Greenhouse Powerhouse: Cleaner, Stronger Batteries Energize Organically

Power sources of the future will be a lot more eco-friendly thanks to recent discoveries in the fabrication of batteries. New water-based batteries developed by a team at USC last longer than traditional lithium-ion batteries and can be created at a tenth of the cost.

The batteries will be particularly useful as alternative forms of energy become more popular, as the charge gathered from various natural sources requires retaining. Sri Narayan, a USC chemistry professor and co-inventor of the new batteries, explained to www.phys.org that, "'Mega-scale' energy storage is a critical problem in the future of the renewable energy, requiring inexpensive and eco-friendly solutions."

Narayan and his team, after much experimentation, discovered that oxidized organic compounds called "quinones" that naturally aid plants, fungi, and bacteria in photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Their capability for energy transfer is critical to the new battery design, which enables the quinones to become electroactive after being dissolved in water.

The batteries have an estimated lifespan of 15 years and can be built in a variety of sizes. Despite being organic, they are still likely not safe to lick.

Your Phone Is Your Own: Supreme Court Forbids Warrantless Phone Searches

In a major breakthrough for privacy rights, the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that cell phones are among the effects that are Constitutionally protected against warrantless searches.

Yesterday in a unanimous ruling, the court made it abundantly clear that warrants are required before any search of a citizen's cell phone can take place, with some speculation as to what will follow if a person was arrested on charges not pertaining to the vast amount of information a cell phone could contain. Justice John Roberts was quoting as saying, “A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form—unless the phone is.”

The Constitutional verbiage of the Fourth Amendment, partially reprinted here via www.msnbc.com, guarantees that citizens shall be “secure in their persons, houses, papers or effects." Phones of all types (from brick to smart) are covered under the ruling.  

Image courtesy www.aclu.org.

Monkey In The Middle (Of My Parking Space): New Parking-Spot Auctioning App Banned In San Francisco

The new "sharing economy" sounds like a feel-good, community-building idea, but some elements of San Francisco have turned it into a very capitalistic marketing ploy. The new app MonkeyParking is designed to auction off soon-to-be-vacated parking spaces, which has given the wealthy a new societal edge but given middle-class communities a headache.

Claiming the app fosters a sense of community and "sharing", MonkeyParking is slated to park itself in New York, Rome, Seattle and Chicago soon.

The craziness of auctioning off publicly funded parking spaces is not lost to the sane media. Reporter Will Oremus of Slate notes, "I know this is Silicon Valley, where words have no meaning, but it takes a special brand of Ayn Rand–spouting nincompoop to try to pass off the unilateral privatization and scalping of public services as a new form of 'sharing.'"

Fortunately, citing a local statute that bans buying or selling of public parking spaces, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has issued a cease-and-desist letter to MonkeyParking. But will the monkey be on your neighborhood's back soon?

Too much Monkey business.

After The Automatons: Could A Robot Take Your Job Soon?

With 47 percent of the world's jobs poised to become automated in the next twenty years, what is half of humanity going to do when it is retired by robots?

While creative endeavors and skilled jobs still maintain their value for labor, automated jobs are quickly being phased out by those with the means to reap more capital by building machines to do so. As www.motherboard.vice.com reports, "last year Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were worth over $1 trillion combined, but employed just 150,000 people." With labor jobs dwindling and information jobs not escalating, what will workers do when their careers and cash all vanish thanks to the rich and their robots?

According to the Oxfam report "Working For The Few", "those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1 [trillion], as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population." With 85 people controlling the same amount of money as 3.5 billion, it is no surprise that ideas like wealth redistribution and possibly guaranteed minimum income may become serious social issues in the coming years.

How safe is your livelihood in the robot revolution?

No Cash For Spy Stash: The NSA Loses Government Funds For Domestic Peeping; Foreign Spyware

Will a lack of "backdoor funding" deter the NSA in any way from spying on citizens at home and abroad? Soon the world will have a chance to find out.

As reported by www.wired.co.uk, on June 19th the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act 2015 that will prevent the NSA from using government funds to stock information obtained while stalking both Americans and foreign citizens not expressly under warrant.

An open letter from several civil liberties groups to the House Of Representatives regarding the vote stated, "...These measures would make appreciable changes that would advance government surveillance reform and help rebuild lost trust among internet users and businesses, while also preserving national security and intelligence authorities."

This is an important breakthrough, with many foreign citizens recently extra-suspicious of the NSA thanks to discoveries of wireless routers sold in Europe being tainted by American spyware (subsequent hacks and defenses have already been issued to quell this problem.) But will removing Uncle Sam's wallet from Big Brother's pocket really slow down the spying?

Now they'll have to raise funds just as shady as they are.

Assault On The Salt: New "Fertigation" System Desalinates Using Fertilizer

Researchers in Sydney, Australia required a way to quickly and efficiently desalinate water for irrigation during the difficult and dry brushfire season. What they achieved may help mankind the world over.

Creating a system called "Fertilizer Drawn Forward Osmosis" that is 80% more energy efficient than traditional heating/evaporation and filtering methods, researchers hope to preserve the nation's normal clean drinking water supplies while expanding the desalinization for irrigation. "By reducing the demand that irrigation places on our traditional water supplies, we are conserving precious water for domestic use in our homes," said head researcher Dr Hokyong Shon to www.phys.org

The new process, which uses soluble fertilizer to help strain the water, is called "fertigation." It is already in use desalinating water at a coal mining site in Newcastle. Further experiments hope to use the converted "osmotic energy" to power energy devices, like turbines.

A small-scale fertigation system.

3-D Me: Mechanically-Printed Organs And You

With tremendous biomedical leaps set to save you as 3-D printed organs are poised to become a reality, 
www.engadget.com wants to tell the true story behind the technology.  Beginning with "building blocks" printed at the Wake Forest Center for Regenerative Medicine in the late 1990s, bladder cells were printed for the purposes of study.  Later, scientists at Clemson University began printing the actual 3-D organs.  In 2007, the biomedical company Organovo began creating slices of human livers for testing.

After CAT and MRI scans to determine the size and placement of the organ needed, scientists use stem cells as well as other non-organic printable material (such as titanium) to craft the part in question.  Live cellular organisms are then put into incubators to help aid their growth and cell fusion.

Of course, the organs still require acceptance by the body to go into action.  As Cornell engineer Hod Lipson is quick to point out:  "You can put the cells of a heart tissue in the right place together, but where's the start button?  The magic happens after the printing has taken place."

78,837 people currently await organ donations, although only 3,407 donations have been created organically since January of this year.  Hopefully this new onslaught of organ technology will make breakthroughs in time to save lives.

The smallest elements of a freshly-printed organ.