New Florence. New Renaissance.

STEM in Time’s 100 Most Influential People

Time’s annual list reflects the topsy-turvy world we live in and profiles Steve Bannon and Kim Jong Un and a bunch of activists. I was pleased, however, to see a fair share of folks who actually move the world forward using STEM.

They include:

• David Adjaye, Architect, designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
• James Allison, Immunologist, pioneering cancer therapies
• Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, pushing boundaries of digital security
• Natalie Batalha, NASA lead scientist for Kepler space telescope, for discovering new planets
• Jeff Bezos, serial innovator with Amazon, Blue Origin and others
• George Church, Biological engineer, pioneering gene editing
• Melinda Gates, Philanthropist, on global healthcare and with her new initiative, Pivotal Ventures
• Glenda Gray, Pediatrician fighting HIV in Africa
• Kirsten Green, Silicon Valley VC, who invests in disruptive retail startups
• Demis Hassabis, AI scientist, leader of team at DeepMind which created AlphaGo
• Yuriko Koike, Governor of Tokyo, preparing her city for digital age and for the 2020 Olympics
• Jean Liu, Entrepreneur, leading China's ride share momentum at Didi Chuxing
• Barbara Lynch, Tastemaker, food innovator
• Evan Siegel, CEO of Snapchat, which recently had a phenomenal IPO
• Vijay Shekhar Sharma, entrepreneur, founder of Paytm, a digital payments startup in India
• Celina Turchi, Infectious disease specialist, fighting the Zika virus
• Bernard Tyson, CEO Kaiser Permanente, for delivering outstanding clinical outcomes
• Guus Velders, Atmospheric Chemist crusading about climate change

The other neat thing is you have other equally renowned folks who have written short essays about those chosen. So, Sheryl Sandberg writes about Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio about Velders, Ray Kurzweil about Hassabis.

Worth spending some time on the list.

Really, really remote-work spaces

McNie has spent the past six months coordinating the team of brokers at her extremely brick-and-mortar business from abroad—first from the island of Jeju in South Korea, then from Chiang Mai, Thailand—courtesy of Hacker Paradise, a “traveling community for creative types.” Some unfortunately timed phone calls aside, it’s been healthy for her three-year-old company. Going abroad “was a choice to step into a more managerial role, or to walk away,” says McNie, who sought out Hacker Paradise on the advice of a business coach. These days, she’s closing deals from Jávea, across from Ibiza on the coast of Spain.

Should you desire a similar experience, it’ll cost you. A handful of companies will set you up with shared workspaces in far-flung locales for about $2,000 a month, which may or may not include living quarters. Trips last anywhere from a few weeks to the rest of your life. The patriarch of the roving office clan is two-year-old Remote Year, whose co-founder, Greg Caplan, attributes its sudden popularity to the ballooning of the “odyssey years” between college graduation and settling down. “That period of time used to be about three to six months, but now it can be 10 to 15 years,” he says.

Bloomberg

 

Off-the-grid living

Boxouses (made from shipping containers) are designed for off-the-grid living, with a 1.5-kilowatt solar system that heats and powers the unit and its kitchenette.

An app can control smart windows and lights, as can a complimentary Alexa. In the works: alerts to port-a-potty vendors when the wastewater tank needs emptying.

Bloomberg

Other ideas in video below for affordable housing in cities where real estate is out of control

Artificial Sun

The giant honeycomb-like setup of 149 spotlights — officially known as "Synlight" — in Juelich, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of Cologne, uses xenon short-arc lamps normally found in cinemas to simulate natural sunlight that's often in short supply in Germany at this time of year.

By focusing the entire array on a single 20-by-20 centimeter (8x8 inch) spot, scientists from the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, will be able to produce the equivalent of 10,000 times the amount of solar radiation that would normally shine on the same surface.

Creating such furnace-like conditions — with temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,432 Fahrenheit) — is key to testing novel ways of making hydrogen, according to Bernhard Hoffschmidt, the director of DLR's Institute for Solar Research.

Many consider hydrogen to be the fuel of the future because it produces no carbon emissions when burned, meaning it doesn't add to global warming.

