Lifeboat Foundation

LONDON (AP) — The rainbow flag flew proudly Thursday above the Bank of England in the heart of London’s financial district to commemorate World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, the new face of Britain’s 50-pound note.

The design of the bank note was unveiled before it is being formally issued to the public on June 23, Turing’s birthday. The 50-pound note is the most valuable denomination in circulation but is little used during everyday transactions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic as digital payments increasingly replaced the use of cash.

The new note, which is laden with high-level security features and is made of longer-lasting polymer, completes the bank’s rejig of its paper currencies over the past few years. Turing’s image joins that of Winston Churchill on the five-pound note, novelist Jane Austen on the 10-pound note and artist J. M. W. Turner on the 20-pound note.

The first house on the moon, an ambitious space-saving alternative to life on crowded Earth, could cost an out-of-this-world $60 million, according to a new study.

That’s an estimated $320000 monthly payment for 1356 square feet of interior space, so if you want to go big, stay home.

The study, conducted by the UK finance site Money.co.uk, used SpaceX’s blastoff weight pricing to estimate what it would cost to bring materials, tools and laborers to the moon to begin the work. It also factored in the costs of new technology that architecture on the moon would require for life support and other factors.

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

Impressive value.

According to data, bitcoin’s market cap is currently over $1 trillion. The digital coin went from zero to $1 trillion in network value 3.6 times faster than Microsoft.

Bitcoin also achieved a higher valuation than the world’s three biggest banks combined, when it hit an all-time high of $61700 last week, as its market cap approached roughly $1.15 trillion. The combined market cap of JPMorgan, Bank of America and The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is $1.08 trillion.

GUANGZHOU, China — Baidu has raised money for its artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor business at a valuation of $2 billion, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.

It comes as the Chinese search giant looks to diversify its revenue streams.

The funding round was led by CPE, a Chinese asset management and private equity firm, the person said. Venture capital companies IDG and Legend Capital were also involved. A fund under Chinese investment company Oriza Holdings also participated in the round.

By the middle of the decade, the team from PsiQuantum will have a commercial quantum computer, according to the Financial Times. The founders are also indicating they are ready to emerge from stealth.

PsiQuantum has been mostly silent about its quantum computer development but with its scientific bench composed of leading UK physicists and nearly $300 million in venture capital funding, according to The Quantum Insider, that silence has been deafening.

Check out “How Watson Works here.”

Is it possible to live forever by using narrow AI that can perform faster and smarter than humans? Having a doctor give you the correct diagnosis and treatment plan only happens on average, 54% of the time, as the New England Journal of Medicine has pointed out. Having Watson instantly diagnose you with the correct diagnosis and treatment plan 95% of the time will become the new standard. Our crop of new personal medicine products such as continual internal diagnostics, synthetic immune systems, virtual assistants, and regenerative medicine will diagnose and stop sickness from ever occurring while constantly rebuilding and improving body and mind capabilities.

IBM has made a series of Watson computer systems so that any company can raise their industries products and services far beyond our human capability. IBM’s Watson was first featured to the public with its historic Jeopardy win over Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter the best human Jeopardy players. At the time, Watson contained 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content in a ninety server computing system with an analytical software IBM designed called DeepQA. Now, the financial markets, medicine, insurance companies, government, engineering, and customer service call centers are employing (buying) Watson is an artificial intelligence system, that can be specifically tailored to any digitized industry and quickly evolve their industries potential.

Creating 200 billion-plus brand-new red blood cells a day can take a toll on a body. The capacity to replace components charged with the life-sustaining task of carrying oxygen eventually wears out with aging, resulting in health problems, from anemia to blood cancers.

What if we could halt the aging process and maintain young blood cells for life? With blood cells making up a whopping 90% of the body’s cells, it makes sense that keeping them abundant and fit could boost vitality into our golden years.

Now, a group of researchers, including experts at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has discovered ways to do just that – keep the blood manufacturing process flowing. The work, recently published in the journal Nature, could open doors to everything from disease-preventive therapies to better blood banks.

Advocates contend central bank digital currencies can make cross-border transactions easier, promote financial inclusion and provide payment system stability. There are also privacy and surveillance risks with government-issued digital currencies. And in times of economic uncertainty, people may be more likely to pull their funds from commercial banks, accelerating a bank run.

Intense interest in cryptocurrencies and the Covid-19 pandemic have sparked debate among central banks on whether they should issue digital currencies of their own.

China has been in the lead in developing its own digital currency. It’s been working on the initiative since 2014. Chinese central bank officials have already conducted massive trials in major cities including Shenzhen, Chengdu and Hangzhou.

Continue reading “Central banks around the world want to get into digital currencies—here’s why” »