Lifeboat Foundation

New article on immigration and AI in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/donald-tr…automation #future

All of this could be under threat if we are to take some of the comments the Trump campaign made in the run-up to the election at face value. The outspoken candidate claimed that Mark Zuckerberg’s push for specialist H1B visas (the main visa used to hire foreign talent to tech companies) was a threat to jobs for American women and minorities. Meanwhile, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon suggested that Asians have too much power in Silicon Valley.

About a dozen members of Silicon Valley’s elite – including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg – will meet with Trump in New York. The meeting is likely to provide an opportunity for them to highlight their concerns and priorities with the incoming administration.

Continue reading “Trump to meet tech firms including Apple, Facebook and Google” »

A successful production trial by Australian battery technology innovator Nano-Nouvelle has proved its pioneering nanotechnology ­­­supports industrial-scale manufacture, with output rates 100 times faster.

The Sunshine Coast-based company is developing world-leading nanotechnology that can boost the energy storage capacity of lithium ion batteries by as much as 50 per cent. Lithium ion batteries are used in devices ranging from mobile phones and notebooks to and electric vehicles and home energy storage systems.

As well as proving its technology, Nano-Nouvelle has worked with companies worldwide to ensure its battery-boosting breakthrough is usable with today’s production lines.

The following press release was written and and published by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and originally published on their website. Click here to see the original version of this post.

On a recent sunny fall day in the nation’s capital, several hundred volunteers—each toting a backpack containing smartphone-sized radiation detectors—walked for hours around the National Mall searching for clues in a “whodunit” scavenger hunt to locate a geneticist who’d been mysteriously abducted. The geneticist and his abduction were fictitious. But the challenge this scavenger hunt was designed to address is real: The need to detect even small quantities of radioactive material that terrorists might try to bring into an urban area with the intent of detonating a “dirty bomb,” or worse. By getting volunteers to walk all day looking for clues, the DARPA-sponsored exercise provided the largest test yet of DARPA’s SIGMA program, which is developing networked sensors that can provide dynamic, real-time radiation detection over large urban areas.

Continue reading “Advanced Radioactive Threat Detection System Completes First Large-Scale Citywide Test” »

Ukrainian scientist Vladislav Kiselev claims that he has developed a type of battery that can power gadgets like smartphones and even cars for up to 12 years, without having to be recharged.

Kiselev, a senior researcher at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry and Petrochemistry in Kiev, and professor at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, unveiled his intriguing battery prototype during the 2016 edition of Sikorsky Challenge, a prestigious international competition for research projects. The matchbox-like device looks fairly unimpressive, but the Ukrainian scientist claims that it has been continuously powering electrical devices for a year and four months without a single recharge, and will continue to do so for the next 11 years. That’s because his “battery” produces energy instead of simply storing it.

But Westworld is more than just entertainment. It raises problems that society will have to face head-on as technology gets more powerful. Here are a couple of the biggest.

1. Can we treat robots with respect?

Westworld raises a moral question — at what point do we have to treat machines in a responsible manner? We’re used to dropping our smartphones on the ground without remorse and throwing our broken gadgets in the trash. We may have to think differently as machines show more human traits.

Continue reading “Westworld is raising some huge issues about our future” »

Lmao.

Fertility clinics probably aren’t the most comfortable places to “extract” sperm. I haven’t had the pleasure, but being handed a receptacle and led into a room with visual aids and hearing that door close behind you has to be a bit awkward. More awkward is the thought that everyone outside this room knows the dirty things I’m about to do to this cup in the name of science.

A new product, ‘YO Sperm Test,’ lets you skip all that. The at-home test kit uses a mini-microscope that clips on to your smartphone and allows you to not only test your sperm’s motility — the rate at which they move — and the count, but to view your little swimmers on the screen of your smart device.

Continue reading “This sperm test via smartphone proves there’s an app for everything” »

I could live with e-paper everything. I’m talking billboards, monitors, keyboards, remotes, watches, phones, and wallets. Yes, we now have an e-paper wallet called the Wonder Wallet. It just launched on Kickstarter. Why an e-paper wallet, you ask? Because e-paper looks cool and because on Kickstarter, anything can maybe become reality with your blind trust.

I don’t have many details on Wonder Wallet, but I do know that users can display an image on their wallet and that it connects to phones through Bluetooth. Do you really want to keep your phone connected to your wallet all day? That sounds like a battery drain to me. Oh yeah, you also have to charge the wallet, although it should last for around three days.

Continue reading “There’s E Ink everything now, even wallets” »

Illustration representing the novel design of a hybrid supercapacitor, showing bundles of nanowires (blue) coated with 2D energy-storage materials (yellow) (credit: University of Central Florida)

University of Central Florida researchers have developed a radical new supercapacitor design that could one day replace lithium-ion batteries, allowing users to charge a mobile phone in a few seconds and with a charge that lasts a week, according to the researchers. The new battery would be flexible and a fraction of the size of a lithium-ion battery.

The proof-of-concept design is based on a hybrid supercapacitor composed of a core with millions of highly conductive nanowires coated with shells of two-dimensional materials. It combines fast charging and discharging (high power density) and high storage capacity (high energy density).

Continue reading “Battery breakthrough charges in seconds, lasts for a week” »

If you want to use one of today’s major VR headsets, whether the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, or the PS VR, you have to accept the fact that there will be an illusion-shattering cable that tethers you to the small supercomputer that’s powering your virtual world.

But researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) may have a solution in MoVr, a wireless virtual reality system. Instead of using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to transmit data, the research team’s MoVR system uses high-frequency millimeter wave radio to stream data from a computer to a headset wirelessly at dramatically faster speeds than traditional technology.

There have been a variety of approaches to solving this problem already. Smartphone-based headsets such as Google’s Daydream View and Samsung’s Gear VR allow for untethered VR by simply offloading the computational work directly to a phone inside the headset. Or the entire idea of VR backpacks, which allow for a more mobile VR experience by building a computer that’s more easily carried. But there are still a lot of limitations to either of these solutions.

Continue reading “MIT’s new method of radio transmission could one day make wireless VR a reality” »