July-August Ideas and Innovation

Read the articles selected in July-August 2016

7 cities transforming their rivers from blights to beauties

by Sam Lubell

Source: Wired, 4 August

Like any other metropolis in the world, Los Angeles is reviving its river in its natural and urban ambient, realizing that water is not only a channel of sewage but can develop the recreational and cultural potential of a city.

This guy made one of the year’s best albums from Youtube sounds

by Brian Raftery

Source: Wired, 4 August

Potential, the latest work of the 27-year-old James Hinton is one-man electronic-pop music that re-elaborates sound from unknown and successless amateur material of You-Tube in a new genre.

Why gene-therapy drugs are so expensive

Source: The Economist, 3 August

Gene-therapies are so costly because the process of making them is still experimental and not industrialized, tailored to each patient for a tiny market. Pharmaceutical companies have to incur ongoing costs to make an experimental therapy a reliable product of guaranteed quality.

Inside the online school that could radically change how kids learn everywhere

by Chris Beroik

Source: Wired, 4 August

In New Hampshire there are 450 virtual schools enrolling more than 260.000 full-time students and millions part-time. They put students in charge of their own education, but are they really better?

This is the enormous gigafactory, where Tesla will build its future

by Jack Stewart

Source: Wired, 27 July

In the desert of Nevada is being built the Gigafactory, an enormous factory that will produce batteries for Tesla Motors, with the goal of 500.000 cars produced a year. Musk is planning a vertically integrated company that will produce electric vehicles, batteries to propel them and solar panels to generate energy

The bicycle problem that nearly broke mathematics

by Brendan Borrell

Source: Scientific American, 20 July

One is able to ride bikes, but nobody knows how bikes move steadily. The biker Jim Papadopoulos has spent years studying the mysteries of bicycle balance, and now his intellectual curiosity has been applied to the cycling industry and to other fields, like prosthetics and robotics.

The US is finally getting its first offshore wind farm

by Brendan Cole

Source: Wired, 28 July

The US has built in Rhode Island the first offshore wind farm. Spinning fans, hundreds of feet tall and anchored to the ocean floor, are built and designed so that they can face the dramatically changing weather conditions.

Planet hunters seek new ways to detect alien life

by Alexandra Witze

Source: Nature, 27 July

After detecting thousands of planets that could harbor liquid water, Nasa is working to understand how to interpret oxygen presence, when there is not good evidence of life, and in the reverse, how not to miss life because we don’t really know all biochemistries that could sustain it.

2 newfound alien planets may be capable of supporting life

by Myke Wall

Source: Scientific American, 19 July

Kepler telescope has discovered during its new mission called K2 four exoplanets orbiting around a small star, two probably habitable.The alien worlds spotted by Kepler until now since its launch in 2009 are 2300.

The air conditioner that makes electricity

by Robert Fares

Source: Scientific American, 19 July

Be Power Tech is a new air conditioner that runs on natural gas to provide air conditioning and produces electricity that can be used for lighting, computers, and all sorts of other commercial use.

Facebook’s giant Internet-beaming drone finally takes flight

by Cade Metz

Source: Wired, 21 July

Aquila, the drone Zuckerberg and company are designing to provide Internet access in remote parts of the world, has made his first successful flight. Flying in the stratosphere is cheaper and easier than running landlines across the whole surface of Earth.

Human brain mapped in unprecedented detail

by Linda Geddes

Source: Nature, 20 July

A team of neuroscientists has constructed a new map of the cerebral cortex, subdivided into 360 separate parcels, different in structure, function, and connectivity, to better understand how the brain works as a whole, and in those variations from person to person that can explain individual talents.

The far-out summit where geniuses learn to build starships

by Nick Stockton

Source: Wired, 12 April 2016

In the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel, a former train depot in beaux-arts style, take place conventions about spaceships, where amid conversations about inspiring topics like Greek mythology they plan to reach Alpha Centauri in 20 years. Shall we take a winged chariot?

Lose yourself in Tomoyuki Tanaka’s X-ray illustrations of Tokio trains stations

by Robbie Gonzalez

Source: Wired, 13 July

The drawings of the Japanese architect Tomoyuki Tanaka are studies of innards that seem see through the walls. The illustrations of labyrinths in Tokio stations, handmade with a ballpoint without computer model, are displayed in a new exhibition at a Tokio gallery.

Gorgeous new book preaches the gospel of brutalist architecture

by Margaret Rhodes

Source: Wired, 14 July

"This Brutal World" of Peter Chadwick is an homage to the modernist architecture movement that is called from the French béton brut. With its monolithic, lunar, raw-cement buildings it featured the post-war construction boom and its style has been deployed by architects like Zaha Hadid and Alejandro Aravena.

Think Culture is a space opera? Nah, it’s a Trojan horse

Source: Wired, 24 June

Iain Bank in “Culture”, a series of science fiction novels about a spacefaring super-intelligent collective that only lives from leisure and intellectual pursuits, uses planet-smashing weapons and giant space shifts to express radical left-wing reflections about society and the space opera genre telling an old story.

Consulta l’articolo:

http://www.wired.com/2016/06/geeks-guide-iain-banks/

Inside the Juno instrument peering deep within Jupiter

by George Musser

Source: Scientific American, 6 July

A microwave radiometer onboard the spacecraft Juno, spinning around and across every angle of Jupiter atmosphere, will read the presence of water vapor, whose abundance confirms that the planet formed far from the sun and not in its present location.

The return of Arthut C. Clarke’s fantastic vision of Jupiter

Source: Wired, 8 July

The Juno orbits around Jupiter are reviving some science-fiction stories like Arthur Clarke’s novella “A Meeting with Medusa”, telling about the discovery of intelligent life on Jupiter in 2099 and about human conquests in the space in a quite visionary way.

Facebook opencellular: a baby antenna brings Internet to the boonies

by Cade Metz

Source: Wired, 6 July

Facebook is building a series of new hardware devices to introduce Internet in the areas of the world without access to it and outside the reach of cellular networks.

“Cortex in a dish” could help researchers develop new therapies for deseased and damaged brains

by Bel Dumé

Source: Scientific American

Induced pluripotent stem cells can differentiate into cortical cells through a simple “default” pathway, and the produced neural tissues divide into neurons of all six cortical layers. These recent discoveries are important for many brain diseases.

Don’t be so quick to flush 15 years of brain scan studies

by Nick Stockton

Source: Wired, 8 July

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is the most sophisticated tool for reading the brain activity through the signatures of oxygen-rich blood. But it is not a perfect tool and for its possible errors has been the object of an overblown negative attention according to a recent study over the past 15 years.

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Pubblicato il : 20/12/2017
Modificato il : 04/04/2019

July-August Ideas and Innovation

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