Weak Signals contributed by Ivan Montenegro Perini
R&D in synthetic biofuels from algae.
There is currently much venture capital flowing into this research area, particularly the breeding and treatment of different algae types. Additionally, the famous biochemist Craig Venter is active in financing projects aimed a...
Whenever there is a major health outbreak, then people quick ...
That increases the chance of more dietary shift. Methane emission by cows, and the fact that the meat industry is one of the biggest problems for climate change, could be an impetus. Meditation, as health costs are so high and ...
The technology progresses, that does not necessarily mean th ...
You could watch the natural miniaturization of electronic devices and track that to see how far that goes and how smart these things become. There is a lot of talk about web standards and the semantic web. The difficulty tracki...
Enabling more fluctuating sources of electricity.
On the material plenty side, you could be looking at energy trading, electricity trading. You could watch the fraction of renewable energy used in Europe, the transnational trading of these things and the consolidation of regio...
Euro became fiat money and not debt money.
Talk about fiat money; and places that are strong, but so challenged economically that they need to make a fundamental change in their economic system or be totally owned by the hedge funds. We think that is far more likely. If...
Some people has insisted on cycling everywhere and using pub ...
It is almost an ideology for him. You can probably find scores of examples of people making small shifts because they think it is appropriate, rather than waiting for the big shift to happen.
Cultivating the values that lead people to work within natur ...
It is a way of approaching small-scale farming that works within the capacity of the land to maintain fertility. It is not just pragmatic, it is more about cultivating the values that lead people to work within natural boundari...
The shift towards post-material values
Going from the need to own a lot of stuff to feel good, to modes of satisfaction and fulfilment that are not based on possessions, but maybe on quality of relationships or doing the right thing by the environment. Where It stop...
The current economic crisis and the lowbrow behaviour of pow ...
The driver of this development is the significant shift of the liberalised system of values in Eastern Europe towards the only critical criterion, economic gain.
Major changes in the behaviour of ecosystems could be caused by the surface water warming by a few degrees. That could also cause an enormous burden for the power grid because water is used to cool practically the whole industr...
Less than half of UK engineering and physical science gradua ...
There are many students deferring university entry because there is perceived higher competition for university entrants places. A knock-on effect could be a sudden downturn in UK student intake, leading to a dip in terms of sk...
Scientists produced artificial lungs for mice for the first ...
Normally, after having successfully achieved tests and experiments on mice it takes around 10 to 15 years before the same results or methods can be applied to humans.
Developing an individually fitting pharmaceutical against ca ...
Particularly in biotech it is observable that current research actions aim at the development of respective technologies. These actions hint at a probable breakthrough in this field, but not within the next ten years.
Too few transnational actions concerning the regulation of f ...
Already we can observe that banks are again distributing high bonus payments to their managers, that profits of banks, which had to be supported by the governments, are increasing and that there is a reintroduction of the “ca...
The way society perceives technological advances or other cr ...
There seems to be a general public misunderstanding of science. The way society perceives technological advances or other crises can dramatically influence their opinion and acceptance of such technologies. This has been eviden...
Particularly, strange are the sun spots (dark patches) as spotted by Galileo. They normally occur in an 11 year cycle, but they have been at a minimum recently as no sun spots have been observed for over 2 ½ years and this is ...
According to Luke GEORGHIOU: "There are some small signs, e.g. Paganism is one of the fastest growing religions. It has been officially recognised and the police are entitled to leave on Pagan festivals if they state that it is...
Misunderstanding of foresight studies.
Policy makers at the European level will read some of these wild cards, but probably for many of them there will be no response, action or preparation for some of these futures, because they think that is too far away, or not r...
More important for futurists is to understand what the decis ...
According to Karl Heinz LEITNER: "Future researchers are not so interested in this question, because they want to provoke and create. But I think the community should better understand what happens with this information."
A growing number of people want to live more consciously, an ...
This is partly due to the ever-increasing requirements for accuracy and work pace in all kinds of professions and other areas of daily life. These increased stress factors are also responsible for the continuously growing share...
The share of German small and medium-sized companies that re ...
These companies are now discovering Germany as their main production location.
A growing demand for mobility services.
An increased share of people prefer to rent, rather than own, mobility devices, or are increasingly using public transport. This development shows the increased awareness of environmental problems and aspects of sustainability,...
Most of PHD students think European
They think in terms not of fortress Europe, but in terms of doing a PhD in Finland but part of it in Barcelona and then getting an appointment in Britain. So there is an increasing consensus that that is the road to research an...
