thefuture

The future of contact lenses is almost here.

A new article from PricewaterhouseCoopers traces the evolution of the role over the past century — and looks ahead to 2040.

Although electric vehicle use is on the rise, we're certainly not out of the woods yet in terms of providing them with a steady supply of clean energy - that's why designer Neville Mars has conceived of an incredible EV charging station that takes the form

China is running out of room for its growing urban population. This amazing design--an entire prefab city that floats on water--could magically create...

There’s a well-known scene in the Brad Pitt-Billy Beane biopic “Moneyball” in which Beane confronts a bunch of stale, oldster scouts about the outdated way they evaluate baseball players. One scout comments that because a player has an ugly girlfriend it means he has no confidence. Beane gives an exasperated “facepalm.” The way many venture capitalists analyze potential startup investments is similarly haphazard and inaccurate. However, just as in the movie, it’s all about to end in a giant wave of business innovation.

A team of chemical engineers and biochemists has managed to change how plants work. Well, to be exact, they've made plants work better by embedding carbon nanotubes into the plants' leaves so that they absorb more light. Put simply, they've created bionic plants.

Six years isn't that long but the rapid pace of innovation means everything--from education to health care to the Internet itself--could look a lot different by then.

How will technology change life by the end of the decade? That's the subject of a new book, called Shift 2020, which explores the future of everything from greentech and health care to 3-D printing and transport.

Shift 2020 was edited by Rudy De Waele, a strategist and entrepreneur from the U.K., and includes predictions from more than 70 futurists, thinkers-in-residence, entrepreneurs, think-tank analysts, and academics. We picked out a few ideas that caught our eye. You can purchase the full copy here.

Robosimian is a machine built for good--to respond in disaster situations. But you might not be happy to be rescued by a horrifying monkey robot.

The digitization of our economy will bring with it a new generation of radical economic ideologies, of which Bitcoin is arguably the first.  For those with assets, technological savvy, and a sense of adventure, the state is the enemy and a cryptographic currency is the solution.  But for those more focused on the decline of the middle classes, the collapse of the entry-level jobs market, and the rise of free culture, the state is an ally, and the solution might look something like an unconditional basic income. Before I explain why this concept is going to be creeping into the political debate across the developed world, let me spell out how a system like this would look:

Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on.  The only condition is citizenship and/or residency.

You get the basic income whether or not you’re employed, any wages you earn are additional.

The welfare bureaucracy is largely dismantled.  No means testing, no signing on, no bullying young people into stacking shelves for free, no separate state pension.

Street lights are an important part of our urban infrastructure — they light our way home and make the roads safe at night. But what if we could create natural street lights that don’t need electricity to power them? A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one – not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities.

Pollution-cleaning towers are being built in China, and they’re set to be the tallest skyscrapers in the world.

I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again.

Many marketing folks have started throwing Google+ by the wayside as they create online marketing strategies in favor of greener pastures over at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Vine.

This is partly because Google+ simply does not have as many users as the other huge social platforms out there. There have also been well-documented concerns going back years about strength of click-through and visitor referrals from Google+.

However, while G+ may not command an impressive piece of the social media community overall, it does include elements that provide companies measurable value, especially in increasing organic traffic.

What will New York City look like 40 years from now? Though it’s obviously difficult to predict the future decades in advance--40 years ago, few people would have guessed how the Internet would take over our lives--the engineering and design firm Arup has taken a stab at a vision of the city in 2050.

The Indiegogo hit Tellspec scanner shoots a laser at your food and counts the calories and nutritional data. But is it just vaporware? We tried one...

Powered by sun and fed by rainwater, the building doesn't produce any waste. Its automated window shades open and close like an organism’s pupil, regulating the amount of light that enters. The 600-panel solar array, which is expected to generate all the energy the building needs in a year, is arranged on the roof so that rays of sunlight can pass through and create a dappled pattern on the sidewalk below — similar to the way light passes through a forest canopy. And all the wood used in the structure came from local forests that harvest trees sustainably.

New technologies will change the kinds of jobs people have in the coming years. Don't be surprised if one day you've taken on the position of...

New Harvest is a non-profit research organization working to advance new alternatives to conventionally-produced meat, including cultured meat - meat produced in a cell culture, rather than in an animal - and plant-based alternatives.