Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10875

With the exception of activity trackers and smartwatches, it’s fair to say that wearable technology hasn’t really taken off just yet, but if Google and Levi’s have their way, that could soon be about to change.

The two companies are teaming up to release their first co-designed product – the world’s first ‘smart’ trucker jacket (yep, that’s a thing now). It looks for the most part like a regular Levi’s Commuter jacket, but with a conductive fabric called “interactive denim” and a Bluetooth device that attaches to the sleeve.

It was back in 2015 that Google first announced its plan to make connected clothing like this – dubbed Project Jacquard – and the Levi’s jacket will be the first garment incorporating the technology.

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“This march of machines is still pulse quickening” (The Guardian)

“AMC’s AI series continues to expand and redefine the genre in dramatically creative and human ways” (The Hollywood Reporter)

“Humans is the most compelling, emotionally resonant robot-centric show on television.” (Vulture)

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Don’t expect it to go up anytime soon, but a New York City-based design firm has floated a mind-bending plan for the erection of a skyscraper it bills as “the world’s tallest building ever.”

Dubbed Analemma, the fanciful tower wouldn’t be built on the ground, but suspended in air by cables from an asteroid repositioned into geosynchronous Earth orbit just for the purpose.

Related: NASA’s Bold Plan to Save Earth From Killer Asteroids.

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For most of us, listening to music, reading a good book, or talking to a friend on the phone are all great ways to wind down. But for someone with synesthesia, activities like those take on another dimension. Synesthetes, as they’re called, experience a blending of two or more senses so that music may have flavor, words may show up in imaginary colors, or voices may elicit different tactile sensations. Scientists don’t yet understand the root causes of this real-life superpower, but what they’re discovering so far is exciting.

Related: What Is ASMR, And Why Does It Make You Tingle?

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A webpage today is often the sum of many different components. A user’s home page on a social-networking site, for instance, might display the latest posts from the users’ friends; the associated images, links, and comments; notifications of pending messages and comments on the user’s own posts; a list of events; a list of topics currently driving online discussions; a list of games, some of which are flagged to indicate that it’s the user’s turn; and of course the all-important ads, which the site depends on for revenues.

With increasing frequency, each of those components is handled by a different program running on a different server in the website’s data center. That reduces processing time, but it exacerbates another problem: the equitable allocation of network bandwidth among programs.

Many websites aggregate all of a page’s components before shipping them to the user. So if just one program has been allocated too little bandwidth on the data center network, the rest of the page—and the user—could be stuck waiting for its component.

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