Skip to main content

Newsweek's List of Brilliant 'Disruptors' - how our world will change even faster

I subscribe to Newsweek Magazine. As its name states, it's a weekly magazine broadly arranged like a blog with articles rarely longer than a few pages, covering highly topical subjects such as cyberwarfare, Trump's legacy, vaccine science and the like, all from an American perspective. I strongly recommend you subscribe at https://subscribe.newsweek.com/.

In their Christmas 2021 issue they published a list of 50 people (or partnerships) whom they describe as 'agents for change' or 'disruptors', the most famous of whom is Elon Musk - considered the Thomas Edison of the digital age. It makes for a fascinating wander through what the world is turning into from many points of view, but especially new technologies, new politics, new awareness of the planet's fragility, new fashions, new fears and new excitements. Many of their choices raise further questions about what we are turning into such as overweight couch potatoes; superfluous actors in a world of robots and AI; screen and metaverse addicts etc, as well highlighting many of the more virtuous changes occurring such as the green revolution, inclusivity, ambitions for levelling society, and an overlying sense of fairness and of a worldwide community blind to flags, race, gender or belief.

For this post I have selected some of the more exciting businesses from their list of 'disruptors' to facilitate wider research around their innovations (I wish I had invested in some of them!). The Newsweek list focusses on the people, my focus is on what they've created with a link to their websites (it's also something to help pass the time while I isolate after a positive Covid test 😓... from which, thanks to previous disruptors who invented the Pfizer vaccine, I'm only experiencing very mild symptoms):

 Medical

  1. An Affordable Bionic Hand  www.psyonic.io
  2. Synthetic DNA at Commercial Scale  www.twistbioscience.com
  3.  Medicine Delivered by Mist  droplette.io
  4. Communicating by Thinking  synchron.com
  5. Robot Medical Assistants   www.diligentrobots.com
  6. DNA Printers to Spur Vaccine Development  codexdna.com
  7. Altering DNA to Cure Disease  www.intelliatx.com
  8. Collaborative Tech to Develop Affordable Drugs  www.openpharmaresearch.com
  9. Prescription Gaming for ADHD  www.akiliinteractive.com
  10. Flexible Electronics for Implants  www.anl.gov (one of their programmes)
  11. Powering Wearable Batteries with Sweat research.ece.ncsu.edu/bandodkargroup/group

Planet

  1. AI and Big Data to Feed the World  gro-intelligence.com
  2. Ecofriendly Alternative to Plastic  www.footprintcenter.com/footprint
  3. App to Replenish Forests  greenstand.org
  4. Eggs Without Chickens  theeverycompany.com
  5. Tech Help for Food Insecurity  plantvillage.psu.edu
  6. Food Preservative Alternative to Plastic Packaging  www.apeel.com
  7. A Metaverse Platform  www.roblox.com

 Art

  1. Blockchain Payment Platform for Musicians  raidar.mit.edu
  2. (one of my favourites) Sponsorship Platform for Creators  www.patreon.com
  3. Marketplace for NFTs  opensea.io
  4. Converting High Street Fashion into Digital  dressx.com

 General

  1. Detecting Emotion with AI smarteye.se
  2. Using Diamonds for Internet Access  akashsystems.com
  3. 3D Printed Housing  www.iconbuild.com

 

 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking an interest.

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo
7 comments
Read more

Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite
Post a Comment
Read more

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat
Post a Comment
Read more