Flicckr

China Has an Ambitious Five-Year Plan to Convert Homes to Clean Heating by  1977   Creative Commons China’s Clean Heating Plan China has taken several steps this year to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. The nation has  tested new electric vehicles ,  shut down coal-burning factories , and  moved forward on plans for “sponge cities”  designed specifically with climate change in mind. However, the transition to clean energy has hit a major hurdle this winter, with natural gas supplies not meeting the heating demands of citizens in Northern China, where temperatures can reach sub-zero levels. Many individuals and businesses are now facing skyrocketing natural gas prices in the midst of what the  South China Morning Post  is calling a “deepening heating crisis.” Click to View Full Infographic Gas companies like PetroChina and CNOOC have begun diverting millions of cubic meters of natural gas from southern regions to help address...

MIT Engineers Develop Glowing Plants Using Nanoparticles   MIT/YouTube IN BRIEF The project is part of a new research sector: plant nanobionics, which uses nanoparticles to give plants unique and naturally un-plantlike features and abilities. GLOWING PLANTS What if, as the sun went down, the unassuming plants in your windowsill began to glow, lighting up the space around them like tiny botanical lamps? Thanks to recent  innovations by engineers at MIT , these living lamps could soon become a reality. The team of researchers embedded specially designed nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, lead by Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and MIT postdoc Seon-Yeong Kwak — senior and lead authors on the study, respectively. The introduction of the nanoparticles caused the plants to give off a dim light, glowing for almost four full hours. While this might seem like a relatively minor ac...

Artificial Intelligence Tax Reform Could Spur U.S. Adoption of Automated Systems   Getty Images IN BRIEF Automation can help businesses cut costs compared to a human workforce, but the initial investment is typically high. However, the proposed U.S. tax bill might help make the hardware more affordable. ROBOT REFORM The ongoing political battle over U.S. tax reform has proven to be a particularly contentious issue in recent months. Proponents of the bill introduced in November argue that it will create jobs – but it might instead empower companies to accelerate plans to replace human workers with automated systems. A provision included in the bill allows for the full and complete depreciation of capital spending. This means that businesses who purchase new machines or other hardware will be able to write off their cost against their profits in the first year, according to  a report from The Intercept . This is a marked change from cu...

Health & Medicine Competition Between Pathogens Could Help Tackle Drug Resistance by    Creative C ompetition between DRU The Resistance Drug resistance  is making it increasingly difficult to produce medications that effectively combat diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria — but researchers have developed a method of turning pathogens against one another that could help those drugs function as intended. Pathogens like parasites, viruses, and bacteria sometimes develop a  genetic mutation  that makes them less vulnerable to certain drugs, such as antibiotics. Once one pathogen becomes able to survive treatment, it can replicate itself into a population of billions that all carry the mutation giving them resistance to the drug. However, pathogens in the body need to compete over resources and nutrients to thrive — and drug-resistant pathogens often have greater needs. The new study took advantage of this competition ...

Future Society Noise Is The Next Great Public Health Crisis by  74 Cities don’t just get filthy in the visu Cities don’t just get filthy in the visual sense — urban spaces can often be a raging mess of sound. The blaring car horns, the police sirens screaming through the usual waves of traffic, the clatter of passing trains, the constant cacophony of voices rising and falling as a strange melody — this deluge of noise can be devastating to the human psyche. “I think, as a society, we are becoming much more aware of the noise around us,”  Scott Sommerfeldt , an engineer at Brigham Young University who specializes in acoustic noise mitigation, tells Futurism. “Excessive noise has detrimental health effects on us, and we’re finally realizing how those effects add up.” By 2100, 84 percent of the world’s estimated 10.8 billion people  will likely live in cities . That means noise pollution will bloom in those areas and beyond, in surrounding...

Robots & Machines Laser-Delivered Internet Could be a Game Changer for Millions of Indian Citizens   Creative Commons IN BRIEF Across India, there are large gaps in broadband internet access. A new effort by a telecom company and X, a subsidiary of Alphabet, will hopefully deliver internet to millions more using lasers. LASER INTERNET In Andhra Pradesh, a southeast state in India, a subsidiary of Alphabet called simply “X” might soon be  delivering the internet with lasers . According to the company, they aim to provide “fiber optic cable, but without the cable.” The technology that makes this all happen is called  free space optical communications (FSOC) technology . To accomplish this ambitious task, X will work with AP State FiberNet, a telecom company owned entirely by the Andhra Pradesh government. X will create two thousand FSOC links, which use beams of laser light instead of traditional cables to deliver the internet over long dista...