Google Glass

Google Glass is an attempt to free data from desktop computers and portable devices like phones and tablets, and place it right in front of your eyes.

Essentially, Google Glass is a camera, display, touchpad, battery and microphone built into spectacle frames so that you can perch a display in your field of vision, film, take pictures, search and translate on the go.

The principle is one that has been around for years in science fiction, and more recently it's become a slightly clunky reality. In fact, the "heads-up display" putting data in your field of vision became a reality as early as 1900 when the reflector sight was invented.

RFID

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is ranked among the top 10 of dominant future technologies. RFID technology is being used now for access control cards, tagging of returnable items, production and assembly tasks and will penetrate other market segments soon due to lower costs and more functionalities. Integration of sensor functions in RFID-tags will also give a lot of potential for future applications in healthcare, food packaging, security & safety etc. 

http://www.futuretechnologycenter.eu/content/RFID.php 

The beauty of RFID tags is that they are passive, requiring no power source of their own. Instead, they derive the small amount of electrical power they need from the radio waves emitted by a tag reader. In a way, the reader is like a radio version of a torch, lighting up tags that it comes near and revealing the information they contain. But there is nothing to stop self-powered devices using the same frequencies and protocols to send and receive all kinds of digital information.

Examples of the implementation of RFID include: (RFID Business Benefits )

• Logistics & Tracking 
• Asset Tracking 
• Personal Identification 
• Payment Systems 
• Workflow Processes 
• Healthcare 

In the future smart appliance could use RFID tags to adjust their behaviour, e.g. a smart washing machine could adjust wash cycles and temperature based on the contents of the clothing items present, a smart refrigerator could create shopping lists of items that have expired based on the information provided by the RFID tag of the item in the refrigerator.

28 km bridge to link Africa and Middle East

A 28 kilometer-long bridge is being planned to link the Middle East and Africa. The US$20 billion bridge will become the longest suspension bridge in the world and tower some 400 meters above the water, with at least three spans of around 2700m each. Undoubtedly set to become one of the wonders of the modern world, the project includes plans to build entire cities at each end, linked by a six-lane motorway and a four-track railway. Adding complexity to the enormous task, the bridge it is to be built in an area of intense seismic activity.



What a wonder this will be! Having seen other fascinating man made feats such as the Pyramids in Egypt, Machu Picchu, Christ the Redeemer, and the Collosseum, I would love to see this in the future. They say that the concrete pylons to make the bridge will have to be supported up to depths of 300m and at the same time tower 400m over the water's surface to support the ultra-long span suspension bridge. Each pylon will be 700m. It will be enormous! The pylons will have to be exceptionally strongs. Maybe a radical material such as graphene could benefit this project?

Graphene

Graphene promises to offer the best possible material properties in almost all applications. Such as its extraordinary performance has led many to call it the ‘superlative’ or ‘wonder’ material. 

The Iron and Bronze ages marked the rise of the first urban civilisations.  The Middle ages led to the development of chemistry and the discovery of new elements, but every era has its material.  Steel, plastic, aluminum and silicon were the materials that propelled technological progress in the 20th century. Graphene, the first two-dimensional material ever, has now arrived on the scene and ready to change industrial and scientific paradigms. 

Scientists had previously discovered single-layered carbon structures, such as rolled up sheets of carbon known as nanotubes and hollow balls of carbon commonly called fullerenes or buckeyballs. However few believed that single sheets of carbon could be produced as they were thought to be too unstable. In 2004 Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov took a hunk of graphite and used Scotch tape to peel off layer after layer after layer. Geim and Novoselov then analysed what they had left, and found graphene.

• First 2 Dimensional crystal ever known to us
• Thinnest object ever obtained
• Largest surface area of any material relative to its weight and volume – important thing since chemical reactions occur on the surface of a material
• Lightest material
• Strongest material – harder than diamond and stronger than steel
• Conducts heat and electricity much better than copper
• Transparent material
• Bendable – take any form you want
•  Really stretchy
• Effectively impermeable to other substances
• Gave birth to a new class of crystals that are also just one atom thin and can be shuffled with each other to engineer new materials on demand to meet specific needs of different industries.
• Graphene has the highest known electron mobility (the speed at which electronic information is transmitted by a material)
• It’s a natural product

Mass commercialisation of graphene may still be a few years away until it reaches its full potential, due to a number of product and process obstacles. However Grafoid Inc announced the launch of a trademarked graphene product called MesoGraf™.  This product represents nothing short of the first platform for the industrialisation and commercialisation of graphene. It represents the first tool through which to achieve graphene’s potential, bridging the gap between the growing bodies of graphene research with actual commercialisation of the material, essentially making the science available to the market. Until now, graphene has been limited to development and study in the laboratory; commercial scale applications have not yet been possible. 

