Posts tagged Technology

Michael McDaniel & Jared Ficklin are designers at frog design, a firm in Austin, TX responsible for a multitude of products, from ovens to compost systems to apps to breast scanners. At this year’s TEDxAustin, the pair introduced their plan to re-invent urban mass transit through flying cars: high-flying gondolas running via cables stretched over cities — a little bit like ski lifts. 

How would this crazy idea work? From their talk:

What if I told you — in the whole area of mass transit, there is one industry that competes on the basis of how many people they can carry per hour without a schedule? Further, they do it moving only 1 to 6 people at a time.

I’m talking about the ski industry: the Zillertal ski area in Austria — they hold the record for lift capacity. They have a system of 174 chairs and gondolas that can move 298,000 people per hour. So if you ran that on a 24-hour cycle, that would be 74 million people a day,and if they weren’t skiing down, and you were carrying them down, that’d be 14 million people per day. That’s a lot of people. And to put those max capacity numbers into perspective, the New York City subway only has to carry 5.3 million people on a given weekday…

Now we’re not exactly saying chairlifts are the best solution for urban transit — there would be a lot of dropped iPhones — but if you were looking for inspiration on how to move a lot of people without a schedule, the ski industry is an excellent place to start. And one innovation you’re going to find there is called the high-speed detachable gondola.

Now these are essentially 4-6 person cars that cruise along at about 12 to 15 MPH attached to a cable supported by towers. For all practical purposes, they are flying cars. So they’re called “detachable” because as they come in through a station, they actually let go of the cable — release from the cable — and slow down to just below walking speed (about 2 MPH) as they glide through the station. Now this allows people to easily load and unload off the cars across a flat, level platform. Then the cars essentially accelerate back up and to line speed and reattach to the cable.

Now, the operation is continuous — it doesn’t stop — so you catch the first available car as it drifts through the station. Some of the other advantages of it being a detachable car is that, essentially, we can add and remove vehicles to the line in real time. Now this really eases maintenance, cleaning, and also helps us save energy by matching peak demand…All of this together forms a new form of mass transit for cities called urban cable.

The Wire is our vision for a user-centered, practical mass transit system for cities like Austin...The Wire can cover the exact same routes as [urban light rail], but it can go places surface rail simply can’t go.

…Imagine flying into Austin, and catching The Wire at the airport. The stop could be located right on top of the attached parking garage, so you would simply walk and roll your luggage right on the first available car and fly out. There’s not waiting and no schedules because it’s constantly in motion…there’s no stoplights in the air; these things run constantly…The ability to put [stations] in the air means they can sit on top of parking garages or they could be over the top of intersections…You could have one that had a rooftop pocket park, or one integrated with retail.

With all these possibilities, it creates new opportunities for public / private partnerships. You could even envision a stop integrated into the lower floors of an existing high-rise building. This means more ways to share costs. It encourages smart growth. It allows us to build community around commuting. 

For more information on urban cable and The Wire, watch Michael and Jared’s entire talk, “A mass transport system in the sky” from TEDxAustin 2013.

The TEDxCERN 2013 venue: the Globe of Science and Innovation

You may have heard of CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — or as it’s more commonly known, the home of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. 

CERN and its LHC are famous for their role in the recent discovery of what very likely is the Higgs boson, a particle crucial to the standard model of physics, but — now — CERN will be the home to another exciting first: their first TEDx event.

On May 3, 2013, Europe’s massive particle physics laboratory will bring together thinkers of all kinds to examine our universe and provide some insight into why the study of it matters.

“Science is everywhere,” says TEDxCERN’s organizers. “Our lives as individuals and our survival as a society depend on its its thoughtful development. In order to move into a more robust future we need to inspire even more young people to become part of a new generation of scientists; we need to celebrate and encourage scientific thinking, and to above all convey that science matters to everyone.

“Going beyond particle physics, TEDxCERN will provide a stage for the expression of science in multiple dimensions and disciplines, unveiling a world in which physics intersects with other multi-dimensional disciplines and thought.”

