Items of Interest

Fixing Ireland's Housing Crisis With SPZs

The Progress Ireland think tank released an interesting new paper describing how the use of Street Plan Development Zones (SPZs) could help solve Ireland's housing crisis. The zones allow communities to agree to designate their area for development to extend the number of dwellings on the land, in exchange for allocation of units at greater value.

Life

Read more about Fixing Ireland's Housing Crisis With SPZs

AI Disease Detection From Coughs

#392

Using Google's AI Health Acoustics Representations (HeAR) model, Indian company Salcit is expanding their Swaasa to detect TB and assess lung health based on the sound of a patient's cough.

AI & ML

Video

Read more about AI Disease Detection From Coughs

Solar Power From Space

#392

UK company Space Solar has developed a proposal to gather solar power in space and beam the converted microwave energy to a fixed point on earth.

Environment

Space

Video

Read more about Solar Power From Space

New Progress Ireland Think Tank

#391

A new think tank focussed on helping solve housing, infrastructure, and innovation issues in Ireland has launched. In their founding essay, Progress Ireland describe how emulating solutions from other countries on problems that are important, tractable, and neglected, can be used to jump start Ireland's economic growing pains.

Business

Innovation

Life

Read more about New Progress Ireland Think Tank

Individual & Systemic Climate Action

#391

Hannah Ritchie posted another great Sustainability by numbers post, this time about the relationship between individual climate action and systemic climate action. Both are needed, and individual action has the power to encourage and support systemic change.

Environment

Life

Read more about Individual & Systemic Climate Action

Logicial Qubit Error Correction

#391

Microsoft announced a breakthrough in using more logical qubits with error correction in Quantinuum chips, allowing simpler error correction with the added flexibility of moveable ion based hardware qubits. Microsoft also plan to abstract all the error correction layers away from the customer interface layer of their Azure Quantum Cloud service.

Quantum Computing

Read more about Logicial Qubit Error Correction

Walking Coffee Table

#391

Inspired by Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest sculptures, Giliam de Carpentier built a walking pod coffee table, which is controlled wirelessly using a Wii remote. He also open-sourced the leg linkage design.

Innovation

Tech

Video

Read more about Walking Coffee Table

Tsunami Trapped In Fjord For 9 Days

#391

In September 2023, a 200m high tsunami sloshed inside a fjord every 92 seconds in Greenland for 9 days, caused by climate change melting ice at the base of a glacier which sent 25 million cubic meters of ice crashing into the water.

Environment

Science