Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 11.

03 - February 11, 2012

ISSN: 1712-9834

Are you a frequent reader of Innovation Watch?

We'd like to hear more about the things that interest you. Send us a short note (future@innovationwatch.com) by February 18, 2012, and let us know how you use the website. We'll post up to 10 replies. If we post yours we'll send you a $50 gift card redeemable on Amazon.com.

Selected news items from postings to Innovation Watch in the last two weeks... experts advocate increased surveillance of biohacker labs... inedible seeds can be made edible through genetic engineering... contact lenses to be used by the military for augmented reality applications... new low-cost smart paint detects faults in large structures... two Eastern European countries have created a national paywall to charge for access to their newspapers... French company Sculpteo plans for cloudbased 3D manufacturing... Stanford professor drops out to become a free-agent online... Sweden's anti-copyright community forms a church promoting online piracy... China is expected to invest heavily in the European bailout... a new Russian generation is empowered online... world powers consider retaliation against the EU carbon tax on air travel... the Arctic shows the effects of dangerous climate change... Google launches the 'Solve for X' conference to address the world's biggest problems... food prices are expected to rise as world population soars... More great resources ... a new book by Hilary Austen - Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life... a link to the Solve for X website, a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems... a Leonard Lopate interview with Adrian Bejan, suthor of Design in Nature: How the Constructural Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics and Social Organization... a blog post by Daniel Burrus on technology-driven trends for 2012...

David Forrest advises organizations on emerging trends, and helps to develop strategies for a radically different future

David Forrest Innovation Watch

SCIENCE
Top Stories: Race to Keep a Lid on Labs Creating 'Artificial Life' Amid Boom in DIY 'Biohackers' (Daily Mail) - A system for keeping an eye on potentially dangerous 'artificial life' laboratories around the world is essential, say leading experts. The Woodrow Wilson Centre, in Washington, US, warns that there is no way of monitoring labs tinkering with 'synthetic biology' to ensure that anything created is safe. The field 'synthetic biology' came into being in 2010 when a scientist added synthetic DNA to a bacteria cell to create a 'new' life form. An Oxford ethicist warned that it opened the door to 'the most powerful bioweapons imaginable.' The Centre's Synthetic Biology project has recommended a 'score card' to ensure laboratories adhere to guidelines laid down by a Presidential Commission in 2010. Genetic Technology to Make Inedible Seeds More Edible (News Medical) - Every night millions of people go to bed hungry. New genetic technology can help us feed the world by making inedible seeds more edible. There are roughly about a quarter of a million plant species known on Earth. But we only eat between 5,000 and 10,000 of them. Many are poisonous to us -- such as lily of the valley. And many plants have no human nutritional value -- such as grass. "In fact, there are no more than about 100 known species that can be used as important food crops," says Biology Professor Atle Bones at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. But Bones and his research team have made a major discovery. They have figured out how a canola plant can be genetically programmed to reduce the toxic substances it produces in its seeds -- thus making it more palatable. Forward Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Forward it Unsubscribe Don't want to receive the newsletter? Unsubscribe

Newsletter Archive

Previous issues

TECHNOLOGY
Top Stories: The Lens of the Future Sees Much More Than What's in Front of You (Fast Company) - Augmented reality is a term for technologies that soup up our view of the real world with an overlay of virtual information. Think Terminator vision. So far, augmented reality has been largely limited to marketing gimmicks and iPhone apps. But a Washington-based company called Innovega is working with the Department of

Defense on a project that could make it much more practical. One of the stumbling blocks in augmented reality has been figuring out how to present the virtual information. Its not hard to project images onto the lenses of a pair of glasses. But it is very hard to focus on images that are an inch from your eyeballs. Innovega is trying to solve that problem with special contact lenses that allow the wearer to focus simultaneously on things that are very close and far away. Smart Paint Could Revolutionize Structural Safety (PhysOrg) An innovative low-cost smart paint that can detect microscopic faults in wind turbines, mines and bridges before structural damage occurs is being developed by researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. The environmentally-friendly paint uses nanotechnology to detect movement in large structures, and could shape the future of safety monitoring. Traditional methods of assessing large structures are complex, time consuming and use expensive instrumentation, with costs spiraling into millions of pounds each year. However, the smart paint costs just a fraction of the cost and can be simply sprayed onto any surface, with electrodes attached to detect structural damage long before failure occurs.

BUSINESS
Top Stories: A Model to Save Newspapers: Where Paywalls Actually Work (Christian Science Monitor) - As news organizations worldwide wonder if they can charge for content that readers are accustomed to getting free of charge, two Eastern European countries have pioneered a new model: erecting national paywalls and charging a monthly fee for access to most of their newspapers. Media executives are now wondering if the model can be scaled up for larger, Western countries, or if it is uniquely suited to small countries, to European nations with a history of mandatory broadcasting taxes, or even to post-communist societies with, some say, a greater thirst for news than those with a longstanding democratic history. Sculpteo Takes 3D Printing to the Cloud (Forbes) - "Soon, instead of buying things that are made in large quantities at factories, we will buy objects made in quantities of just one, specifically for us." So says Eric Carreel, Chairman of Sculpteo, a French company that is betting on an impending revolution in manufacturing, and building the 3D-printing infrastructure to help make it happen. "The materials that we can use for 3D printing will eventually be as good as materials used in factories, making it easy for consumers to customize the design of any object," predicts Carreel. "And with cloud technology, it could be done using smartphones and tablets." Sculpteo joins American companies like Shapeways and MakerBot in a movement to democratize mass production by giving designers the tools to produce their wares using an inexpensive, scalable single process.

