After a campaign that avoided climate change like the plague, President Barack Obama gave a State of the Union speech that put climate change on center stage. Early in the speech he encouraged law makers to revisit cap-and-trade as a way of tackling emissions of greenhouse gases. “I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, [...]

Last week, I and some 200 other attendees of the Global Trends 2030: U.S. Leadership in a Post-Western World conference got a thought-provoking look at the current “megatrends” leading to four possible futures for the world some 10 to 15 years from now. Cutting across all of them is the disruptive influence of emerging technologies—which [...]

3D printing is hot right now. The promises of customization and its potential to disrupt the market are of great interest. It’s being exploited by scientists to help them print lab supplies at a reduced costs, because as anyone who has worked in a lab knows, some small specialized pieces of plastic can be ridiculously [...]

I saw an article in Time magazine a few weeks ago about a low-cost 3D printer. The machine  receives instructions from a digital computer file that instructs it to build things by depositing and fusing layers of a heated plastic. In 1983, I remember a Time magazine “Machine of the Year” cover that proclaimed: “The [...]

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