diffusion of innovation. He made a lot of very trenchant observations, including The challenge for policymakers and populations alike is how to cope with the pervasive-and perverse-consequences of ever more people gaining access to ever …
Lynne Kiesling Check out this Wired article about methane capture from a trash dump in Bangaledesh. Methane capture technology can serve three objectives here: generating power, improving the utilization of the dump, and creating fertilizer that can enrich the thin soil in the area. When it gets going, this system can produce enough electricity to …
Lynne Kiesling We here at KP are a bit in the futurist optimist vein, so we pay attention to fuel cell technologies. One of my personal favorites is work to commercialize small methanol cartridges for use in phones, PDAs, and other small devices. So my instant thought when I saw this article on the development …
Lynne Kiesling Randall Parker at FuturePundit has a post about using nanoscale silica to release hydrogen from ammonia borane, and how that technology could lead to more feasible hydrogen storage for vehicles and other uses. This interesting finding is a result of research at Pacific Northwest National Lab.
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