SOCIETY
Top Stories: Like Peter Thiel's Fellows, Sebastian Thrun Dropped Out, Hacked Education, Too (Fast Company) - Last fall, Stanford made the bold announcement that two of their courses would be taught online -- artificial intelligence and machine learning classes. No one expected hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for the courses. But they did, and by anyone's measure, the courses were a wild success. Two weeks ago, Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors who taught the online courses, dropped a bombshell: He has left Stanford to start teaching courses independently. It's a big deal for a professor to dump a university. But dump Stanford Sebastian did. He dumped Stanford because he realized that he -- as an individual -- holds the power, not Stanford as an institution. The Church of Internet Piracy (Businessweek) Sweden's newest religion may be the only faith that was born out of an insult. The idea to form a church promoting Internet piracy first came to an activist named Peter Sunde "four or five years ago" when he saw a comment by one of the lawyers seeking his prosecution for facilitating copyright infringement. Asked in an interview for her opinion of enthusiasts such as Sunde, at the time the spokesman for the popular file-sharing site Pirate Bay, the lawyer replied: "Theyre a cult." The slur provided a new direction for Sweden's vibrant anti-copyright community to explore.

GLOBAL POLITICS
Top Stories: China May 'Move Shortly' on Aid for Europe, Academic Says (Businessweek) - China may "move shortly" to help Europe resolve its debt crisis by providing an investment of as much as 100 billion euros ($132 billion), said Yuan Gangming, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The money would probably go to the European Financial Stability Facility, the euro bailout fund, said Yuan, adding that the forecasts are his own and dont necessarily represent government plans. Economists from the academy provide policy advice without direct involvement in decisions. Helping Europe is like "hitting two birds with one stone," Yuan said in an interview. The action would have many benefits and few drawbacks, Yuan said. A New Generation Aims to Revitalize Russia (Spiegel) - In 2012, many of Putin's children have grown out of poverty and now belong to a new middle class. Their memories of the hardships of earlier years are as faded as other impressions

from their childhood days. The Kremlin still uses state-run TV to drive home its propaganda about how Russians should be thankful for the stability they enjoy under Putin. But Russia's youth hardly watches TV anymore. Instead, young Russians spend their time in the free worlds of the Internet, getting their information and organizing through blogs, Facebook and Twitter. For the first time in generations, an entire segment of Russians can steer clear of government propaganda, depriving the Kremlin of control over large parts of their lives.

ENVIRONMENT
Top Stories: World Powers 'Plan Anti-Carbon Tax Talks' (PhysOrg) - India, Russia, the United States, China and other countries will meet in Moscow this month to decide whether to retaliate against the EU's decision to impose a carbon tax on air travel, a report says. The European Union (EU) imposed the tax with effect from January 1, but over two dozen countries, including India, Russia, China and the United States, have opposed the move saying it violates international law. The Press Trust of India quoted what it said were official sources as saying over 30 countries would meet in Moscow on February 21 and 22 to decide on retaliatory measures against the EU if it insists on imposing the carbon tax on non-EU flights as there was "growing agreement" on the matter. The Arctic is Already Suffering the Effects of a Dangerous Climate Change (PhysOrg) - Two decades after the United Nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change in order to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system," the Arctic shows the first signs of a dangerous climate change. A team of researchers led by CSIC assures so in an article published in the latest issue of the Nature Climate Change magazine. These researchers assert that the Arctic is already suffering some of the effects that, according to The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), correspond with a "dangerous climate change." Currently, the rate of climatic warming exceeds the rate of natural adaptation in arctic ecosystems.

THE FUTURE
Top Stories: Google Imagines the Future As It Unveils Global Conference 'Solve for X' to Decode the World's Biggest Problems (Daily Mail) - Google, already a giant in everything from search engines to social media, announced a highly anticipated conference that will take aim at the worlds biggest and complex problems. The project, called Solve for X, says it is

a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems, according to its website. It appears to take aim at TED, itself think-tank for ideas, concepts, and lectures. Era of Food Prices Always Falling Seen at End as World's Population Grows (Blomberg) - The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization has said global food output must rise 70 percent by 2050 to feed a world population expected to grow to 9 billion from 7 billion now and as increasingly wealthy consumers in developing economies eat more meat. Food prices tracked by the FAO climbed to the highest ever a year ago on surging grain prices. "You dont have to be a reviving bull on commodities to believe that the era, which went from the 50's, 60's to 70's and early 80s, of ever decreasing food prices in real terms has probably come to an end," Paul Conway, vice chairman of Cargill, said at the Kingsman sugar conference in Dubai.

Just in from the publisher...

Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life

By Hilary Austen
Read more...

A Web Resource... Solve for X - Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life. Solve for X is intended to be a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork. This forum started with a small face-to-face event cohosted by Astro Teller, Megan Smith, and Eric Schmidt -- the Solve for X talks are now being posted here on this site.

Multimedia... Adrian Bejan: Design in Nature (Leonard Lopate) - Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature -- trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts -- and reveals how a the Constructal Law accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world. Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, and Social Organization, written with J. Peder Zane, looks at how everything -- from biological life to inanimate systems -- generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. (28m 5s) [Leonard Lopate]

The Blogosphere... Technology-Driven Trends for 2012 (Huffington Post) - Daniel Burrus "No matter what industry you're in, your company can't survive without technology. And these days, even non-technical employees know that technology goes way beyond desktop computers and networks. From smart phones and tablet computers to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there's a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep

track of, but also to profit from. To stay competitive, your organization needs to anticipate the future technology trends that are shaping your business and then develop innovative ways to implement them in your organization."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com