Thirteen speakers will grace the TEDxCERN stage, including 
George Church, who helped initiate the Human Genome Project;
the “father of grid computing” Ian Foster; 18-year-old grand prize winner of the 2012 Google Science Fair, Brittany Wenger; renowned philosopher John Searle; TEDster and molecule-3D-printing-master Lee Cronin; Planck Collaboration team member and winner of the 2012 RAS Fowler Prize, Hiranya Peiris; and Zehra Sayers, chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for SESAME (Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East).

The TEDxCERN will take place in Switzerland at CERN — in the laboratory’s beautiful Globe of Science and Innovation (pictured above). The event will also be webcast live at several different venues across the globe, including a special TEDxAthens event.

For information on how to host your own TEDxCERN livestreaming event, visit the Simulcast page on TEDxCERN’s website.

For updates on TEDxCERN, you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

(Globe photo by Flickr user davidpc_)

Frogs giving birth through the mouth, DNA retrieved from the frost, and why Jurassic Park just won’t happen: 5 takeaways from TEDxDeExtinction

What happens when you bring together an award-winning science journalist, a Harvard geneticist, the director of a “frozen zoo” of cryopreserved animal DNA, one of the scientists behind a mission to clone a wooly mammoth, and a 26-year-old dedicated to resurrecting a long-extinct breed of pigeon? TEDxDeExtinction, of course.

Last Friday, 25 speakers — biologists, geneticists, researchers, conservationists, and thinkers of all kinds — met at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington D.C. to explore the hows, whys, and what ifs of “de-extinction” — the mind-boggling science of reviving extinct species from the dead.

Below, 5 takeaways from this day of pondering whether a pet Tasmanian tiger is possible, or a herd of wooly mammoths in the 21st century is a good idea. And, of course, thoughts on Jurassic Park:

1. “You can’t clone from stone.” Sorry, guys, no dinos: When it comes to de-extinction, dinosaurs are just not happening. Journalist Carl Zimmer (author of National Geographic’s April cover story on de-extinction) explained how DNA breaks down over time — has a half-life, so to speak — and as time has passed, dinosaur DNA has gone extinct, just like the dinos themselves. Or as Robert Lanza put it, “You can’t clone from stone.”
   
   
2. Once upon a time, there were frogs who swallowed their eggs, incubated them in their stomach, and gave birth via their mouth. They’re extinct now, but they might be coming back — thanks to TEDxDeExtinction speaker Michael Archer and his team of researchers at University of New South Wales in Australia. At the event, Michael explained how his team used preserved DNA of the  frog, Rheobatrachus silus, to create the first living embryo of an extinct species, implanted into the eggs of a different species of frog. An amazing feat for sure.
   
   
3. The mammoth genome is almost at full completion, according to molecular evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, who works sequencing the genome via samples extracted from excavated, frozen remains. This mapping is key to an eventual attempt to “de-extinct” a mammoth, which would bring the animal to chilly areas like Siberia.
    
4. There is such a title as molecular paleontologist, and Beth Shapiro has it. The adventurer scientists travels the Arctic collecting mammoth, horse, and extinct giant bear bones revealed by melting permafrost. She then extracts ancient DNA from these bones, studying it to figure out why some species die out when others don’t — especially after the last Ice Age. At TEDxDeExtinction, she explained how this extracted DNA could help scientists revive these ancient creatures from the past into the present (or, really — future).
   
   
5. The very first “de-extinction” was of the bucardo, a type of Spanish goat. Soon before the last bucardo’s death, a team of scientists captured the animal and took tissue samples for preservation. After the goat’s death, and, ultimately, the species’ extinction — these samples were used by a team of scientists, including TEDxDeExtinction speaker Alberto Fernández-Arias to “de-extinct” the goat, using a domestic (and alive) goat as a surrogate. In 2003, a baby bucardo was born, but only lived for ten minutes.

For more information on TEDxDeExtinction, visit their website, and for more on “de-extinction” science, check out TEDxDeExtinction speaker Carl Zimmer’s feature story in National Geographic, “Bringing Them Back to Life.”

(Photos: top, ANT Photo Library/Science Source; Bottom left, passenger pigeon, Bradley’s Animal Place; Bottom right, El retorno del bucardo)