We nailed it again! History Before it Happens. Check out your just released Trend Alert: Rising interest rates rattle markets. Home sales slumping. What’s next?   Equity and real estate markets are trending precisely as we had forecast. In our Trends Journal, Trend Alerts and Trends in the News broadcasts, we not only accurately forecast the direction the markets are...

Everyone tuned-in to stock market news knows the story. US equities experienced a 10-percent correction recently over concerns that higher inflation would push the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy faster than expected. The Street feared that stopping the cheap money flow that juiced equity markets since 2009, would put a damper on future stock market investment. Absent from most...

The developing world is undergoing a building boom. From Vietnam to Africa and India, businesses and governments are building roads, airports, skyscrapers and other landmarks of busy economies. Building these things requires concrete. Making concrete requires sand. Only there’s suddenly not enough to go around. In global markets, sand’s price has risen 40 percent to 70 percent. Indonesia and some...

A drug created to treat type 2 diabetes has shown an ability to reverse Alzheimer’s-related memory loss in mice, according to researchers at Lancaster University in England. The drug, not named in the university’s report, is a triple threat; it combines three hormones that act as growth factors. While the hormones can help the pancreas deal with sugar, they also...

An artificial neural network is a computer process that can learn from examples, as people do, instead of having to be programmed before it can do something. But the network often requires thousands of examples before it can figure something out on its own. At the University of Michigan, engineers have drastically reduced the number of examples, and shortened the...

An artificial-intelligence software program has passed China’s exam for licensing physicians. The program needed 360 points to pass the test; it scored 456 and did it in a fraction of the allotted time. This wasn’t just a multiple-choice test. More than half the questions ask the test-taker to analyze actual patients’ cases, formulate diagnoses and prescribe treatments. In other words,...

The California start-up Robomart will offer autonomous vehicles about the size of a golf cart that can be stocked with fruits and vegetables and summoned by or sent to a house, where humans will choose their fare. Software will tally purchases and send a receipt. The idea arose from survey data showing shoppers don’t mind having grocery-store employees pick and...

While the auto industry and its high-tech partners have been driving high-profile publicity touting driverless vehicles as a reality just a few years away, Trends Research Institute tracking shows that hype is overblown. Instead, the reality of cashless – cash-register less – stores is a real, imminent high-tech advancement that will radically change the retail sector. The big buzz in...

After catastrophic floods in 2012, China made recovering from floods and minimizing their damage a national priority. To achieve that goal, China is creating “sponge cities” – urban areas able to absorb and hold large amounts of excess water and gradually let it back into nature. Only about a quarter of the rain falling on Chinese cities is absorbed into...

In America, the world’s leading economy, the middle class keeps shrinking. In China, the world’s second-largest economy, the middle class is booming. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, its middle class grew from 5 percent of the population to nearly 35 percent today. And while America’s middle class is difficult to define because of cost-of-living disparities across...