This week’s hype: same as last week’s hype.

This is an excellent application of technology. For something to have a real impact, it needs to move away from “corrective” technology and toward “superpowers for everyone” technology. Corrective technologies like eye glasses and contacts have been ripe for disruption for a generation and yet as a niche*, they have remained largely untouched.

Lens replacement surgery is a standard procedure for treating cataracts so the main innovation here is the replacement of a passive lens with an active one. The details are not explained in the article but the promise of improving the eyesight of everyone by 3 x 20/20 vision certainly sounds like a big deal.

*a niche but a pretty fucking huge niche at that.

Also via Emlyn O’Regan.

Originally shared by Laston Kirkland

So, umm… little disruptive maybe?

http://www.businessinsider.com/ocumetics-bionic-lens-perfect-vision-at-every-age-2015-5

While talk of terraforming Mars tends to dwell on changing the atmosphere, that’s just the beginning.

While talk of terraforming Mars tends to dwell on changing the atmosphere, that’s just the beginning. The Martian soil is also tremendously hostile to life. If life can made to sustain itself there it will have to set to work oxidising everything and making the surface less chemically active.

Originally shared by Laston Kirkland

Send the printers first… send people in a decade or so after the life takes hold.

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/elon-musk-and-craig-venter-want-to-print-life-on-mars

Just to highlight once again the futility of prohibition (of anything) in the Age of More.

As Richard Hughs said in comment on Andres Soolo’s post

1: sugar

2: yeast

3: science

4: any chemical you could conceivably want, really

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

Future Shock strikes again. Once more science creates something new that is not quite covered by laws written a century ago.

I guess it will soon be illegal to own yeast.

http://www.nature.com/news/engineered-yeast-paves-way-for-home-brew-heroin-1.17566

These glasses work by blocking very specific wavelengths of light.

These glasses work by blocking very specific wavelengths of light. The problem for red-green colour blind people is that because the red and green ranges are so close to each other (in fact they overlap) these people have a problem distinguishing between them. By blocking the wavelengths in the overlap region, it helps the brain separate out the colours and the effect is quite dramatic. Colours that used to be grey-brown now “pop” as either green or red. That also makes composite colours like yellow, purple and aqua really work too.

Originally shared by Glenn Murray

Very cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpCTDwjHZQ

Let’s not get too fancy about this.

Let’s not get too fancy about this. Your burger is not that important when we consider that 6 out 7 billion people are going to need access to a cheap source of protein if we ever hope to end extreme poverty globally. Farmed beef is astonishingly inefficient (apart from also being a major source of greenhouse gas production). We need to be doing less of it rather than more. The scale of factory farming needed to supply chicken as a protein source is just astronomical and fairly horrific to consider. Via Emlyn O’Regan

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, one of the world’s foremost experts on synthetic meat, was responsible for that first fully lab-grown burger a few years ago which was generally reviewed as tasting not bad. At the time, it cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars to make – but in a new interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company, he says he’s gotten the cost down to AU$80 per kilo – about US$29 per pound. In a few years, this could easily become cost-competitive with ordinary beef, and then even cheaper: cows are, if you think about it, an awfully inefficient way to convert water and grain into protein, going through that whole “life form” business in the interim.

I suspect that it will be a long time until lab-grown meat tastes as good as cow-grown (it’s not easy to mimic the fat marbling process in good beef), and in particular lab-grown steaks will be a much longer time coming. But that’s far less noticeable in ground beef, and it’s not hard to imagine a future where that can be factory-produced far more cheaply than cattle, with cow steak becoming more of a luxury good.

The consequences for human diet and health may be profound: it makes protein suddenly a lot cheaper and easier to come by, even as changing climates can play merry hell with existing ranching.

Via Ward Plunet and Steven Flaeck.

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2015/s4205857.htm

Interesting way to generate power from wind. No moving parts and silent. Via Vlad Markov

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/16/8615089/vortex-bladeless-wind-turbines-shake-to-generate-electricity