Top TechTop Tech #12: Bricks, bands, and Immortality
Spotlighting important innovations with long-term promise.
Today’s top news:
A brick can cool your house
500 years? Google invests in Immortality
Billion-dollar wristband
A brick can cool your house
A new spin on an old idea could lower your power bill (and Iknow mine could use that).
3D printed porous ceramic bricks “absorb water like a sponge” and the three-dimensional lattice “allows air to pass through the wall. As air moves through the 3D printed brick, the water that is held in the micro-pores of the ceramic evaporates, bringing cool air into an interior environment, lowering the temperature using the principle of evaporative cooling.”
That’s the claim of Oakland-based Emerging Objects. The company says its “innovation lies in our unique approach to materials and sizes, and our belief that 3D printing is the medium where good ideas become real.”
What’s missing: pricing and ship dates — I’d buy ‘em now!
Wired also has more info here.
500 years? Google invests in Immortality
The head of Google’s investment arm is looking to fund science that could slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life — and he’s got $425 million to do it with.
It might be a combo of human biology extensions and machine additions, but he’s betting on being around for half a millennium.
Bloomberg has the full story here.
Billion-dollar wristband
Truth in labeling? Well, Disney is calling them “MagicBands,” but the techy wristbands do deliver a special experience within the Magic Kingdom.
The bands pack an RFID chip and a long-range radio that transmits info about the guests 40 feet in every direction, so that, for example, a meal awaits you when you enter a resort restaurant. It connects to sensors throughout the parks.
