Yesterday, I delivered the opening keynote presentation at the American Technical Education Association’s 51st annual meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota. The title of my talk was “The Ten Trends Transforming the Technical Education of Tomorrow.” To demonstrate how fast the world of technical (and higher) education is changing I explained how Oculus Rift–a promising virtual…

1. Genes That Fit—Finally! (Genomics): The price of sequencing a gene has plummeted 100 million-fold since 1998 and, amid continued exponential progress in sequencing technology, the field shows no sign of abating. This suggests that the cost of sequencing the 3 billion genes in an individual’s genome will drop from $10,000 today to less than…

The think tank known as The Millenium Project has recently published a new report, “The State of the World 2011.” One particular paragraph caught my attention because it reinforces a concept (accelerating change) I’ve been espousing for some time: “The coming biological revolution may change civilization more profoundly than did the industrial or information revolutions.”…

New reports have demonstrated that certain skin-cancer treatments which target specific genes are yielding extraordinary emmawatson-fans.com.  According to Hal Barron, chief medical officer of Roche, the findings “mark a major step forward in personalizing the treatment of metastic melanoma.” Said another doctor of the results, “[it] takes your breath away if you’re a melanoma doc.”…

Here’s novel idea. Rather than treating disease, health care professionals should treat patients. Thanks to advances in nanotechnology this might soon be possible. It is a fact that different drugs work differently on different people. New imaging probes now portend the day when doctors will be able to predict the effectiveness of a particular drug—before…

In 2003, I wrote the book, ”The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business.” In it, I outlined the many ways in which nanotechnology will impact the pharmaceutical industry in the near future. Recently, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have uncovered a method of reviving a…

A few weeks back I had a posting entitled ”Change or Die … Unnecessarily” in which I provided a few examples of how our inability to unlearn could, quite literally, cost some people their lives. Well, the other day, one of my favorite thinkers, Josh Wolfe, sent me a copy his weekly newsletter, The Forbes/Wolfe…

Yesterday, I addressed a large meeting of professional managers at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. And whenever I speak about the future and future technologies to such groups and organizations, I tell them that they need to keep a very open mind regarding the future. To this end, if I would have told you only…

Last month, I had a post discussing the health care industry’s need to “unlearn.” They are not, however, the only industry which might benefit from unlearning. I recently came across this article discussing how targeting “gut bugs” could revolutionize the development of future drugs. I am not enough of an expert in the field to…

Imagine a world in which a battery yields a 400X improvement over existing power devices or iPod can download a movie in 5 seconds and is capable of storing a total of 30,000 feature length movies. Well, you probably won’t have to imagine this future much past 2010 or 2011 because of the accelerating pace…