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Platform enables passers-by to tip buskers with Bitcoin

by Michael Keller

Not too long from now, those peaches and peppers you love will be getting some TLC from a few farmers’ friends made of silicon and metal.

Engineers at a number of institutions and companies are working on systems that will help farmers tend their crops by offering new insights into real-time conditions of the plants, soil and atmosphere.

“Agriculture right now is at a unique point, with lots of R&D going on,” Gary McMurray, a mechanical engineer who leads the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s efforts in food processing technology, tells Txchnologist. “In the next five to 10 years, you’re going to see a significant change in the farm. There’s a lot of technology coming.”

McMurray says robots, his area of research expertise, are going to be the main enabling technology. The drivers of farm innovations, he says, are U.S. Department of Agriculture research funding and defense contractors looking for new opportunities for their technologies after current conflicts taper off. “Even venture capital is going into agriculture companies,” he says.

In Illinois and at Georgia Tech, for example, researchers are taking steps to use flying and ground-crawling robots to help farmers better manage the land and plants.

Nick Stockton, wired.com

Underground fridge goes back to basics to save money and the environment

The disintermediation of healthcare could mean we begin to use comparison sites to manage our health in the same way we manage our holidays. Pharma companies must consider this future now to develop their brands.

By Charlie Stott

Cory Doctorow on intellectual property in a digital age

In his keynote speech for The Literary Consultancy’s 2014 conference, author and renowned digital publishing pioneer Cory Doctorow talks about his creative experiments on and offline, and addresses head-on the thorny question of ‘Intellectual Property in a Digital Age’.