Do you hate it when roads you travel often are torn up for weeks/months in order to repave them?
I do. I also hate the pollution manufacturing asphalt causes, not to mention the choice between driving on potholes or seeing my taxes paying to do the same road over and over.
“New synthetic binders are going to transform the global road construction or road rehabilitation marketplace, and they’re going to allow for roads to be 100% recycled,” says Sean Weaver, president of TechniSoil Industrial, the company that designed the new process. “That’s always been the holy grail of the road construction market—could you recycle 100% of the top surface of the road, grind it up, crush it, and put it right back down, and have that be as durable as the original hot mixed asphalt road.”
Even better, the process uses recycled PET plastic (think water bottles) to replace bitumen and the result is far stronger than the original.
Considering the fact that so much US infrastructure, especially roads/streets/highways are badly deteriorated TechniSoil’s innovation couldn’t come at a better time.
After it’s tested in LA the main problem will be getting (forcing) bureaucracies and politicians to use it.
And that means overcoming entrenched players, with powerful lobbying and money to buy the pols.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I read a couple of articles last week highlighting two mind-blowing new products. Tomorrow you’ll learn about one that addresses wildfire prevention in a totally new way. The other (Wednesday) is a way to recycle roads, instead of repaving them, using plastic bottles.
In 2011, the Gates Foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to bring sustainable sanitation and hygiene solutions to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who do not have such access. The challenge, which is ongoing, is a global call to researchers around the world to develop innovative and financially profitable systems to manage human waste. The systems must operate off-grid, cost less than $.05 per day, and function in poor, urban settings.
Even corporate giants got into the effort.
Kohler—a leading U.S. manufacturer of toilets (…) received a Gates grant in 2014, describes these toilets as “stand-alone units that take in wastewater, then disinfect and purify it to be reused for toilet flushing.”
But water is also a scarce commodity, even when it’s reused.
Now, from a group of students at the University of British Columbia, comes the MYCOmmunity Toilet.
The MYCOmmunity Toilet consists of a mycelium tank that is small enough to sit inside each individual dwelling. (…) when it’s full, the toilet is buried in the ground or left somewhere out of the way for another 30 days to allow the composting process–aided by the mushroom spores–to finish. Each toilet includes local seeds, which can be planted on top of the toilet, allowing plants or crops to grow from the human waste.
Although it was designed specifically with refugee camps in mind, it would seem to have far greater potential.
The MYCOmmunity Toilet qualifies as an invention — with the potential to truly change the world.
More recently, RMT (Riva-Melissa Tez,CEO @ Permutation AI and an active investor) wrote a superb post on Medium noting that Silicon Valley has lost its perspective on the difference between a ‘problem’ and an ‘obstacle’
— any obstacle that restricts our standard of living — is now framed as a problem. (…) Recognizing these obstacles or inconveniences and being able to avoid them are privileges — a special right enjoyed as a result of one’s socioeconomic position. They are perks…
Most of SV has made its success from vertical approaches to issues with little complexity. The few SV approaches to humanitarian causes are failing badly for repeating that simplicity.
Starting a company that is a solid, sustainable, revenue-producing business, even one that won’t change the world, but that rewards its investors, will always be funded.
So, if that is what your startup is, then say so.
Not just to your investors, but also to your team.
Less ‘me too’ and more ‘me new’, or, as Matt Rosoff puts it, stuff that impresses his 5-year-old son.
By groundbreaking, I mean a technology that changed society, changed every other industry in the world. The World Wide Web was groundbreaking. The internet was groundbreaking. The personal computer was groundbreaking.
And before you write Rosoff off as a know-nothing consider Peter Thiel’s comment.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
It’s nice to know my nobody-know-nothing opinion is in good company.
In the tech world IoT is supposedly the bright light on the horizon, but don’t hold your breath.
Worse for tech, the public is waking up to the fact that it doesn’t give a damn about people’s privacy, security or even safety as long as they buy — at least not until it’s forced to and then only enough to shut up the noise.
As Accenture puts it, companies must “ignite” the next five years of growth by coming up with products that “offer a compelling value proposition,” “ensure a superior customer experience,” and “build security and trust.”
Read the article. Digest Accenture results.