Radical Materials

Revolutionary advances in all aspects of science, biology, nanotechnology, medicine, robotics and quantum physics have seen the creation of radical new materials. The past decade has seen some amazing advances in our ability to engineer materials with increasing precision at such a small scale.  Much of this change is thanks to advances in nanotechnology, which investigates the relationship between the structure of the materials at atomic or molecular scales and their macroscopic properties.

Many of these radical materials are still at the research stage.  However scientists are finding that they far outperform conventional materials in their strength, lightness, conductivity, ability to transmit heat, and a whole host of other characteristics. As demands for high performance materials continue to increase everywhere from medical devices to advanced microprocessors and safe, efficient cars to space flight, radical materials will become increasingly common. Brand new materials suitable for the construction, electronics, medical and textile industries will allow for products that cannot be fabricated using current techniques. 

All this attention has created global interest and has attracted massive research and development, capital investment and creating a new generation of industry giants. Fortunes will now be made as scientist partner with big businesses to patent and trademark new materials. The companies that now embrace this rapid change will become leaders of the high technology industries of the future. The huge advances can drive the creation of new products or even new industries, but stable industries also employ materials scientists to make incremental improvements and troubleshoot issues with currently used materials. In other words rather than haphazardly looking for and discovering materials and exploiting their properties, one instead aims to understand materials fundamentally so that new materials with the desired properties can be created.  

Carbon Nanotubes

A carbon nanotube is a nano-size cylinder of carbon atoms. Carbon nanotubes are extremely small, the diameter of one carbon nanotube is one nanometer, which is one ten-thousandth (1/10,000) the diameter of a human hair.

Imagine a sheet of carbon atoms, which would look like a sheet of hexagons. If you roll that sheet into a tube, you'd have a carbon nanotube. Carbon nanotube properties depend on how you roll the sheet. In other words, even though all carbon nanotubes are made of carbon, they can be very different from one another based on how you align the individual atoms. They can come in different forms, it all depends on the chemistry, and how they are arranged.

Carbon nanotubes are classified according to their structures: single-wall nanotubes, double-wall nanotubes, and multi-wall nanotubes. The different structures have individual properties that make the nanotubes appropriate for different applications. It can help benefit many fields such as:

• Structural 
• Electromagnetic
• Electroacoustic
• Chemical
• Mechanical
• Electrical circuits
• Medicine

For instances, with the right arrangement of atoms, you can create a carbon nanotube that's hundreds of times stronger than steel, but six times lighter. Engineers plan to make building material out of carbon nanotubes, particularly for things like cars and airplanes. Lighter vehicles would mean better fuel efficiency, and the added strength translates to increased passenger safety.

The properties of nanotubes have caused researchers and companies to consider using them in several fields. For example, because carbon nanotubes have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any known material, researchers at NASA are combining carbon nanotubes with other materials into composites that can be used to build lightweight spacecraft.

Gesture Based Computing

Gesture recognition is a topic in computer science and language technology with the goal of interpreting human gestures via mathematical algorithms. We first saw this on the movie, Minority Report featuring Tom Cruise.

Gesture based computing is another form of computer input using, hands, whole body, eyes, facial expressions. Some devices react to shaking, rotating, tilting, or moving the device in space. We already have finger based gesture movements by physically touching a touch screen, such as Apple’s iPhones, iPads, etc.

Businesses will see new applications emerging using gesture based computing, and as they see the benefits with increased control, they will start demanding applications which fit their business needs. This will replace existing technology such as the computer mouse, and even touch screens. Gesture based computing will fit well with some other emerging technology such as improvements in screen technology and voice recognition.

While gesture-based computing has found a natural home in gaming, as well as in browsing files, its potential uses are far broader. The ability to move through three-dimensional visualisations could prove compelling and productive, and gesture-based computing is perfect for simulation and training. Gesture-based computing has strong potential in education, both for learning, as students will be able to interact with ideas and information in new ways, and for teaching, as faculty explore new ways to communicate ideas.