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This is what the Skycar should have been developed into, only using four rotors instead of two.

Read the full story online: FUEL VS FOOD: THE WAR SPREADS.

“Active Disassembly is a promising technique for recycling electronics that relies on shape-memory connectors inside devices to pop apart under heat, separating valuable components without any manual labor required. Screws have been prototyped that lose their threads, as well as screen housings for laptops that pop apart to separate glass from LCD substrate. A typical cell phone can be broken down in seconds without any need to handle the toxic components”
 

Courtesy of Trends.

The latest news about oil discoveries off Brazil support this argument. As so eloquently put by the Economist:

The discoveries do suggest that the gloomiest pundits are wrong to predict that the world will soon run out of oil. It is not that there are still lots of huge oil fields out there: the number of mammoth discoveries is declining, Tupi (and perhaps Carioca-Sugar Loaf and Jupiter) notwithstanding. But the new finds do illustrate how the technology with which oil firms hunt for, extract and process fossil fuels is constantly improving. Petrobras’s recent success is only possible thanks to recent advancements in seismic surveys, drilling, and offshore platforms. Other technological developments are allowing a greater proportion of the oil found around the world to be recovered and are even expanding the definition of oil, as firms conjure liquid fuel from the solid tar-sands of Canada, for example, or from coal and natural gas.

Now I’ve posted before, and written MindBullets about the relative ease with which we can already convert gas and coal to convenient liquid fuels. As with most things, the economic hurdles are often the highest. But even sooner than we expect, solar power could make the big leap forward and compete with coal, never mind oil. This MindBullet poses that scenario:

Am I smoking my socks, or could we really see a complete lack of dependence on oil, gas and coal by the 2020s?

Read the full story at MindBullets online or browse the article.

Read the full analysis online if you’re a subscriber or click here for the graphic display.

But the second thing is almost more impressive – instead of keeping it a powerful secret, go and share the knowledge, with a step-by-step video tutorial of how to do it. And this from a respectable university. In fact the whole thing is very well documented and professionally published, on the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which I’ve only just discovered.

Awesome. That’s what I call open-source innovation. There must be a million other applications for using Shrinky Dinks and laser or ink-jet printing to create useful micro cell or pathway devices. It’s a great example of lateral thinking too, and another cheap alternative to 3D printing of tools and substrates, without shelling out for a fabber.

Now the European Union-funded Symbrion programme is spending big money to develop exactly that – small sugar-cube sized robots that join together to overcome obstacles and accomplish tasks. Take a look a t the video on ITN:

This of course has far reaching applications and implications if the technology is developed to its logical conclusion, just like the ‘spiders’ in Minority Report.

In the Symbrion project’s own words,"[we envisage] artificial robotic organisms become self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimising and self-protecting from both hardware and software perspectives. This leads not only to extremely adaptive, evolve-able and scalable robotic systems, but also enables robot organisms to reprogram themselves without human supervision and for new, previously unforeseen, functionality to emerge."

But most of the usefulness will probably be for things that benefit the average human – like unblocking drains and finding survivors in collapsed building, don’t you think?

There’s a full time-line of events behind this scenario in the online version at MindBullets.NET.

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