Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Drawing inspiration from the plant world, researchers have invented a new electrode that could boost our current solar energy storage by an astonishing 3,000 percent.

The technology is flexible and can be attached directly to solar cells — which means we could finally be one step closer to smartphones and laptops that draw their power from the Sun, and never run out.

A major problem with reliably using solar energy as a power source is finding an efficient way to store it for later use without leakage over time.

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Good Fellows is a series of short films that focus on the unique and human stories of IBM Fellows. To be named a Fellow is to achieve the highest honor bestowed by IBM to its most outstanding technical employees.

Chieko Asakawa has been blind since the age of fourteen and for the past three decades has worked to further accessibility research and development. She was named IBM Fellow in 2009 and in 2013, the government of Japan awarded the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon to Chieko for outstanding contributions to accessibility research.

Today she is working with Carnegie Mellon University to find out how accessibility technologies can play a key role in the real world to help create opportunities for more people to actively participate in the society. Learn more about her NavCog project: http://bit.ly/2nNjV94

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Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shows that AI doesn’t only learn from human knowledge, but also creates new knowledge. AlphaGo has it own creativity and intuition, inventing new knowledge and strategies about Go Game for human professionals to study in 2017.

Go game was invented in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago, is an abstract strategy board game, aiming to surround more territory than the opponent for two players. It is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played today. Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is very complex, even more so than chess, and possesses more possibilities than the total number of atoms in the visible universe. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move.

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At the Woodside operated Natural Gas Plant in Karratha, Western Australia, employees often work in challenging conditions. IBM Watson is making things a little easier, by allowing employees to ask technical questions via their tablets or computers. Watson has been trained with expert knowledge from thousands of employees, and can help provide project-related answers in minutes, instead of hours. Now if only he could do something about the 40-degrees Celsius average outside temperature.

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Last October we started recruiting regional coordinators. These are individuals, organisations and groups of people who coordinate Asteroid Day activities in their own regions. As of today (April 16, 2017) we have over 187 coordinators across 114 countries. That is a fantastic achievement and I am very proud of the work these coordinators do every day. We have a dedicated email group and we meet once a week via teleconference to keep each other updated.

There are still quite a few regions where we need coordinators. Below is a list. If you are interested in this position or know someone who would be perfect for this role then please send an email to [email protected].

HERE is our Coordinator Guide which details the work our coordinators do.

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Decentralization of technology and ever cheaper electronics and materials will also bring more risks. Not to mention the serious risks of terrorism.

Here is a less harmful example of what decentralized tech can do.

Using computers they’d built out of discarded electronics and hidden in a closet ceiling, two inmates in an Ohio prison hacked the facility’s network, downloaded porn, and applied for credit cards with stolen information, according to a report released Tuesday (April 11) by Ohio’s inspector general’s office.

The computers were discovered in 2015 after the IT department at the Marion Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison, noticed that a computer on the network had exceeded its daily usage limit. Alerts indicated that the computer had attempted to hack through the network’s controls, but was unsuccessful.

Continue reading “Two Ohio inmates hacked their prison from the inside using makeshift computers built from spare parts” | >