Lifeboat Foundation

A group of PhD students from the MIT Media Lab and researchers from Microsoft Research have come up with the ultimate wearable: a temporary tattoo that can turn into a touchpad, remotely control your smartphone, or share data using NFC.

The technology, which is described on MIT’s website and will be presented in full at a wearables symposium next month, is called DuoSkin. The researchers say you can design a circuit using any graphic software, stamp out the tattoo in gold leaf (which is conductive to electricity), and then apply other commodity materials and components that would make the tattoo interactive.

The paper presents three key use cases for the tattoo: you could use it to turn your skin into a trackpad, design it to change color based on temperature, or pull data from the tattoo. In one photo shared by MIT the tattoo even includes LED lights, creating a kind of glowing display on the skin.

Continue reading “MIT and Microsoft Research made a ‘smart’ tattoo that remotely controls your phone” »

A single gram of DNA can hold unimaginable amounts of data. Say hello to genetic storage.

If you’re interested in one day creating your own eco-house using open source tech, this kit is great place to start:

Picture this: you own a small piece of land. Nothing fancy — just a small plot. A group of people shows up, sets up a workshop in your shed, and within five days, using materials available at your local hardware store or made from the raw resources of your land, builds you a small starter house kitted out with state-of-the-art eco features for less than $25,000.

Sound crazy? Well, open source advocate and maker Catarina Mota and inventor Marcin Jakubowski (see their TED Talks, “Play with smart materials” and “Open-sourced blueprints for civilization,” respectively), are making the dream of accessible, affordable eco-housing come true with their Open Building Institute Eco-Building Toolkit. They’ve already built several prototypes and tested the concept through a series of educational builds.

Continue reading “How to Build Your Own Starter House in Just 5 Steps — for $25,000” »

Classic tv will never be the same.

Remember that amazing automatic colorizing algorithm we told you about back in March? It was just put to an interesting test. As a fun “what if?” hobbyist Amir Avni tried the neural network-powered colorizer on a B&W video.

Continue reading “Automatic Colorizing Bot Tries to Colorize a Black and White Video” »

Stanford computer science student Joshua Browder, whose DoNotPay bot helps you fight parking tickets in London and New York (it’s estimated to have overturned $4M in tickets to date) has a new bot in the offing: a chatbot that helps newly homeless people in the UK create and optimise their applications for benefits.

Report this ad.

In austerity-wracked Britain, where the Tories have made things easier than they’ve ever been for landlords and harder than they’ve ever been for workers, repossessions and evictions are at an all-time high. So Browder — who was born in the UK — decided to add a homelessness navigation aid to his bot, which had already been expanded to handle fight-delay reimbursement applications. He’s also researching adding New York City homelessness form-completing to the bot’s repertoire.

They have been warned in the past; and chose to ignore. Bot operated company gets hacked.

A funny thing happened on the way to a post-capitalist, crypto-anarchist utopia.

Its super train.

Beijing: China on Monday began operating its indigenously designed bullet trains which can clock 350 kmph speed, the country’s first passenger train using Electric Multiple Units technology.

The China Railway Corporation announced that Train No G8041 departed from Dalian for Shenyang, capital of northeast China’s Liaoning.

Continue reading “China begins operating bullet trains at 350 kmph speed” »

Watson joins China’s research team.

China’s Hangzhou Cognitive Care has teamed up with IBM to bring Watson super computer to 21 hospitals in the country.

Singapore: In a bid to intensify its fight against cancer, China’s Hangzhou Cognitive Care has teamed up with IBM to bring Watson super computer to 21 hospitals in the country. The super computer is all set to play a crucial role in a new multi-year program being unveiled in China. This is IBM’s first partnership in China’s healthcare sector.

Continue reading “IBM’s foray into Chinese healthcare sector” »

A day in the life of an NSA Hacker.

In what Edward Snowden deems “not unprecedented,” hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers have collected NSA-created malware from a staging server run by the Equation Group, an internal hacking team. The Shadow Brokers published two chunks of data, one “open” chunk and another encrypted file containing the “best files” that they will sell for at least $1 million. Wikileaks has said they already own the “auction” files and will publish them in “due course.”

They’ve also released images of the file tree containing a script kiddie-like trove of exploits ostensibly created and used by the NSA as well as a page calling out cyber warriors and “Wealthy Elites.” The page also contains links to the two files, both encrypted. You can grab them using BitTorrent here.

Continue reading “Everything you need to know about the NSA hack (but were afraid to Google)” »