TCA News
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07 Jan 2017
One billion people around the world live in slums, also known as informal settlements, that outpace the civic authorities’ ability to provide services. This number is projected to double by 2030, when the majority of the Earth’s population is expected to live in urban areas. [Side_Content] Many projects draw solutions from local cultures so that they are accepted enthusiastically by the people. The lives of settlement dwellers are improved through micro-economic businesses and savings practices that help them lift themselves out of extreme poverty. [/Side_Content] Design with the Other 90%: Cities is a series of exhibitions featuring 60 potential solutions…
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03 Jan 2017
Sticking electrons to a semiconductor with hydrazine creates an electrocatalyst LOS ALAMOS, NM, June 13, 2016 – In the 2015 movie The Martian, stranded astronaut Matt Damon turns to the chemistry of rocket fuel, hydrazine and hydrogen, to create lifesaving water and nearly blows himself up. However, if you turn the process around and get the hydrazine to help, you create hydrogen from water by changing conductivity in a semiconductor, a transformation with wide potential applications in energy and electronics. “We demonstrate in our study that a simple chemical treatment, in this case a drop of dilute hydrazine (N2H4) in…
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03 Jan 2017
Policy Horizons Canada worked with futurist and data visualizer Michell Zappa of Envisioning to produce a report called MetaScan 3: Emerging Technologies and accompanying infographics. We are reproducing the summary for emerging agriculture technologies. Below are technologies related to agricultural and natural manufacturing under four key areas of accelerating change: Sensors, Food, Automation and Engineering. Sensors help agriculture by enabling real-time traceability and diagnosis of crop, livestock and farm machine states. Food may benefit directly from genetic tailoring and potentially from producing meat directly in a lab. Automation will help agriculture via large-scale robotic and microrobots to check and maintain…
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03 Jan 2017
When one hears the name “Jericho one naturally thinks of Israelites marching, trumpets sounding and walls falling. It is a wonderful story of faith and victory that we enjoy reading and telling in Sunday School class, but did it really happen? The skeptic would say no, it is merely a folk tale to explain the ruins at Jericho. The reason for this negative outlook is the excavation carried out at the site in the 1950s under the direction of British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon. She concluded, It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age,…
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31 Dec 2016
President Obama delivered a speech at the African Union headquarters in Ethiopia 28th of July 2015. He said he was honored to be the first American president to address the African Union. He spoke about the dignity of the African people, and how the United States would work together with them to create a better future by pursuing projects that would lift many people in Africa out of the poverty in which they live their lives. [Side_Content] President Obama stressed the significance of improving the lives of the women and girls of Africa, eliminating the use of rape as a…
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31 Dec 2016
A team of astronomers, led by the University of Arizona, announced in July 2016 that they had used the direct imaging technique to discover planet HD 131399Ab. This planet is about 340 light years from Earth and roughly 16 million years old. It has the widest orbit yet discovered for a planet in a multi-star system – one revolution lasts approximately 550 Earth-years. [Side_Content] It might seem like something out of Star Wars, but such planets are actually as commonly found in the Universe as single-sun planets like our Earth. Scientists learn a great deal from studying planetary systems such…
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31 Dec 2016
Scientists have concluded that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. They measured the universe’s age using two methods: by evaluating the rate of its expansion and by calculating the age of its oldest star. Astronomers are able to tell a star’s age by how bright it is. Large stars burn brightly, but burn out just a quickly. A star ten times the size of our sun will die in about 20 million years, but a star only half the sun’s size will live for about 20 billion years. Tight groupings of stars, known as globular clusters, follow the…
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31 Dec 2016
NASA recently released photos of the prototype robot arm for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which is planned to launch in 2021. This robotic probe is designed to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid, as well as test out the ‘enhanced gravity tractor’ method of changing the asteroid’s path. Asteroids periodically collide with Earth, causing greater or less damage. NASA intends to have a plan in place to protect us from potentially harmful impacts in the future. ARM will go to a nearby asteroid and collect a large boulder from its surface. Two gripping robot arms will hold on to the…
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31 Dec 2016
New manufacturing robots are more intelligent, more agile, and take up less space than ever before. They are able to learn from their human coworkers, increasing production efficiency and saving money for factory owners. They also cost less, reducing the initial investment required to automate. Adaptive robots use sensor technology similar to the collision detection systems in new cars to distinguish when objects are close by, making it much safer for factory workers to operate near them. The robots can also detect the objects they are supposed to manipulate, regardless of how it is oriented. More advanced arms and gripping…
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31 Dec 2016
A new drug might turn out to be the best new weapon against Alzheimer’s disease. An antibody treatment called aducanumab appears to clear the brain of sticky amyloid-beta plaques, long thought to be a significant factor in the brain deterioration that accompanies the disease. One theory, the amyloid hypothesis, states that the abnormal protein buildup is a primary cause of Alzheimer’s. The plaques choke vital areas of the brain and destroy nerve cells. Other theories suggest that the buildup may just be a symptom, with the cause lying elsewhere. This new treatment will finally enable researchers to test the amyloid…
