Fiction is full of predictions. Figuring out the future may not be the sole occupation of novelists, but it's a side job for many. While data scientists, tech entrepreneurs, and the CIA are scrambling to predict ways the world will change based on past events and algorithms, the imaginings of novelists sometimes prove more prescient.
Maybe it's because speculation is at the heart of fiction, whether it's in the motivation of characters or the generation of an entire world. While creating a believable simulacrum of things already extant in our universe is a considerable undertaking, it takes a particular gift to dream up things that don't already exist. Science-fiction writers are most often interested in this, but they can churn out the same prefab future over and over again: flying cars, replicating food, smartwatches. Until one day they hit upon something like cyberspace, where before there was just a great big yawning nothingness.Some scenarios seem simpler but take subtle skill. Even giving life to lackluster cubicle dwellers at Microsoft in the 1990s takes the touch of a writer who can imagine themselves on the inside of a new and exclusive tech world looking out. Or expounding on just how strange and even insidious the workings of a Google-like company can be, as Dave Eggers does in The Circle, which comes out next month.
Whether you're well-read or not, you'll want to be well-versed in these books if you're into tech, especially since some of the ideas they present may well provide clues to our future.In the 90s Microsoft was Apple and Bill Gates was Steve Jobs. Douglas Coupland documented these seminal Internet boom days in his novel Microserfs, and described Gates thusly: "Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with thick, thick glasses." Microserfs follows a group of coders as they drift from the safe environs of Redmond to the more unsure shores of startup life in Silicon Valley.Besides, global food loss and waste generate annually 4.4 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2 eq) gases, which corresponds to circa 8% of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
This means that the contribution of food wastage emissions to global warming is almost equivalent (87%) to global road transport emissions. Or in other words, if food wastage were a country, it would be the third largest GHG emitting country in the worldWith this review, the authors aim to expand the current perception and scope of biomaterials by demonstrating how they can be engineered to interface with food and plants, to ultimately boost food security. In this respect, biomaterials design principles adopted in the medical field for drug delivery, gene therapy, and nanotechnology-based sensing and diagnostics serve as an inspiration and guidance for new applications in the AgroFood system..Specifically, as illustrated above, the authors dedicate their focus to four aspects where they believe biomaterials-based approaches and platforms can make a real impact. In each section, they introduce and discuss biomaterial design principles, emerging micro-/nanofabrication strategies, and the advantages and disadvantages of different delivery, preservation and sensing platforms.
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