Then think about what you can build that would impress a 5-year-old—even a little.
In the United States, cervical cancer is considered a preventable disease. “You have 10 years to detect this disease before it becomes untreatable,” Walmer says. “And it’s easy to detect. It develops on the outside of the cervix, which you can see.”
For those who watch Gray’s Anatomy this story about using modified HIV may seem a bit familiar.
There was nothing else to try. Nothing except a crazy experimental treatment never before given to a child: Blood was taken out of 6-year-old Emily’s body, passed through a machine to remove her white cells and put back in. Then scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used a modified HIV virus to genetically reprogram those white cells so that they would attack her cancer, and reinjected them. (…) [When the reaction almost killed her] Doctors gave Emily a rheumatoid arthritis drug that stopped the immune system storm–without protecting the cancer. Emily awoke on her 7th birthday and slowly recovered. A week later her bone marrow was checked. Emily’s father, an electrical lineman named Tom Whitehead, remembers getting the call from her doctor, Stephan Grupp: “It worked. She’s cancer free.”
Researchers at the National Cancer Institute sequenced the genome of her cancer and identified cells from her immune system that attacked a specific mutation in the malignant cells. Then they grew those immune cells in the laboratory and infused billions of them back into her bloodstream.
The vaccine, known as ADU-623, uses a genetically modified version of the bacterium listeria monocytogenes — the bacterium that in its native form causes the listeria infection — and a specific mutated protein found only in cancer cells, said Keith Bahjat, a researcher at Providence Cancer Center in Portland. The protein used is found in more than half of brain cancers (…) The idea is to provoke an immune response to the bacterium, assuming the immune system will then also target the proteins found in the cancer cells. The goal is to wipe out the pieces of tumor that are so intertwined with brain tissue they cannot be completely removed by surgery.
Tsunami, a regal-looking dog with attentive eyes and an enthusiastic tail wag for her trainer friends. University of Pennsylvania researchers say she is more than 90 percent successful in identifying the scent of ovarian cancer in tissue samples, (…) The largest study ever done on cancer-sniffing dogs found they can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy. At least one application is in the works seeking U.S. approval of a kit using breath samples to find breast cancer.
Pretty cool, and a friend/researcher in the industry tells me that rats are used to do diagnostic testing of sickle cell anemia.
But now, scientists are developing technology that can read signals directly from the brain and restore motion to a paralyzed hand — no healthy spine required.
Last, but not least, a look at how dentistry has seen the light in a way that could change a lot more than tooth replacement.
A Harvard-led team just successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. (…)The ability to naturally regrow dental tissue could transform dentistry, making it possible to regrow teeth instead of replacing them with a substitute like porcelain. But even more amazingly, once it’s better understood, this same technique could potentially be used to heal wounds and regenerate bone, skin, and muscle.
Truly amazing, life-changing innovation happening in our lifetime.
Mostly they are about finding and rating personal and businesses services, locating partners, whether for hook-ups or long-term, and other such weighty matters.
Additionally, other than the bio-X stuff, innovation is dominated by software.
But software, including the giants like Facebook and Google haven’t fundamentally changed things as much as is stated—and both could be easily replaced relative to something as basic to our modern civilization as silicon.
Is there anything happening that does have the potential to fundamentally change our world?
The American Chemical Society said in 2012 that graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel and so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields. Chinese scientists have created a graphene aerogel, an ultralight material derived from a gel, that is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass.
Graphene is transparent, conductive, flexible and inexpensive.
The heavy lifting to develop graphene and uses for it is being done by old people in stogy, non-entrepreneurial companies, such as IBM, Nokia and SanDisk and especially Samsung along with a number of universities, with nary a twenty-something in sight.
Because the electronics industry so invested in silicon (software, including the cloud and apps run on hardware) it’s doubtful they will move quickly to embrace Graphene, in spite of its ability to truly revolutionize the entire industry.
Not so the Gates Foundation, which already paid to develop a graphene-based condom that is thin, light and impenetrable.
If your dream is to truly change the world, whether now or later, consider graphene.
Who knows, your idea could lead not just to a new company, but to an entirely new industry; not to employing a few thousand, but to jobs for millions.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
New year, new ideas — one would hope.
