Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Y Combinator, a seed accelerator and startup incubator, plans to inaugurate a short-term “universal basic income” experiment in Oakland, California; it’s a first step toward a larger, projected five-year study of the guaranteed cost-of-living salary.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “basic income”—the notion of a guaranteed financial disbursement to every human being simply for being alive.

It’s an idea that has garnered a great deal of support in certain circles, for obvious reasons (free money); however, many see it as the natural progression of society…as the only viable way of dealing with issues like increased automation, poverty, etc. Indeed, many see in a universal basic income (UBI) an instrument of liberty, and an effective tool for combating the threats of social unrest, economic dislocation, and various other forms of civil strife that are often the corollaries of unemployment.

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A team out of Waseda University in Japan has unveiled some pretty cool images from the first half of the 20th century, given new depth with full colorization thanks to an artificial intelligence.

Unlike colorizing black and white photos using software, which can be a lengthy process of repeated cleaning and coloring – this AI samples similar photos and applies those colors and tones to the photo at hand. So, for example, if you have an old black and white photo of your grandparent’s house – and that house is still standing today – you can take a photo of it and the AI will learn how to color the old photo based on the tones and levels from the modern day one.

Similarly, if you have an old photo of an area or people that don’t exist, the program can still learn and adapt those colors from similarly colored images. The more photos and images it has to pull from, the greater detail and true to color matching it will be able to provide.

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Intel is in the midst of its biggest business transition ever. Just a few months ago, the chip giant announced that it would be laying off 11,000 workers and taking a step away from the PC market. Instead, it’ll be focusing on wearables and IoT devices. Coinciding with those announcements was an executive shuffle that put Navin Shenoy, its Mobile Client VP, in charge of its wider Client Computing Group (which covers all consumer devices). At Computex this week, we had a chance to pick Shenoy’s brain about Intel’s path forward.

Taiwan Computex

What do you envision being the next major breakthrough for PC form factor?

We’re working on lots of things that are mind-blowing. To me, we have to figure out how to get to J.A.R.V.I.S. [Iron Man’s trusty AI, not Intel’s vaporware earpiece]. The ability to manipulate things wherever you are, look at things wherever you are, talk to things in a more natural way. That’s the next big breakthrough in computing. And it will be in so many domains, it won’t just be PCs. It’ll be phones, tablets and also new types of things we haven’t conceived of yet.

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Another reliable article on the Quantum Internet work.

You can’t sign up for the quantum internet just yet, but researchers have reported a major experimental milestone towards building a global quantum network — and it’s happening in space.

With a network that carries information in the properties of single particles, you can create secure keys for secret messaging and potentially connect powerful quantum computers in the future. But scientists think you will need equipment in space to get global reach.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Strathclyde, UK, have become the first to test in orbit technology for satellite-based quantum network nodes.

Continue reading “Quantum satellite device tests technology for global quantum network” | >

A quantum node device that might pave the way for a future space-based quantum Internet has been successfully tested for the first time aboard a small satellite.

The device, called SPEQS, has been developed by a team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Glasgow-based University of Strathclyde. It contains technology for creation of the so-called correlated photons, which are a precursor for the better known entangled photons that communicate across large distances.

In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Applied, the team led by NUS researcher Alexander Ling described first result of the experiment, which saw the SPEQS system reliably creating and measuring pairs of photons with correlated properties.

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A group of more than 2,000 physicians is calling for the establishment of a universal government-run health system in the US, in a paper in the American Journal of Public Health.

According to the proposal released Thursday, the Affordable Care Act did not go far enough in removing barriers to healthcare access. The physicians’ bold plan calls for implementing a single-payer system similar to Canada’s, called the National Health Program, that would guarantee all residents healthcare.

The new single-payer system would be funded mostly by existing US government funding. The physicians point out that the US government already pays for two-thirds of all healthcare spending in the US, and a single-payer system would cut down on administrative costs, so a transition to a single-payer system would not require significant additional spending.

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Also, here is Eros compared to Lake Tahoe:

http://www.erosproject.com/erosfact.html?source=ErosProject

And I have to mention though I cannot find the proper link, there is at least one burnt out comet head that is a Near Earth body who’s water content has been compared to Lake Tahoe.

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission has had its funding cut. Here’s why politicians should think again.

Continue reading “How to capture an asteroid – and why we should go to such trouble” | >