Insights April 28th, 2017

Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Future Trends – Artificial Wombs we look at researchers trying to save children’s lives using artificial wombs, people abandoning TV sets, pathways into cyber crime, rapid liquid printing, and an ingenious way to reuse Coke bottles.

Researchers design a functioning artificial womb

Future Trends – Artificial Wombs
Researchers have designed an artificial womb-like device that could drastically change the way we care for extremely premature babies. The device, which has been used successfully with lambs, mimics the environment of a real womb. It’s designed to allow critically preterm infants to continue developing as they normally would.

People are ready to abandon their TV sets in record numbers, study suggests

A new Accenture report shows a dramatic drop in the percentage of people who prefer to watch TV on a regular television set.
The Accenture 2017 Digital Consumer Survey, which involved 26,000 people in 26 countries, showed only 23 percent of viewers preferred watching programming on a television set. Among U.S. survey takers, it was marginally higher at 25 percent.
Read more at CNBC

Pathways into Cybercrime

Availability of low-level hacking tools encourages criminal behaviour. […] Offenders begin to participate in gaming cheat websites and ‘modding’ (game modification) forums and progress to criminal hacking forums without considering consequences. Financial gain is not necessarily a priority for young offenders. Completing the challenge, sense of accomplishment, proving oneself to peers is a key motivation for those involved in cybercriminality. Offenders perceive the likelihood of encountering law enforcement as low. Cyber crime is not solitary and anti-social. Social relationships, albeit online, are key. Forum interaction and building of reputation drives young cyber criminals.
Read more in this National Crime Agency Document

Rapid Liquid Printing

In collaboration with Steelcase, we are presenting a new experimental process called Rapid Liquid Printing, a breakthrough 3D printing technology. Rapid Liquid Printing physically draws in 3D space within a gel suspension, and enables the creation of large scale, customized products made of real-world materials. Compared with other techniques we believe this is the first development to combine industrial materials with extremely fast print speeds in a precisely controlled process to yield large-scale products.