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Category: government – Page 164

This is a horrible, horrible idea. The company wants to create a series of satellites that can unfurl, which will reflect light, and that can be manipulated to send messages to earth. The entire collection, comprised of CubeSats, will provide an area of about 50 sq. km. and create a whole new kind of orbital debris.

According to the website, “When phones don’t work, during zero visibility, power cuts and catastrophical emergencies – government can use the display for urgent notifications for the population.” We can ignore the idea of them being seen during zero visibility, but can you imagine a message floating in the sky that you can’t just turn off?

It was bound to happen.

While the rest of us look up at the night sky, and wonder at what we’re seeing, ponder how it all fits together, and strain ourselves trying to understand how our origins are intertwined with all that we see, others don’t. They look up at the magnitude of the night sky and think none of these things.

Continue reading “Astronomers aren’t pleased about a Russian plan to put billboards in space” | >

To be approved, government figures have shown.

More than 17,000 people have died in the past seven years while waiting for their disability benefit claim to be approved, according to figures obtained by The Independent.

The claimants, who were in the process of claiming a type of benefit named the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), were reportedly suffering from a mixture of terminal illnesses and disabilities, including anxiety and depression while they waited for their benefits to be paid.

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Amidst various sanctions by the United States, Russia might buy Bitcoins in the Billions as a way to mitigate these sanctions.

According to Vladislav Ginko who is a lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, the Russian government which sits on $466 Billion of reserves is planning to invest heavily into Bitcoin. He told Micky that he believes the government could start investing Billions in Bitcoin as early as next month which could potentially trigger a bull run.

Since 2012, the U.S has imposed over 60 rounds of sanctions against Kremlin, many of which do not have clear paths to get lifted. Sanctions are a way to achieve certain objectives (mostly political) in a nonviolent way, Russia certainly does not take this lightly and will try to mitigate these sanctions in any way possible.

Continue reading “Russia might Invest Billions into Bitcoin to Mitigate U.S Sanctions” | >

Measured against that boom—one of the most impressive periods of scientific achievement in human history—China’s new hardware, grand as it often is, falls a bit short. It has been catching up, not forging ahead. It has not been a beacon for scientists elsewhere. And far from benefiting from a culture of free inquiry, Chinese science takes place under the beady eye of a Communist Party and government which want the fruits of science but are not always comfortable about the untrammelled flow of information and the spirit of doubt and critical scepticism from which they normally grow.

The hypothesis that scientific greatness requires freedom of thought is about to be tested.

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Hacker attacks on everything from social media accounts to government files could be largely prevented by the advent of quantum communication, which would use particles of light called “photons” to secure information rather than a crackable code.

Using light to send information is a game of probability: Transmitting one bit of information can take multiple attempts. The more photons a light source can generate per second, the faster the rate of successful information transmission.

“A source might generate a lot of photons per second, but only a few of them may actually be used to transmit information, which strongly limits the speed of quantum communication,” Bogdanov said.

For faster quantum communication, Purdue researchers modified the way in which a light pulse from a laser beam excites electrons in a man-made “defect,” or local disturbance in a crystal lattice, and then how this defect emits one photon at a time.

Continue reading “Toward unhackable communication: Single particles of light could bring the ‘quantum internet’” | >

Scientists in India have hit out at speakers at a major conference for making irrational claims, including that ancient Hindus invented stem cell research.

Some academics at the annual Indian Science Congress dismissed the findings of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Hindu mythology and religion-based theories have increasingly become part of the Indian Science Congress agenda.

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It’s true that this was a horrible year for many of the tech industry’s biggest companies. Amazon held a nationwide beauty pageant for its new headquarters, raising hopes that the company would help transform a struggling city, then picked the two places that needed it the least. Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter got hauled before Congress to apologize for * gestures wildly in all directions*. One of Uber’s self-driving cars killed someone. And then there was Elon Musk.

But the tech sector is more than its giants.

Last year, I handed out “good tech” awards to a handful of companies, nonprofit organizations and people who used technology to help others in real, tangible ways. The goal was to shine a spotlight on a few less-heralded projects that may not get front-page headlines or billions of dollars in funding, but are actually trying to fulfill the tech industry’s stated goal of improving the world.

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Despite government shutdown?

A NASA spaceship is zooming toward the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever photographed by humankind, a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule some 6.4 billion kilometers away. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.

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