Lifeboat Foundation

In the coming decades, the planet’s most heavily concentrated populations may occupy city environments where a digital blanket of sensors, devices, and cloud connected data are orchestrated to enhance humanity’s living experience. A variety of smart concepts are forming key elements of what enable city ecosystems to function effectively – from traffic control and environmental protection to the management of energy, sanitation, healthcare, security, and buildings. In this article, we reflect on the potential personal impacts of the smart city, and its technologies, on the individuals residing there.

Eyes on the Prize

In the race to attract ideas, business, talent and money, the world’s premier cities are competing to build highly interconnected smart environments where people, government, and business operate in symbiosis with spectacular, exponentially improving technologies. These include big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, hyperconnectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), robots, drones, autonomous green vehicles, 3D/4D printing, and renewable energy. The trick will be to ensure that this array of technological goodies is harnessed in service of the humans that make cities what they are.

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It’s a race to the skies in terms of which company actually deploys an on-demand air taxi service based around electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. For its part, German startup Volocopter is taking another key step with the revelation of its first aircraft designed for actual commercial use, the VoloCity.

The VoloCity is the fourth-generation eVTOL vehicle that Volocopter has created, but the first three were created for testing and demonstration purposes, and have flown more than 1,000 times in service of that goal. The VoloCity, an 18-rotor VTOL with a range of around 35 km (just under 22 miles) and a top speed of about 70 mph, is designed for transporting up to two people, including light luggage like backpacks, briefcases or purses.

FUTURISTIC MOVIE TIMELINE

Super proud to announce the first in-depth analysis by our “Rejuvenation Now” initiative: a “Risk-Benefit Analysis of.

An in-depth analysis — more than 200 pre-clinical and clinical trials.

Scientists have created an image which zooms in to a tiny section inside a cell. This is not a simulation, it is the real thing. As you run the video, you will see the section highlighted in green and then thin yellow tubes inside it. These are strands of the body’s clotting agent ready to be transported to the site of a wound.

But observers warn that there are several factors that could stymie the nation’s plans, including a lack of contribution to the theories used to develop the tools underpinning the field, and a reticence by Chinese companies to invest in the research needed to make fundamental breakthroughs.

The country’s artificial-intelligence research is growing in quality, but the field still plays catch up to the United States in terms of high-impact papers, people and ethics.

Mexico-based startup Biomitech has developed an artificial tree that it claims is capable of sucking up the equivalent amount of air pollution as 368 living trees. In doing so, it could be a game-changer for polluted cities lacking enough free space to plant a forest of real trees.

The Universe is expanding, and that expansion is speeding up over time. These two facts have been well established through observation, but we don’t know what’s causing that expansion. It seems to be some mysterious, unknown energy that acts like the opposite of gravity.

We call this hypothetical energy “dark energy”, and it’s been calculated to constitute around 72 percent of all the stuff that makes up the Universe. We don’t know what it actually is. But a new experiment has just allowed us to rule out one more thing that it isn’t: a new force.

“This experiment, connecting atomic physics and cosmology, has allowed us to rule out a wide class of models that have been proposed to explain the nature of dark energy, and will enable us to constrain many more dark energy models,’‘said physicist Ed Copeland of the University of Nottingham.

NASA just successfully demonstrated the first of three tools designed to refuel spacecraft in space, right outside of the International Space Station.

The space agency’s Robotic Refuelling Mission 3 was able to unstow a special adapter that can hold super-cold methane, oxygen or hydrogen, and insert it into a special coupler on a different fuel tank.

Future iterations of the system could one day allow us to gas up spacecraft with resources from distant worlds, such as liquid methane as fuel. And that’s a big deal, since future space explorations to far away destinations such as the Moon and Mars will rely on our ability to refuel after leaving Earth’s gravity.