Scientists have identified exactly how it is that climate change may increase the likelihood of extreme weather events around the globe. You can read the full details here, but the gist of it is that there are normally what is, in essence, atmospheric ‘waves’ oscillating between the artic and tropic regions, which help mix things up. During recent extreme weather events, those waves were more or less frozen in place, something which climate change may make more likely as the planet is not heating uniformly (the poles heat more than the tropical areas, hence there’s less temperature different between them to drive the oscillations).
Getting Things Done (GTD)
I’ve always been a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done strategies, and even though I don’t fully implement the system, I still feel it’s a massive benefit to my life (I’m working on fully implementing it, it’s just tough to get into that routine). If you haven’t heard of it, take two minutes to watch the video below…it does a great job of summarizing what this is all about.
Graphene supercapacitors to replace batteries?
There’s a lot of exciting work being done in battery technology…yet your future electronic devices may end up being powered by a supercapacitor instead if research into this area pays off. Environmentally, it’s pretty awesome…graphene is of course carbon, which is plentiful and non-toxic (potentially, you could even throw a used graphene supercapacitor into your compost bin!). These supercapacitors can store a lot of energy and be recharged extremely quickly (like 100-1000 times faster than a battery). It’ll be interesting to see which wins out here…advanced battery technologies, or supercapcitors? Stay tuned to Peak Geek for all the latest on that, and in the meantime, check out the video below describing these graphene supercapacitors (I love that word, especially as they didn’t mention ‘nano’ anything).
Transparent (sort of) bicycle
By using a special type of plastic, designers at Designaffairs Studio made a bicycle with a transparent frame. It’s perfect for the cyclist who worries that they stand out too much in traffic and want to just be less visible. Yes, that’s a joke. I mean really, aren’t cyclists usually going out of their way to be MORE visible? Like the ‘light up like a Christmas tree’ bike light system I wrote about here previously.
The one way I could see this transparent frame being of any benefit whatsoever is if you pack it full of bright LEDs, so you have a glowing frame. It wouldn’t help much during the day, but at night, no one is going to miss you!
A retinal implant to restore sight
Right off the bat, realize that this isn’t about restoring 20/20 vision to blind people…but rather, helping those who lost their sight due to medical conditions (in this case, retinitis pigmentosa) restore partial vision. It’s amazing technology…a retinal implant uses a 1500 pixel sensor to receive light through the eye, and transfers it (via electrical signals) to the nerves in the eye for processing by the brain. This gives these people a very rudimentary level of vision, but adequate enough to detect the objects around them, make out the horizon, houses, trees, rivers, cars. Close up, they can even tell if someone is smiling or wearing glasses. Pretty amazing tech.
(via SmartPlanet)