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As the climate crisis worsens, scientists have been urgently working to develop reflective materials, including different types of coatings and films, that could passively cool the Earth. The materials rely on principles of physics that allow thermal energy to travel from Earth along specific wavelengths through what’s known as the transparency or sky window in the atmosphere, and out into deep space.

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Officially named "The Sphere," this massive theater in Las Vegas is set to open in late September with a 25-show run from rock legends U2. Visitors to the strip got a preview on July 4th as the exterior fully lit up for the first time, displaying stars and stripes, fireworks, and other patriotic images.

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🔵 FS 🌀 DTech

The mixing of ‘Art’ and ‘Progress’ makes for a curious potion. When we consider the latter term, we tend to associate it with technological advancement, or perhaps the promotion of liberal values within society. Yet with art it seems a bit harder to decipher. From one perspective, we can examine the capacity of art as a tool for making social and political progress. Artists can often serve as powerful voices for social causes and help to make vivid the most sobering of truths. Another way of combining art with progress may encourage us to consider the notion of whether art, as a discipline, improves upon itself. A rather contentious narrative, given the fact that art seems to represent a pocket of nostalgia, with many people longing for the classical composers, old masters, and epic poets of bygone times. I began by asking Eno where he stood on the latter of these two.

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Extreme heat disasters like this are becoming increasingly common in regions where high heat used to be rare. Blackouts during severe heat waves can also leave residents who believe they are protected because they have in-home air conditioners at unexpected risk. To prepare, cities, neighborhoods, companies, and individuals can take steps now to reduce the harm.

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🟠 Des-fi 🔵 FS

How can we become better ancestors to our future generations? Human beings are cognitively not good at thinking about the long-term, without barriers of plausibility at present. That is why futurists help decision makers connect with the future emotionally to develop empathy in order to kick-start better decisions today, and also to stay ahead.

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🟣 SC

For most people, the chance to walk through a re-creation of early 20th-century Chinatown in Los Angeles or page through a 15th-century Christian devotional book known as a Book of Hours is the stuff of fantasy. But faculty at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences aim to bring historical objects into people’s laps — sometimes literally — through innovations in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

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Davidoff began experimenting with VR using image data from the Curiosity rover on Mars. There had been attempts to solve the visual distance issue, like using 3D imagery viewable with red and blue filtered glasses, but nothing made scientists feel like they were really there. Davidoff and his colleagues decided to wrap the panorama around the scientist in a virtual environment. Geologists using VR in this way reported feeling like they were in the real Martian environment. They could ascertain the distance and size of features much more quickly and accurately than they could with a flat display, which sparked another idea. Davidoff thought that if viewing imagery in VR helped, it could be a game changer for more complex “multi-dimensional” data.

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