Blogs

Many investors are beginning to think of water as an investable asset class – similar to oil or precious metals, but with less volatility.

This week's five stories look at:
1.Shocking Alzheimer's Brains Helps Patients in Clinical Trial;
2. New Breast Cancer Screening Technology Wins Sanofi-Pasteur Prize;
3. Transformers - They're Real and They're Tiny;
4. Taikonauts Plan to Grow Vegetables on the Moon in Closed Ecosystems;
5. Electrochromic Windows Coming to Homes and Buildings in the Near Future.

Our possessions continue to grow until we start approaching retirement age. That’s when we start taking a hard look at everything we’ve accumulated and begin the shedding process of obtaining and storing stuff. Two recent trends are beginning to change this cycle. One is the transition from physical products to digital ones. The other is our every evolving systems that enable us to access items at the time of need rather than maintaining a standing inventory. This is all part of our transition from just-in-case to just-in-time living.

It’s incredible to think that my car, which is parked in the garage, is, in reality, moving. That’s because our world is a 4D space-time continuum and things move through time, as shown by the ageing process, even when they are at rest in space. The parked car is travelling through time. It’s undergoing change. It’s getting older and rustier. A person who is asleep and motionless in bed is also moving. Not only is this person moving through time, but the space-time world as a whole is always travelling at incredible speeds in our expanding universe. Nothing that exists is ever at rest in space-time, even when they appear to be stationary.

On Friday, November 30th, 2012, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (http://www.futures.hawaii.edu & @HRCFS) hosted the Manoa Futures Symposium. As one of, if not, the first gatherings for graduate students pursuing studies in Futures, the conference brought together young scholars from Australia, Finland, Germany, Canada, Bahrain, and across the U.S. representing Regent University, University of Sunshine Coast, the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), JAMK University of Applied Sciences, the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Houston, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

With the meetings in Doha, Qatar, coming to an end, is there a successor to Kyoto on the global community horizon? Kyoto was an abject failure but at least it identified strategies for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Countries that signed the accord in the Developed World, for the most part, achieved the limited treaty goals.

Solar Ship, a Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based company, my home town, has built a one-of-a-kind, helium-filled, delta-shaped. solar-powered, heavier-than-air, airship. It has properties of both an airplane and dirigible, but doesn't require mooring like the latter. It is even designed to take off with plain air filling its hybrid balloon delta wing in the event of a puncture and helium loss.

This last week we learned that there is frozen water at Mercury’s poles and that water has been detected by Curiosity in its exploration of Gale Crater. Water seems to be abundant in the Solar System but increasingly scarce here on Earth. I’m not talking about oceans of water but freshwater. In previous blogs on this subject we have looked at water stressed areas of the planet.

Star Trek popularized the notion of mobile medical diagnostics with its tricorder. Now, almost five decades later, consumer-friendly health diagnostics delivered via mobile devices are becoming a reality...and this is happening sooner than envisioned by Star Trek's calculations. (We're about two centuries ahead of schedule for those of you who are counting.)

originally posted at The Trends & Foresight Blog

When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in. But what happens when the volume of data used to make decisions increases 100 million times, and trading volumes increase 100 million times, and trades can be transacted over 100 million times a second?