111–120 of 545 posts
Asking questions that are orthogonal to how we see education today might be a good way to get started:
Could school become all-play? Do we need teachers? Do we need grades?
and so on and so forth...
research research. there are a lot of things wrong with publishing and accessing research that really shouldn't be the case: public access to research is locked into expensive journals, while we already have tons of cheap distribution methods; published research almost never includes full datasets for third party analysis (storage is cheap, and distribution again); we never see research with unexciting results; resea…
Send us mail at contact@satifer.com if you want to talk about any of these. We're working on fixing "we never see research with unexciting results" and a few others.
We've set up an email list, we're hoping to get some conversations started soon at satifer.com
Cheers!
There's a ton of money that goes into research of well-known plant species like rice, wheat, maize etc.
However, there are myriads of species where we know not much beyond the taxonomic assignment and getting funding to research these species is a drag ("How do you want to monetize that?"). Yet there's a wealth of novel resistances, food sources, medicines, biochemical pathways etc. hidden away in these species, there's just no funding.
There are some companies which sponsor small research projects into organisms like that (edit: mostly for advertising purposes), for example PacBio awards one genome assembly project of the "most interesting species" (read: underfunded). This species won last time: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
It's a weird tiny grass which can completely dry out and then come back to live, imagine what we could do when we'd take this pathway out and put it into wheat! Completely unresearched (Google Scholar has 122 papers mentioning the name, edit: Oryza sativa (rice) has 387,000) yet massive potential.
It may not be the best fit to your funding scheme because research like this goes far beyond 5 years.
Disclaimer: I work in plant bioinformatics (canola)
Later Edit: There's also experiment.com for crowdfunding research, but it's really hard to get a project crowdfunded if it's unpopular (compare: "We have this tiny plant we know nothing about" vs. "We have this tiny plant that may cure cancer", maybe the plant you know nothing about does that too?). YC could fit its funding scheme above "single project" and below "decades long funding"
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Have you ever sat at a light and wondered why it was still red when no cars were coming in any direction?
This software is lousy, it should have object recognition, sensor tech, but the basic idea of traffic lights haven't been updated in decades.
You want to save time, money and a big sale to the rest of the world? Fix traffic lights.
Wherever you look, there's opportunity for sampling and sequencing - in the soil, inside livestock, on hospital floors - that could lead to novel life-saving or industrial applications or at worst, a better understanding of the natural world.
To do this at scale takes capital and resources - difficult for many labs, but not a problem for YC Research.
* Green energy
* Battery technology
* Water cleansing (ie pollutants from rivers & oceans
* Water purification
* Air purification
* Food production
* Medical technologyThere is almost no research into which languages are best and a lot of guesswork. This is also directly related to ycombinator itself so you guys have plenty of incentive.
1) We might be in a position of needing a new home sooner than expected
2) Humans seem to be better at affecting global environments than we originally thought
It can only help us to have a better understanding of what a realistic budget and timeline for terraforming would be.