Reblogged: Helium-Lifted Craft and Other Advances Promise Better Livin

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We live in an amazing age, filled with astounding, life-serving technological advances. And, in addition to the material goods involved in these advances, we can gain spiritual fuel from them by explicitly recognizing and celebrating them and the great producers who bring them about.

Here are some recent examples:

• The California company Aeroscraft has test-flown an updated version of the old Zeppelin, a rigid-bodied craft filled with light gas capable of lifting heavy loads with vertical takeoff. Unlike the ill-fated, hydrogen-filled Hindenburg Zeppelin that crashed and burned in 1937, the Aeroscraft uses non-flammable helium. Aeroscraft explains that the craft “compresses helium into large storage tanks to become heavier than air; the helium is released back into the envelope to become lighter-than-air. No helium is lost during the process, and no helium cleaning is required.”
• Elizabeth Holmes is working to revolutionize medical testing, the Wall Street Journal reports. Theranos, the company Holmes founded in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford, is developing “devices that automate and miniaturize more than 1,000 laboratory tests, from routine blood work to advanced genetic analyses,” the Journal notes. The tests promise fast, inexpensive, and accurate results from mere drops of blood.
• Easton LaChappelle, a Colorado teenager, “has used 3D printing to create a robotic prosthetic arm that costs less than $500 and is fully functional,” International Business Times reports. The user controls the arm with a headband using wireless technology.

These innovators, in pursuing careers they love and applying reason to the problems and possibilities they meet, produce life-enhancing products and technologies and provide spiritual fuel for everyone to boot. Congratulations and “thank you” to these and to all men of the mind.

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Related:

• Review: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
• Sony’s Video Headsets Radically Improve Surgeons’ Ability to See Inside Patients

Image: Aeroscraft

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[Jon Letendre]

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison after conviction in Theranos fraud case (msn.com)