Happy Darwin Day everyone! Today is Darwin’s birthday and in honor of him, I thought I’d post this article about Liquid Glass, which could possibly be the coolest nanotech material I’ve seen in some time. I think it’s so cool mainly because of its versatility and the fact that it’s already in use in Germany, the UK and Turkey.
Why am I talking about nanotech on Darwin’s birthday? If you think about it, without evolution, we wouldn’t be able to manipulate our world so deftly and with such finesse. About 195,000 years ago homo sapiens first appeared in the fossil record. We started leaving Africa about 70,000 years ago, and migrated as far as the Americas 14,500 years ago.
A mere 10,000 years ago, we were mostly hunter-gatherers in nomadic groups. The first proto-states were developed only 6,000 years ago. Think of that! Look how far we’ve come in such a short time!
Think of how we lived just 100 years ago in 1910.
- By 1910 many suburban homes were wired up with power and new electronic gadgets.
- Vacuum cleaners and washing machines had just become commercially available, though still expensive for middle class folks
- The telephone was new, and millions of American homes were connected by manual switchboard
- People relied on the paper for their news, but radio technology was in its infancy
- The age of the airship was in full swing. Only 7 years previously, the Wright brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk
- Henry Ford introduced the Model T 2 years before and sold about 10,000 of them this year
- Advances in the use of gases meant the first electric refrigerators and air conditioning units.
- Neon lighting was debuted in Paris
- Inventions included: escalators, teabags, cellophane, instant coffee and disposable razor blades
- Women still had another 3 years of corsets
Things they didn’t have in 1910: Read the rest of this entry »
