Desalination: Easing the burden of thirst

              To sustain a growing population, research is bent on developing a solution to these issues. Ground water drilling and recycling of wastewater are examples of temporary solutions. Among these solutions is desalination. Desalination is the process of forcing salted water through a membrane by reverse osmosis, separating freshwater from impurities. An approach to reduce cost is substituting the primary material used in the constructing membrane with a relatively inexpensive material called polyamide. To avoid degeneration, the extraction of chlorine becomes an additional step in the desalination process. However, when chlorine is absent, microbes can occur and obstruct the flow of water.

             A possible solution is to replace polyamide with graphene oxide. The compound graphene has a structure similar to the honeycomb. It is predicted that this material will be more permeable to water and therefore reduce the pressure required to dictate the flow of water. Further research leans toward alternative materials like carbon nanotubes as the membrane. The underlying issue for integrating such findings is cost. The application of such processes must be considered on a global level.

               To counter such challenge, Jia Zhu of Nanjing University in China and colleagues worked on alternative sources of energy, such as the sun. Yet depending on direct contact alone from the sun is limiting. Research is looking into the use of absorbable materials to increase the amount of energy from sunlight. In short, the high energy consumption required for desalination often renders it a last resort. However, the growing urge to subsidize water scarcity on a global level leaves room for possible advancement and increasing innovation in the desalination process.

The beginning of the end for cancer

                 The emergence of real-time diagnostics for complex diseases will mark the beginning of the end of their debilitating reign by 2020. The ability to monitor cancer, the dynamic immune system, intestinal flora and pre-diabetes in real-time will change the nature of medicine and usher in a new era of human health where wellness is protected versus illness treated. As a result, fundamental shifts in healthcare will occur, causing it to become largely preventative rather than fire-fighting.

             These are exciting times for cancer immunotherapy. After many years of disappointing results, the tide has finally changed and immunotherapy has become a clinically validated treatment for many cancers. Immunotherapeutic strategies include cancer vaccines, oncolytic viruses, adoptive transfer of ex vivo activated T and natural killer cells, and administration of antibodies or recombinant proteins that either costimulate cells or block the so-called immune checkpoint pathways.

              The recent success of several immunotherapeutic regimes, such as monoclonal antibody blocking of cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) and programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1), has boosted the development of this treatment modality, with the consequence that new therapeutic targets and schemes which combine various immunological agents are now being described at a breathtaking pace.

Knowledge Mechanics will become a new job

             Machines are eating humans’ jobs talents. And it’s not just about jobs that are repetitive and low-skill. Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople, and border patrol agents.

            Two new jobs will grow. First — “trainers” or “data annotator” have been a small thing for a few years. They will become a big thing. Secondly, you will start to hear about “knowledge mechanics.” These are people who don’t do a process but understand how to fix it when a machine screws it up. Think of a washing machine. We don’t wash clothes by hand anymore, and most of us don’t know how a washing machine works. But we have people who design and fix washing machines. These knowledge mechanics will design and fix

           Anything that involves force, energy or motion involves mechanical engineering. Because mechanical engineers design and work with all types of mechanical systems, careers in this field span across many industries. A mechanical engineer working in the aerospace industry could design the next big energy-efficient jet engine. The robotics industry employs mechanical engineers who build robots that help save lives. The entertainment industry also demands the talents of mechanical engineers who design grand, moving Broadway stages and thrilling roller coaster rides..

The complexity of digital streaming

         A lot has changed over the last three decades because of digital media, the way we access information, our dietary habits and even how we raise our children, but one change that isn't always acknowledged lies in the music industry. We seem to continuously overlook how drastically music has been affected by free and paid streaming. New music is always emerging, and because of the internet, it's more accessible than ever. 

          Some people believe that free streaming sites are the future, and that they will only become more prominent as time goes on. Most people counter this with examples of paid download and streaming services like iTunes, which appear to still be popular.  There has even been panic that all physical copies of music will disappear.  

           Music labels see a drop in music sales, followed by the rise of free streaming, and do what they can to make the same profits that they did before. The problem is that this often causes musicians to lose in the long run. 

Saving the Rainforest with Old Cell Phones

               Rainforests have some of the most complicated soundscapes on the planet. In this dense noise of insects, primates, birds, and everything else that moves in the forest. The old cell phone you have hanging around and collecting dust may have the answer.

                 After a visit to the rainforests of Borneo, physicist and engineer Topher White was struck by the sounds of the forest. In particular, the noises he couldn’t hear.While on a walk, White and others came across an illegal logger sawing down a tree just a few hundred meters away from a ranger station.This incident set White thinking that perhaps the best way to save the Earth’s precious rainforest is to listen to its loggers and poachers. And the innovation he came up with uses old cell phones to do this!

               To introduce us to the innovation he came up with, here is Topher White on the National Geographic Live stage. National Geographic is promoting some incredible things, so go check them out to see what they’ve been up to lately!. We all have a cell phone graveyard filled with the ghosts of technologies past.We need to feel empowered and the more we understand how our small actions can have an enormous impact, the more we engage others to do the same.

X-ray pills to detect bowel cancer

         Traditional colonoscopies that are used to screen patients for presence of colon cancer can be physically unpleasant, much too invasive, and require diets and laxatives that leave patients feeling empty and exhausted. A new option, in the form of a pill that emits X-rays to image the colon, has just been cleared by European regulators via a CE Mark. The C-Scan System from Check-Cap, an Israeli firm, features a swallow able pill that has an X-ray source, a positioning system, computing components, and a battery.

         
        The patient first swallows a contrast agent and then wears special sensors attached to the skin over where the colon is located, and as the capsule moves through, the sensors are able to pick up imaging and location data that it transmits. Laxatives and sedation are not necessary, nor does anyone have to stick anything up your shithole, to use the word of the day in its literal context. The pill works off of two separate X-ray phenomena. One involves shooting the X-rays into the swallowed contrast agent, which fluoresces its own X-rays in return. This makes it and the contents with which its mixed more readily visible.

         The other phenomenon is called Compton scattering, which is exhibited when X-rays interact with electrons in the tissues of the colon wall and which results in some of the X-rays coming back to the pill. Combining these two readings produces a novel view inside the colon that has the potential to identify lesions that would need a closer inspection.

Rising sea levels threaten Internet infrastructure

           In a talk to internet network researchers, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, an assistant professor in the computer and information science department at the University of Oregon, warned that most of the damage could come in the next 15 years. Strategies to reduce potential problems should be under consideration sooner rather than later, he says.“Our analysis is conservative in that we only looked at the static dataset of sea level rise and then overlapped that over the infrastructure to get an idea of risk,” Durairajan says.

      “Sea level rise can have other factors—a tsunami, a hurricane, coastal subduction zone earthquakes—all of which could provide additional stresses that could be catastrophic to infrastructure already at risk.”By 2033, the study also found, that more than 1,100 internet traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. New York City and Miami are the other two most susceptible cities, but the impacts could ripple out and potentially disrupt global communications.

          “Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” says the study’s senior author Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was Durairajan’s academic adviser while he completed the study as part of his doctoral work. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”