The Internet will vanish, says Google's Eric Schmidt

Digitally speaking, we're not even plodding along yet.

Why, AT&T is throttling my data this month and my phone still won't work too well in half of California's Wine Country.

However, Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is very well connected to the future. And he'd like you to know that the pesky Internet thing will soon be a digital dodo.

I know this because today he said: "The Internet will disappear." As the Hollywood Reporter offers, Schmidt was schmoozing and strategizing with the hive mind of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He made a few more brushstrokes to contribute to his picture of Futureworld: "There will be so many IP addresses (...) so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won't even sense it."

Surely you will sense it, because you'll find this magical at-oneness with the digital world far more interesting than, say, the humans in a room who are also finding their own magical at-oneness with the digital world.

Schmidt explained: "It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room."

Permit me a dynamic guffaw at the mention of permission. Humanity has long ago bared its chest and dropped its trousers, merely for the opportunity to post images of its tanned toenails and to buy some strawberry-flavored toothpaste.

Just to underline this, the Davos forum also heard from Harvard professor of computer science, Margo Seltzer. The AFP reported two of her more charming statements.

First: "We live in a surveillance state today." Second: "We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism."

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This latter thought portends a world, she said, where tiny drones are flying through the air checking you for a pox of one kind or another. On behalf of, say, your health insurance company.

All for the greater good, you understand.

Yesterday, with its HoloLens, Microsoft showed one small step toward walking into its version of a dynamic room. Most who saw it found it exciting.

For Schmidt, the idea of a dynamic world represents "a highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world."

Of course we'll rush headlong into it because there'll be so much excitement along the way. There'll be fun and marveling to be had.

We should look forward to it. We'll all be robots after all, programmed to marvel at just the right things.

The Internet will vanish, says Google's Eric Schmidt

6:29 AM Eric Schmidt, Future technology, Google, internet

Engineers Invent Inks for Making 3-D Printed Fuel Cells

Simplifying The Energy Needs For The Future

Photo: Shah Tissue Engineering and Additive Manufacturing Lab and Northwestern University


Making ceramic fuel cells with a 3-D printer would be a quick and easy way to manufacture the devices and could lead to new fuel cell designs that do a better job of converting a gas into electricity, according to researchers at Northwestern University.

The lab of Ramille Shah, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, has developed new inks that a single 3-D printer can use to create the individual components of the solid oxide fuel cell—cathode, anode, electrolyte, and interconnects. The inks are a mixture of ceramic particles that make up 70 to 90 percent of the mix, a binder, and a cocktail of solvents that evaporate at different rates. The ink for the electrolyte, for example, is made of yttrium-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) particles, while the anode is YSZ plus nickel oxide.

When the machine prints a line with one of these inks, a highly volatile solvent in the mix evaporates immediately, so the printed piece turns from a liquid to a solid instantly. The other solvents, however, evaporate more slowly, leaving the printed line hard enough to maintain its shape but soft enough that the next layer melds with it to form a single piece. The printing is done at room temperature, but just like when making a ceramic vase, the printed piece has to be fired at up to 1250° C to make it denser and smoother. To make sure the different parts of the printed fuel cell all shrink at the same rate during firing, the team tweaks the composition of the individual inks, and adds iron oxide in some layers.

“We can get really densely packed particles in the printed structure,” says Adam Jakus, a Ph.D. student in Shah’s lab, who described the work at the Materials Research Society’s fall meeting in Boston this week.

Solid-oxide fuel cells operate at high temperatures, so they don’t require catalysts and work with a variety of gases, including methane. They could be used to provide power to the electricity grid.

Using 3-D printing to build fuel cells of a standard design could be an easier manufacturing process than having to join the separate parts together, says Jakus. But, he says, the real promise could come from 3-D printing’s ability to create shapes that standard manufacturing processes can’t. For instance, they’ve printed flat sheets of the ceramic materials, which can be rolled or folded into different shapes before firing. Instead of the standard stack of fuel cells, they could be built in concentric circles, or be interwoven, creating more surface area and therefore easier transport of charge. Jakus, though, focuses on the inks, and will leave it up to colleagues who are experts in fuel cells to experiment with new designs.

Meanwhile, he’s developing similar inks for other uses, such as 3-D printed ceramic bone replacements that mimic the mechanical properties of actual bone. The team has also made an ink that allows 3-D printing of graphene.

Engineers Invent Inks for Making 3-D Printed Fuel Cells

11:46 AM 3d Printing, alternate energy, Fuel cells, Future technology, renuable energy

The Big Future: How will drones change the skies?

The Flying Drones And The Future

The sky may look very different in a few decades. This week’s Big Future takes a look at how the world will change as drone technology spreads, filling the world’s rooftops and skies. Tech giants like Amazon and Google are testing them out as delivery robots, but those early implementations are just scratching the surface.

A flying security guard

Companies like Skycatch are currently developing drones that could act as automated guard dogs. When a motion detector is triggered, the drone would take flight and check out the scene, beaming back a live video feed so you can decide whether to follow up with a call to the police or even an onboard weapon.

An eye in the sky

The Supreme Court has ruled that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to aerial filming — so for the time being, camera drones are fair game. It’s easy to imagine tabloids using them as propeller-powered paparazzi, tasked to follow a celebrity’s every move around town.

Be the drone

Things really get wild when you start to combine drones with virtual reality. Add an Oculus Rift to a quadcopter with an HDMI output and you can experience a drone’s-eye-view of a race over a raging river or inside an active volcano.

The Big Future: How will drones change the skies?

11:16 AM drones, flying drone, Future technology, HDMI