Six Ideas That Will Change the World

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1. Breaking Down the Firewall. Internet censorship is the book burning of the modern age, denying as much as a third of the world’s population access to news and information. But a new brand of activists — or “hacktivists” — are using their computer expertise to help people stranded in Web-censored countries abroad (and corporate offices and military bases at home) jump the firewall.

2. Electronic Skin. As fast and small as our electronics and computers are today, there is one major drawback. They are hard and rigid and fragile. Completely the opposite of what Stéphanie Lacour is making: bendable, stretchable circuits that will one day be used to make electronic skin and malleable computers.

3. The Pollution Magnet. Eighty-two thousand people die from cancer in Bangladesh every year, many due to arsenic poisoning. But building upon her discovery of a way to get rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic, Vicki Colvin has invented a new, astonishingly easy way to clean the water supply: Sauté a teaspoon of rust in a mixture of oil and lye, which breaks down the rust into nano-sized pieces. Retrieve the rust particles with a household magnet. Then immerse the rust-covered magnet into a pot of contaminated water. Pull out the arsenic. The system is up to a hundred times more efficient than existing methods, and requires no electricity or manufacturing infrastructure, so even the poorest of villagers can use it.

4. Machines That Fix Themselves. There will come a time when computers and robots don’t need humans to program them. For mechanical engineer Hod Lipson, that time is now. And it all starts with his four-legged starfish robot.

5. Burying Our CO2. Kurt Zenz House isn’t the first scientist to suggest sequestering carbon dioxide in the ocean. But he is the first to come up with a solution that might actually work. The key is depth. Whereas other plans to sequester carbon in the ocean were plagued by fears that the CO2 would escape, House advocates going much deeper — at least three thousand meters, or two miles below sea level into the seabed. At that depth, House hypothesizes that the extreme water pressure and low temperature will turn the carbon into a liquid denser than the surrounding water, forming a layer that will prevent it from rising back up into the ocean.

6. The Next Plastic. Plastic has changed little since its heyday in the 1960s. It’s still ubiquitous, oil based, and dirty as hell for the environment. Chemist Geoffrey Coates in his lab at Cornell University has been reinventing plastic. Making it environmentally friendly and biodegradable — with orange peels. The key is limonene, a citrusy-smelling chemical compound made from orange rinds that when oxidized and mixed with carbon dioxide and a catalyst can be turned into a solid plastic.

Source: Business Opportunities Weblog

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