Time

Endless runway

The Endless Runway is a radical and novel airport concept, which applies a circular runway. The concept of the Endless Runway can generate a breakthrough in sustainable airport capacity by avoiding the physical constraints of conventional runways through shifting the lift-off and touchdown points of individual aircraft.

The main feature of the circular runway is that it will become possible to let an aircraft operate always at landing and take-off with headwind. Whatever its strength and direction, the Endless Runway becomes independent of the wind. When allowing limited crosswind, airspace users can shorten the global trajectory of the flights through optimized departure and arrival routes.

The circle of the runway, whose diameter is set to 3 kilometers, is large enough to provide sufficient room for infrastructure preferably inside the circle, even for a hub airport. This makes the airport compact, while allowing current-day aircraft to use the circle without significant structural modifications.

 

Advanced technologies for brain research

The annual issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE is chockfull of brain related research

• Silicon-Integrated High-Density Electrocortical Interfaces
• Framework for the Development of Neuroprostheses: From Basic Understanding by Sciatic and Median Nerves Models to Bionic Legs and Hand
• A Nonhuman Primate Brain–Computer Typing Interface
• Reliable Next-Generation Cortical Interfaces for Chronic Brain–Machine Interfaces and Neuroscience
• Let There Be Light - Optoprobes for Neural Implants

Journalist bots

After a few months of development, Heliograf debuted last year. An early version auto­published stories on the Rio Olympics (image below of the tweets it sent); a more advanced version, with a stronger editorial voice, was soon introduced to cover the election. It works like this: Editors create narrative templates for the stories, including key phrases that account for a variety of potential outcomes (from “Republicans retained control of the House” to “Democrats regained control of the House”), and then they hook Heliograf up to any source of structured data—in the case of the election, the data clearinghouse VoteSmart.org. The Heliograf software identifies the relevant data, matches it with the corresponding phrases in the template, merges them, and then publishes different versions across different platforms. The system can also alert reporters via Slack of any anomalies it finds in the data—for instance, wider margins than predicted—so they can investigate. “It’s just one more way to get a tip” on a potential scoop, Gilbert says.

Wired

 

Startup cultures at large companies

In the trend that's emerging, the founders of prominent startups are finding ways to sell their cake and have it, too. They can run their brands on their own terms inside larger corporations while at the same time providing spark and nimbleness to the parent company. "We needed some sort of outside catalyst to get our digital effort going at the speed I wanted it to," says John Schlifske, CEO of Northwestern Mutual, which bought fintech startup LearnVest. "I didn't feel we had the right speed and agility."

We're now at the point when entre­preneurship doesn't have to end with a purchase. Even better, entrepreneurs like Alexa von Tobel at LearnVest and Marla Malcolm Beck at Bluemercury get to operate with resources they couldn't imagine having as startups. Whether it's Northwestern Mutual jump-starting its online financial planning, or Under Armour building a connected fitness initiative with a startup such as MyFitnessPal, this is how the smart 21st-century acquisition gets done. "At some point, established companies have to adopt some startup thinking," says Alexander Chernev, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. "It's not that startup thinking is the best thing ever. But it forces you to look at the world as a changing place."

Inc with several examples of impactful startups acquired by companies like Macy’s, Under Armour and Sprint

Sleep Gadgets

from Time

Silicon Valley’s Chef

Bauccio is the masterful CEO behind Bon Appétit, the catering company serving the tech industry’s biggest behemoths, those that line Highway 101 from Silicon Valley up to the vertiginous streets of San Francisco. His clients include Google, Oracle, Adobe, Uber, Yahoo, Twitter and, of course, LinkedIn. In all, that’s about 200 million meals in 650-plus cafes every year. As of 2015, Bon Appétit says it’s raked in north of $1 billion. Bauccio, 73, has been beating the drum for local, healthy, organic food for 30 years now — peddling the virtues of farm-to-fork fare well ahead of Eric Schlosser’s release of Fast Food Nation in 2001 and long before the Slow Food Movement accelerated in the 1990s. In 2012, he won the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Lifetime Achievement award for being one of the first to bring “sustainably sourced, cutting-edge foods” to big businesses.

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