Recycling carbon: it just makes sense This woman’s idea is all about turning garbage into gold. She’s Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, and her company has invented a technology that transforms pollution, including carbon emissions, into sustainable fuels, fabrics, packaging, and other products we use daily. She is transforming waste carbon into valuable and sustainable […]
Every year, an estimated $80 billion of valuable metals are discarded in consumer and industrial waste streams (known as the urban mine). This is all the more regrettable since humanity’s appetite for the electronics that use these metals is ever-growing, leading to increased needs to mine more metals. But traditional mining takes a real toll […]
It may sound like science fiction, but it isn’t. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have, for the first time, made “living” skin for robots out of human cells. While this may sound creepy, it is actually a technological advance that will have serious implications for both how robots work and how humans interact with […]
A new initiative is helping to address the global freshwater crisis. The World Economic Forum and multinational technology company HCL have launched the Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative. This collaboration secures funding of $15 million over five years for entrepreneurs to tackle the growing concerns of water scarcity, water pollution and water stress, a situation where not […]
The fact that ground squirrels burn almost no energy when they hibernate – with no loss of muscle mass – has implications for the many millions of people globally who experience muscle wasting as a consequence of various conditions. A decrease in muscle mass can be caused by undernourishment, for instance, which affects almost 830 […]
A cancer study sponsored by drug company GlaxoSmithKline has provided researchers with a surprising result: a 100% remission rate for the 12 participants. All of the study’s participants had a very specific type of advanced rectal cancer – mismatch-repair deficient colorectal cancer – that, due to its genetic traits, made it a good candidate for […]
The Good Times ends our series on new and not so new technologies that benefit mankind with this short video, courtesy of the World Economic Forum, on three ways the world of sports is using artificial intelligence. Featured image: Artificial intelligence (Flickr, Attribution 2.0 Generic – CC BY 2.0)
Batteries power our daily lives. From communications and information technology in phones and laptops, to mobility in cars, motorcycles, and scooters, and beyond, most electronic objects have a battery-powered version. While this has many positive impacts, what we do with the batteries in these objects at the end of their lives still needs some work. […]
The news is full of stories about how plastics are further encroaching into even the most remote regions of the Earth, the latest example being the discovery of microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow, probably the result of traveling through the atmosphere. While the news is indeed dire and the need to curb the production and […]
It looks a bit like a beehive, this 3D printed home located in Massa Lombarda, a town in northern Italy near Ravenna. It took a large 3D printer about 200 hours spaced out over a few months to print this 60-square-meter (645-square-foot) house that looks like no other. Certainly it is not the only 3D […]
