The solar energy designers at Rawlemon have created a spherical, sun-tracking glass globe that is able to concentrate sunlight (and moonlight) up to 10,000 times. The company claims that its ß.torics system is 35% more efficient than traditional dual-axis photovoltaic designs, and the fully rotational, weatherproof sphere is even capable of harvesting electricity from moonlight.
More At:- Beautiful Engineering — with Carlos Marcelo Cuadrado and Jose Luis Benavides.
Look at the enforcement side of things:
The latest available data from the Justice Department (US) show that during January 2013 the government reported 634 new white collar crime prosecutions. According to the case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this number is up 19.8% over the previous month.
White Collar Crime Prosecutions for January 2013.
| Number Latest Month | 634 |
|---|---|
| Percent Change from previous month | 19.8 |
| Percent Change from 1 year ago | -21.3 |
| Percent Change from 5 years ago (Including Magistrate Court) | -10.8 |
| Percent Change from 5 years ago (Excluding Magistrate Court) | -15.5 |
Table 1: Criminal White Collar Crime Prosecutions
Need I say more ?
Wiki: White-collar crime is financially motivated nonviolent crime committed for illegal monetary gain. Within criminology, it was first defined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation”. Sutherland was a proponent of symbolic interactionism and believed that criminal behavior was learned from interpersonal interactions. White-collar crime is similar to corporate crime as white-collar employees are more likely to commit fraud, bribery, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery.
Wow ! Watch out for what you leave behind. That should help in reducing littering costs. Lou
Heather Dewey-Hagborg culls discarded DNA (in the form of cigarette butts, chewed gum, et cetera) from the New York sidewalk and then uses a 3D printer to create sculpture portraits based on the genetic information.
Click on link for full story—>>>
Artists Recreates Strangers’ Faces From Discarded DNA On NYC’s Streets.
Expeditionary Lab – Mobile – YouTube.
A civilization without science will soon decay. When a new technology emerges it is usually usurped for military means. See a glimpse of the future of warfare through the deployment of these labs on the field. Lou
Will 3D Printing Change the World? | Off Book | PBS – YouTube.
Feb 28, 2013
Much attention has been paid to 3D Printing lately, with new companies developing cheaper and more efficient consumer models that have wowed the tech community. They herald 3D Printing as a revolutionary and disruptive technology, but how will these printers truly affect our society? Beyond an initial novelty, 3D Printing could have a game-changing impact on consumer culture, copyright and patent law, and even the very concept of scarcity on which our economy is based. From at-home repairs to new businesses, from medical to ecological developments, 3D Printing has an undeniably wide range of possibilities which could profoundly change our world.
This video includes copyright material from http://www.explainingthefuture.com You can learn more about 3D printing on the ExplainingTheFuture channel at http://www.youtube.com/explainingthef…
Lee Cronin: Print your own medicine | Video on TED.com.
Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering. And as a chemist, one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is, could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? In essence, could we “app” chemistry?
Now what would this mean, and how would we do it? Well to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware. And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry.
Now what could this mean? Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that’s ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way.
So how are we doing this in the lab? Well it requires software, it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks. And so the really cool bit is, the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer, and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device. And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software.
So what could this mean? Well, ultimately, it could mean that you could print your own medicine. And this is what we’re doing in the lab at the moment.
But to take baby steps to get there, first of all we want to look at drug design and production, or drug discovery and manufacturing. Because if we can manufacture it after we’ve discovered it, we could deploy it anywhere. You don’t need to go to the chemist anymore. We can print drugs at point of need. We can download new diagnostics. Say a new super bug has emerged. You put it in your search engine, and you create the drug to treat the threat. So this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly.
But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine.
And if that doesn’t seem fanciful enough, where do you think we’re going to go? Well, you’re going to have your own personal matter fabricator. Beam me up, Scotty.
