Technology and how it affects our brains

How our brains are affected by google search and the future of brain-computer interaction...

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - ...

IBM Next 5 in 5 -- 2010

JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

Future of Diving

Here is an innovation which may enable more people to dive and to dive deeper. It will be interesting to wear the gear as it creates a drowning effect at first..

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/into-the-abyss-the-diving-suit-that-turns-men-into-fish-2139167.html

Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish.

Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

The idea immediately conjures up the terrifying spectre of drowning but our lungs are more than capable of taking oxygen from a solution.

“The first trick you would have to learn is overcoming the gag reflex,” explains Lande, a 79-year-old inventor from St Louis, Missouri. “But once that oxygenated liquid is inside your lungs it would feel just like breathing air.”

Lande envisages a scuba suit that would allow divers to inhale highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear cavities.

The CO2 that would normally exit our body when we breathe out would be “scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein in the leg.

Programmable processors

As Intel is in my radar for employment, I came accross an interesting innovation, programmable chips, on The Economist. Normally, chips are made for single purpose and designing and producing customized ones are very expensive. So, programmable processors will solve this problem. Also, take notice of sector growth, players and gross margins below...

http://www.economist.com/node/17528052

"ONE kind of hardware will probably never be virtualised: processors. After all, these are the brains of every digital device. Yet chips, too, are becoming more malleable. Demand is growing for processors that are not just made for a single purpose but can be reconfigured with a special programming tool, a bit like rewritable DVDs. The research arm of Deutsche Bank predicts this segment of the semiconductor market will grow by an annual average of 14% in the next few years.

“Programmable logic devices” (PLDs) help to solve a pressing problem in chipmaking. Developing a custom processor is becoming ever more pricey. Firms may spend up to $40m before the first chip is made. The risk of a design flaw is high, as are the costs of fixing it. PLDs lower both the upfront expense and the cost of getting things wrong. ..."

RFID tags on your watch

As I see on Engadget, they think of placing rfid tags on watches. It is wise. But, even in work safety, they made fall protection harnesses with rfid tags... I wonder where this will go....

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/04/winwatch-wants-rfid-tags-in-your-next-wristwatch-what-could-p/

Looking to simultaneously trick your employees into thinking you love them and keep better tabs on their whereabouts? If so, you should definitely look into handing out Winwatch-approved timepieces as "performance incentives," which should be sporting an oh-so-telling RFID tag in the near future. The Switzerland-based outfit has just announced plans to patent an RFID-enabled crystal gasket that would be placed in luxury wristwatches, and while they're pushing it as a way for companies to weed out counterfeit products, we're sure the privacy advocates in attendance can think of far darker applications. Samples are slated to start shipping out later this autumn, which means your window to snag a non-voyeuristic watch is hastily closing.