Lifeboat Foundation

YouTube is the world’s biggest video platform, and its most popular content is still relatively short video clips. But over the last year Robert Kyncl, the service’s chief business officer, has begun to lay the groundwork for a new era of YouTube. He led the launch of YouTube Red, a subscription service that eliminates ads and brings a bunch of premium features to customers. He’s also created separate apps for YouTube’s three most popular verticals: gaming, kids, and music.

We sat down for a chat with Kyncl at CES. He gave a keynote speech earlier in the week, and one major focus was music. Despite being a video service, YouTube’s massive scale means it’s also the world’s most popular platform for streaming music. The new Music app is optimized for that experience, adding features like offline playlists and background play. We chatted about MTV and why YouTube has the ability to be many different things to different people all at once.

Continue reading “YouTube’s money man says the future is live virtual reality” »

Carl Zimmer, a science journalist, explains how the revolutionary new genome-editing tool CRISPR works.

Zimmer is a columnist for The New York Times and the author of “A Planet of Viruses.”

Continue reading “Carl Zimmer explains the CRISPR DNA editing system in 90 seconds” »

Governments, businesses, and economists have all been caught off guard by the geopolitical shifts that happened with the crash of oil prices and the slowdown of China’s economy. Most believe that the price of oil will recover and that China will continue its rise. They are mistaken. Instead of worrying about the rise of China, we need to fear its fall; and while oil prices may oscillate over the next four or five years, the fossil-fuel industry is headed the way of the dinosaur. The global balance of power will shift as a result.

LED light bulbs, improved heating and cooling systems, and software systems in automobiles have gradually been increasing fuel efficiency over the past decades. But the big shock to the energy industry came with fracking, a new set of techniques and technologies for extracting more hydrocarbons from the ground. Though there are concerns about environmental damage, these increased the outputs of oil and gas, caused the usurpation of old-line coal-fired power plants, and dramatically reduced America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Continue reading “These Technologies Will Shift the Global Balance of Power in the Next 20 Years” »

A Chinese company building a massive animal cloning facility doesn’t want to limit itself to just replicating cattle and pets but hopes to move into the human cloning business in the future. The company, Boyalife Group, possesses the technology to do so, its CEO, Xiaochun Xo, told AFP, but to date has been “self-restrained” because it fears public backlash.

A Chinese company is claiming it has the technology to clone humans but is holding off because it says the public isn’t ready. That’s likely true, experts say, and it’s not likely to change because there isn’t a powerful enough medical reason that could swing public opinion.

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“What is the best way to study the brain? Big labs or small?”

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“The most successful drone firms could be those that do not make them”

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My new article for the International Business Times:

The US presidential candidate completes his three-month campaign aboard a coffin-shaped bus.

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Microelectromechanical systems—or MEMS—were a $12 billion business in 2014. But that market is dominated by just a handful of devices, such as the accelerometers that reorient the screens of most smartphones.

That’s because manufacturing MEMS has traditionally required sophisticated semiconductor fabrication facilities, which cost tens of millions of dollars to build. Potentially useful MEMS have languished in development because they don’t have markets large enough to justify the initial capital investment in production.

Two recent papers from researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technologies Laboratories offer hope that that might change. In one, the researchers show that a MEMS-based gas sensor manufactured with a desktop device performs at least as well as commercial sensors built at conventional production facilities.

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Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the “structural collapse” of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged.

Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with “peak humanity” occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people.

This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called “geriatric-tech” related IP.

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