Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Scientists in the UK have invented a new type of touchscreen material that requires very little power to illuminate, offering up a cheap alternative to today’s smartphone and tablet screens, with vivid colours and high visibility in direct sunlight.

The team is already in talks with some of the world’s largest consumer electronics corporations to see if their new material can replace current LCD touchscreens in the next couple of years, which could spell the end for daily smartphone charging. “We can create an entire new market,” one of the researchers, Peiman Hosseini, told The Telegraph. “You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that didn’t need much power, you could recharge it just once a week.”

Developed by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, the new display is reportedly made from a type of phase-change material called germanium-antimony-tellurium, or GST. The researchers are being understandably cagey about exactly how it’s made as they shop the technology around, but it’s based on a paper they published last year describing how a rigid or flexible display can be formed from microscopic ‘stacks’ of GST and electrode layers.

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Samsung on Thursday revealed it is now mass producing memory modules boasting the largest capacity and the highest energy efficiency of any DRAM module. The 128GB DDR4 sticks in question were made possible by utilizing the through silicon via (TSV) interconnect technique.

Foregoing traditional wire bonding, the TSV technique involves grinding chips down to a few dozen micrometers, piercing them with hundreds of tiny holes and vertically connecting them with electrodes passing through the holes. Although not new, the advanced circuitry does allow for a significant boost in signal transmission.

The 128GB modules are comprised of 144 DDR4 chips arranged into 4GB DRAM packages (18 per side for a total of 36), each containing four 20nm 8Gb chips. Samsung says the modules have a special design in which the master chip of each 4GB package embeds the data buffer function, further optimizing performance and power consumption.

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When Holly Brockwell wrote about the fact that she doesn’t want to have children, she knew her stance was controversial. But she never expected the sheer volume of backlash and abuse that would force her offline.

After 36 hours, she’s back online and set on fighting the trolls for her right — for all women’s rights — to express their opinions without fear. 👊

The 29-year-old, who is founder of the women’s tech and lifestyle site Gadgette, was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece about her — clearly divisive — stance on reproduction as part of their ‘100 Women 2015’ series.

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A spokesperson from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has confirmed that Apple has acquired face motion capture software developer Faceshift, TechCrunch reports. Though Apple hasn’t disclosed its strategic objectives, it seems likely that Faceshift’s technology can enhance several Apple products.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” was Apple’s stock comment. However, the previously rumored acquisition has been confirmed, and it appears that several Faceshift employees are now working for Apple.

Note: You might be interested in ‘10 reasons why Apple stock is underpriced’

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There are probably plenty of things that frustrate you about air travel, but waiting to take off or disembark is probably high on your list. Why should you have to board well before the plane is ready to get moving? Airbus might have a way to cut that idle time to near zero, though: it recently received a patent for a detachable passenger cabin that would lift into the airport gate. Your aircraft would only show up when it’s actually ready to go, and would spend far less time on the ground as a whole (as it’s just swapping cabin pods). It could also eliminate the convoluted boarding process, since you could take your seat right away instead of forming a queue in the terminal.

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Well if we do have a major SHTF event even though we don’t have many skilled tool makers any more. Then at least the remains of society should be able to teach itself tool making.

A new study from the University of Exeter has found that teaching is not essential for people to learn to make effective tools. The results counter established views about how human tools and technologies come to improve from generation to generation and point to an explanation for the extraordinary success of humans as a species. The study reveals that although teaching is useful, it is not essential for cultural progress because people can use reasoning and reverse engineering of existing items to work out how to make tools.

The capacity to improve the efficacy of tools and technologies from generation to generation, known as cumulative culture, is unique to humans and has driven our ecological success. It has enabled us to inhabit the coldest and most remote regions on Earth and even have a permanent base in space. The way in which our cumulative culture has boomed compared to other species however remains a mystery.

It had long been thought that the human capacity for cumulative culture was down to special methods of learning from others — such as and imitation — that enable information to be transmitted with high fidelity.

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