Bryan O’Rourke shares his thoughts on technology, business, and consumer trends in health, fitness and more.
Transcendent Man is a film about famed inventor and futurist thinker, Ray Kurzweil. The film follows Ray around the world to tell the story of his early day's as an inventor, including his influences, successes and accolades. It delves deeply into his profound predictions about the future, raising questions about our humanity, our divinity, and ultimately, our destiny.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, ("DARPA"), is holding a meeting at Stanford University soon on the topic of geoengineering: modifying the planet artificially in order to offset the effects of global warming. The topic is addressed in the video above.
An expanding group of experts like Stanford’s David Victor, Carnegie Mellon’s M. Granger Morgan, among others are investigating the most likely geoengineering scenario to receive real consideration: Introducing sulfate aerosol particles into the stratosphere, which will reflect sunlight and cause global cooling. It is what volcanic eruptions have done in the past to the earth's climate. These are the latest articles by major climate researchers, or policy experts sounding an alarm about geoengineering.
Read the Article "When Will GeoEngineering Tip?" by Chris Mooney to learn more.
Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, and video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. Read more and watch the video on TED as he explains his concept.
If the past was document sharing, the future is data sharing. Tim Berners-Lee says now, “I want you to put your data on the Web.” But how should we go about that? To answer that question, Berners-Lee provides three points of instruction. One, a URL should point to the data. Two, anyone accessing the URL should get data back. Three, relationships in the data should point to additional URLs with data. These three rules are simpler departure from the past 10 years of discussion, focused on the “semantic” web and a “resource description framework”. Those concepts have received less mainstream acceptance because of their high degree of abstraction. Other technology is faring better, in particular the hardware devices. For example, wider data collection through common 3G devices can now monitor traffic, temperature, emergencies and other events with transparent data connectivity. If the past is any indication, hardware advances will continue to arrive much earlier than software advances. So while the raw data is coming, we still have a long way to go before the software to access a world wide web of data is mature.
Imagine re-growing a severed fingertip, or creating an organ in the lab that can be transplanted into a patient without risk of rejection. It sounds like science fiction, but it's not. It's the emerging field of regenerative medicine, where scientists are learning to harness the body's own power to regenerate itself, with astonishing results. Learn more about the astonishing advances in this medical technology.
Charlie Rose has a conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. Best known as co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape. He is on the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay and articulates technology trends from a veterans view point of a quarter century. The best is yet to come and fast.
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