Each European country for itself does not mean anything.
There is a growing idea that we must act more together. There is also the realisation that if we want to be a global player we need a common foreign and defence policy. I think these might make it possible. With the research n...
Cyber attack could take on an economy by hitting a weak point over and over again. The US economy was almost taken down by the banking situation two years ago and there is evidence there was some malevolent cyber hacking and ba...
Bacteria; it is actually a strong one
We have people trying to make synthetic bacteria for energy conversion technology, such as converting coal into methane. That kind of technology, linked with other technology in IT, such as multi core processors – if you foll...
The environmental fiasco caused by scientists changing their ...
Many traditional techniques are clearly failing and many techniques used by politicians over the last few decades have made things much worse. There is a lot of frustration building up, people are wary of politicians and I thin...
According to Ian PEARSON: "At the moment there are some big ...
According to Ian PEARSON: "At the moment we are doing small incremental changes leading to a slow development path and it needs a rapid change. Weak signals of that are just the numbers of people looking at the field."
China already controls approximately 80% of essential earth ...
With regard to the Far East limiting access to rare materials that are vital to renewable technology, there are already studies saying China controls approximately 80% of these resources and as such there are concerns over futu...
Debate about climate change, carbon emissions and CO2 emissi ...
There is ongoing debate about climate change, carbon emissions and CO2 emissions. Typically, this is along the lines of climate scientists versus industry regarding the validity of CO2 emissions and the correlation to global wa...
An ambition for the energy industry is to create low cost re ...
There is a lot of research ongoing to establish this, which is itself a weak signal that we are aspiring to create this holy grail of low cost sustainable energy.
The bee population is massively in decline.
One of the reasons for this could be the changes in climate which is significantly changing the ecological system and the natural habitat. However, that is if there is such a thing as climate change!
A very serious reduction in support of research and developm ...
You could get a situation where this would not be merely discouraged but forbidden. Most cannot conceive of a serious setback like that but it is possible, particularly when you see more and more discontent with the way things...
According to Harold A. Linstone: "We see it already in the USA you have efforts in Texas, for example, where the school boards are forcing the schools to use texts that include intelligent design as an alternative to evolution....
There is a strange echo of the early industrial age from 200 ...
According to Fred Young Philips: "There was a report I read that compared the per capita GDP of countries to a host of variables and it turns out and I am quoting here from my paper, ‘a 24/7 Wall Street Report based on IMF da...
Changes in scientific journals – there is a focus and an i ...
Everyone is talking about biotechnologies nowadays, which is a good indication that there is potential there. People cannot imagine what can be done really. If you talk to people who work in this area, it is clearly very new an...
GlaxoSmithKline is trying to benefit from medical knowledge ...
According to Johannes Mayer: "Further, there has been an enormous increase in external requests at our research group lately. Another important signal might be a research group in Austria, which focuses on exploring a kind of t...
What happens if governments try to violate our human rights ...
which is happening a little in Italy. There is also a risk of this happening in The Netherlands, where a right wing party got a lot of votes in the last election. If they were in power, this could affect not so much citizens’...
The difficulty that have in The Netherlands to form a govern ...
This has almost become impossible, and at every new election it becomes more and more difficult to make a new cabinet.
There are certain occurrences on the internet, and certain w ...
More and more of the immediate landscape is becoming itemized, individualized and influenced by many more people. Twitter is a good example. In DATE???? a little more than one year ago I wrote an article for a Dutch newspaper...
The developing countries are not developing and that China i ...
As we move into a world of more sparsity, these decisions by the Chinese government, the Chinese people and Chinese companies to buy basic materials from Africa are a clear weak signal of the crucial position of Africa in a wor...
There is a difference between the reality of an issue and th ...
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) was once recognised as being completely independent, but now it is also prone to sensationalise events, and cannot be considered as a reliable source of information. Indeed, traditiona...
Fishing Blockades to prevent offloading thousands of fish to ...
Blockades have been made at Peterhead port in Aberdeenshire, physically preventing the Faroese vessel Jupiter from offloading 1,100 tonnes of the fish to a processing plant in protest at the quotas for mackerel fishing.
People do not care about their health
People do not care about their health because they will have a nano-lab inside their bodies.
University offers Lady Gaga sociology course
As reported by BBC, a new course on "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame" is to be taught at the University of South Carolina. Course documents said students would learn to "engage in sound and substantiated scholarly think...
