10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life

1) Digital Libraries

Having total connectivity is pointless if all you get is the latest gossip about Paris Hilton. But the digitization of mankind's accumulated works proceeds apace. All of MIT's courses are now online, for instance, and, if you haven't done so, check out Google Book Search. The time will come when any straightforward factual question can be answered immediately, online. But, alas, those are always the easy questions.



2) Gene Therapy and/or Stem Cells

A lot of maladies actually involve inherited conditions–they're in your genes, in other words. But scientists are working to change those genes and trick defective cells into growing correctly. Perhaps, someday, birth defects will be as treatable as pneumonia.






3) Pervasive Wireless Internet

WiMAX, 3G, 4G, etc., all point to a pervasive wireless Internet, where being on-line everywhere, all the time, will be routine. That implies the possibility of full connectivity between any two random devices. Want to check your burglar alarm from your cell phone? It'll be easy. Unjacking to get away and relax, however, may not be so easy.




4) Mobile Robots

The recent DARPA challenge (where robot cars navigated through suburban traffic) hints at what might come. Why drive to the deli to pick up your order when you can just send your car? We may see convoys of robot trucks on the highways. Admittedly, they'll probably have more initial acceptance in warehouses, handling pick-and-pull chores.




5) Better, Cheaper Solar Cells

The cost of photovoltaic cells (that turn sunlight into electricity) are coming down. In less than ten years the cost of solar energy could be at parity with the cost of electricity from the grid, and solar cells could be standard features in new residential construction. Your house could power itself about a third of the time. (Science can't do much about night and bad weather.)




6) Location-Based Computing

Instead of clicking an icon on a browser screen, you can walk outside, point your cell phone at an actual three-dimensional thing (presumably, a building that houses a business), click the phone, and get information about (or jump to the Web site of) whatever you were pointing at. As well as servers with Internet address, there will be servers with geographic coordinates.

7) Desktop 3-D Printing

Instead of going to the store for your next gadget, you might download a design of your choosing and generate it in your desktop 3-D printer. The next step will be to design your own gadgets, post the designs, and sell them, etc. Toys, kitchenware, and decorative household items should be fair game, at least. Cottage industry, here we come!






8) Moore's Law Upheld

The law, stated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, implies that available computer power can be expected to double every other year. For at least two decades pundits have been pointing out barriers to the law's fulfillment, and the chip industry has been smashing those barriers. Currently they can't agree if the law has a couple of more decades of life left, or 600 years. Either way, in terms of available computing power, it's clear that we ain't seen nothing yet.


9) Therapeutic Cloning

Forget the stories about generating identical copies of a particular sheep or person. The whole idea behind cloning all along has been to grow replacement organs or tissue in a vat, which the body would see no reason to reject. Cancerous or damaged organs could be replaced by new, disease-free clones of themselves.





10) The Hydrogen Economy

Instead of guzzling imported oil (and being at the mercy of oil suppliers) we could turn water into hydrogen and burn that (or use to charge fuel cells.) Meanwhile, the only byproduct of the combustion of hydrogen is ... more water! However, hydrogen storage remains a thorny issue, due to its low density, and hydrogen may end up being only one of many interlocking components that replace the current oil economy.

- referenced from http://www.livescience.com

AMAZING FACTS (HEALTH AND BODY)

* A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for approximately sixty-nine years.
* 1 out of every 4 kids in the USA is overweight.
* 41% of women apply body or hand moisturizer a minimum three times a day.
* 75-90% of primary physician visits are due to stress.
* A Russian man who wore a beard during the time of Peter the Great had to pay a special tax.
* A blink lasts approximately 0.3 seconds.
* A ear trumpet was used before the hearing aid was invented by people who had difficulty hearing.
* A fetus develops fingerprints at eighteen weeks.
* A fetus starts to develop fingerprints at the age of eight weeks.
* A fetus that is four months old, will becomes startled and turn away if a light is flashed on the mother's stomach.
* A headache and inflammatory pain can be reduced by eating 20 tart cherries.
* A human embryo is smaller than a grain of rice at four weeks old.
* A kiss for one minute can burn 26.
* A little under one quarter of the people in the world are vegetarians.
* A person infected with the SARS virus, has a 95-98% chance of recovery.
* A person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day will on average lose two teeth every ten years.
* A person will burn 7 percent more calories if they walk on hard dirt compared to pavement.
* A sneeze can travel as fast as one hundred miles per hour.
* A study concludes that kids who snore do poorly in school.
* A study indicates that smokers are likely to die on average six and a half years earlier than non-smokers.
* A women from Berlin Germany has had 3,110 gallstones taken out of her gall bladder.
* A world record 328 pound ovarian cyst was removed from a woman in Galveston, Texas, in 1905.
* A yawn usually lasts for approximately six seconds.
* About twenty-five percent of the population sneeze when they are exposed to light.
* According to the American Institute of Stress, job stress approximately costs the U.S. industry over $300 billion dollars per year.
* After twenty-seven years, Betty Rubble made her debut as a Flintstones Vitamin in 1996.
* Air is passed through the nose at a speed of 100 miles per hour when a person sneezes.
* Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were both epileptic.
* An adult esophagus can range from 10 to 14 inches in length and is one inch in diameter.
* An average adult produces about half a litre of flatulent gas per day, resulting in an average of about fourteen occurrences of flatulence a day.
* Approximately 1-2 calorie are burned a minute while watching T.V.
* Approximately 25,000 workers died during the building of the Panama Canal and approximately 20,000 of them contracted malaria and yellow fever.
* Asthma affects one in fifteen children under the age of eighteen.
* At least 7% of all health care costs in the United States are attributed to smoking.
* At one time it was thought that the heart controlled a person's emotions, Babies that are exposed to cats and dogs in their first year of life have a lower chance of developing allergies when they grow older.
* Babies' eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.
* Being lactose intolerant can cause chronic flatulence.
* Between 12%-15% of the population is left-handed.
* Between 1997-2002, there was an increase of 228% in cosmetic procedures in the United States.
* Bile produced by the liver is responsible for making your feces a brownish, green colour.
* Brain damage will only occur if a fever goes above 107.6 degrees farenheit.
* By walking an extra 20 minutes every day, an average person will burn off seven pounds of body fat in an year.
* Carbon monoxide can kill a person in less than 15 minutes.
* Children grow faster in the springtime than any other season during the year.