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Dec 4, 2013

Virgin’s space passengers can pay with Bitcoin

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, fun, space, transportation

richard branson virgin galactic

Good news, future space travelers: Now you can enter the void without bringing your wallet.

U.K. business magnate Richard Branson announced Friday that his commercial space travel venture, Virgin Galactic, will allow customers to pay for their flights with the digital currency Bitcoin.

“Virgin Galactic is a company looking into the future, so is Bitcoin. So it makes sense we would offer Bitcoin as a way to pay for your journey to space.” Branson wrote in a blog post.

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Dec 2, 2013

Predictive Analytics is the Next Growing Sector in Big Data Market

Posted by in categories: big data, complex systems

By On November 30, 2013

The theme of Big Data has spawned a tremendous amount of attention and investor interest in recent years. While much of the big data hype has focused on the storage, structured and unstructured processing technologies, London based investment bank GP Bullhound predicted that some of the most exciting developments are in the fields of Predictive Analytics and Advanced Visualization.

The “Exabyte Research Report” of the international tech investment bank GP Bullhound shows why the investment activities currently skyrocket. Based on over 30 interviews with technology providers, investors and customers, the study shed light on developments in the Big Data market. As per report, big data has already furnished $1.4 billion worth of investment over the last 12 months and has been able to achieve revenue of more than 200 per cent last year.

A large chunk of progress is coming from processing information and using analytics. The report said over 17 percent of information processing individuals eventually use big data analytics and the number is expected to progress to over one third of information workers by 2016.

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Dec 2, 2013

The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, posthumanism, transhumanism

The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg

Annalee Newitz on io9

Neil Harbisson is the first person on the planet to have a passport photo that shows his cyborg nature — in his UK passport, he’s wearing a head-mounted device called an eyeborg. The color-blind artist says the eyeborg allows him to see color, and he wants to help other cyborgs like himself gain more rights.

Anyone who has ever gotten a passport photo knows Harbisson has accomplished something that once seemed bureaucratically impossible. Other people with cyborg headgear, like Steve Mann, have had their gear forcibly removed and been refused entrance into buildings for wearing devices on their heads. But with a passport photo that shows the eyeborg as part of Harbisson’s face, somebody trying to rip his augmentation off would be committing a violent crime equivalent to injuring his face.

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Dec 2, 2013

Boardroom lies, bedroom truths may come from augmented reality-artificial intelligence partnership

Posted by in category: augmented reality
Michael del Castillo
Upstart Business Journal Technology & Innovation Editor

The UpTake: Enon Landenberg is taking augmented reality into uncharted territory by integrating it with artificial intelligence.

Augmented reality took another step towards being something more than just a gimmick with today’s announcement that Infinity AR has partnered with Beyond Verbal, an Israeli startup that decodes and measures human emotions in voice.

“Augmented reality is the front end. It’s just presentation,” said Infinity AR founder Enon Landenberg in an interview with Upstart Business Journal. But this new partnership, according to Landenberg, will enable users to determine if a potential investor is lying during a business meeting, or if a romantic interest means it when she tells you she’ll call later.

“We don’t need to develop tone recognition,” he said. “We take it from Beyond Verbal.”

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Dec 2, 2013

The secret Hong Kong facility that uses boiling goo to mine Bitcoins

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, economics, engineering

By Rich McCormick on

http://cdn1.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/9508155/bitcoin9_large_verge_medium_landscape.jpg

A single bitcoin is now worth over $1,000, but the process of mining for the digital currency — in which people devote computing power to facilitate global Bitcoin transactions and secure the currency’s network — is growing increasingly expensive. Serious miners have started to build dedicated facilities for the sole purpose of Bitcoin mining. Journalist Xiaogang Cao visited one such center in Hong Kong, the “secret mining facility” of ASICMINER, reportedly located in a Kwai Chung industrial building.

The mine is the size of a shipping container, and filled with 1-meter-high glass tanks in which banks of blades are immersed in roiling liquid. Each tank can hold 92 blades; the blades themselves are kept at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius or below by “open bath immersion” technology. Open bath immersion cools computer components by submersing them in liquid with a particularly low boiling point. The heat the components generate mining for coins boils the liquid, causing it to turn gaseous, rise up to a condenser at the top of the tank, and fall once again, removing heat from the components in the process. The ASICMINER open bath immersion system was reportedly built by Hong Kong-based company Allied Control, and operates at a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.02, which “would make it one of the most efficient designs in the world.”

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Dec 2, 2013

Law Banning 3D-Printed Guns Up for Crucial Vote

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, defense, engineering, government, law enforcement, open access, policy

3d-printed-gun

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking at a government function in July when a man sitting a few rows behind him pulled a Liberator, the infamous 3D-printed gun that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) recently defined as a “lethal weapon.”

The gun posed no real danger. The man bearing it was just a TV reporter trying to prove how easy it is to sneak a 3D-printed plastic gun past security checks that include metal detectors.

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Dec 2, 2013

Body piercing controls wheelchair

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, robotics/AI

Tongue piercing

Body piercings have been used to control wheelchairs and computers in a move scientists believe could transform the way people interact with the world after paralysis.

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Dec 2, 2013

Spoils of war: Police getting leftover Iraq trucks

Posted by in categories: government, law enforcement, policy, security


QUEENSBURY, N.Y. (AP) — Coming soon to your local sheriff: 18-ton, armor-protected military fighting vehicles with gun turrets and bulletproof glass that were once the U.S. answer to roadside bombs during the Iraq war.

The hulking vehicles, built for about $500,000 each at the height of the war, are among the biggest pieces of equipment that the Defense Department is giving to law enforcement agencies under a national military surplus program.

For police and sheriff’s departments, which have scooped up 165 of the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPS, since they became available this summer, the price and the ability to deliver shock and awe while serving warrants or dealing with hostage standoffs was just too good to pass up.

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Dec 2, 2013

Someday Your EV Charger May Be the Roadway Itself

Posted by in category: transportation

A researcher envisions the ultimate cure for “range anxiety”: roadway-powered vehicles with modified on-board power receivers.

One way to extend the range of electric vehicles may be to provide power wirelessly through coils placed under the surface of a road. But charging moving vehicles with high-power wireless chargers below them is complex.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a way to deliver power to moving vehicles using simple electronic components, rather than the expensive power electronics or complex sensors previously employed. The system uses a specialized receiver that induces a burst of power only when a vehicle passes over a wireless transmitter. Initial models indicate that placing charging coils in 10 percent of a roadway would extend the driving range of an EV from about 60 miles to 300 miles, says Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NCSU.

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Dec 2, 2013

Hair, bone and soft tissue regrown in mice by enhancing cell metabolism

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

By

November 11, 2013

Anyone who has left youth behind them knows that bumps and scrapes don’t heal as fast as they used to. But that could change with researchers at the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children’s Hospital finding a way to regrow hair, cartilage, bone, skin and other soft tissues in a mouse by reactivating a dormant gene called Lin28a. The discovery could lead to new treatments that provide adults with the regenerative powers they possessed when very young.

Lin28 is a gene that is abundant in embryonic stem cells and which functions in all organisms. It is thought to regulate the self-renewal of stem cells with the researchers finding that by promoting the production of certain enzymes in mitochondria, it enhances the metabolism of these cellular power plants that found in most of the cells of living organisms. In this way, Lin28 helps generate the energy needed to stimulate the growth of new tissues.

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