Readers who visit the Chicago Sun-Times today will notice something they aren’t likely to have seen before: a bitcoin paywall separating them from their content.
The Chicago Sun-Times is the ninth-largest newspaper in the United States, and the first major US publication to trial a bitcoin paywall.
Instead of paying for a subscription, as patrons of the The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times do, Chicago Sun-Times readers who visit the site on 1st February will be asked to donate bitcoin payments to the Taproot Foundation, or tweet about the nonprofit, in order to read articles.
Known as bioprinting, the medical application of 3D printing to produce living tissue and organs is advancing at such a rate, a major ethical debate on its use is likely to ignite by 2016.
In August last year the Hangzhou Dianzi University in China announced it had created biomaterial 3D printer Regenovo, which printed a small working kidney that lasted four months. Earlier in 2013, a two-year-old child in the US received a windpipe built with her own stem cells. Read more
QUOTATION: “…Digital code is what drives rapid speed growth today. It allows mergers like AOL Time Warner … It drives the Internet, TV, music, finance, IT, news coverage, research, manufacturing. A few countries and companies understood the change. That is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan got so wealthy … So quickly … But a lot of folks just did not learn to read and write a new language … And even though they produced more and more goods, particularly commodities … And even though they restructured companies and governments … Cut budgets, raised taxes, built large factories and buildings … They got a lot poorer. (In 1938 the richest country per person in Asia was … the Philippines. In 1954, according to the World Bank, the most promising Asian economy was … Burma. Both remain commodity economies … Both are sidelined from the digital revolution … And you probably would not like to live in either country). Your world changed when you went ‘On Line.’ One day you used a fax or e-mail … And it soon became hard to conceive of living with only snail mail. If you understood this change early … And invested or worked in some of the companies driving the digital revolution … You are probably quite well off … (as a country and/or as an individual). If you came late, as a speculator, without understanding what a digital language does, or does not do … You probably lost a lot of money during the year 2000. Your world … and your language … are about to change again. The two nucleotide base pairs that code all life …A-T, C-G … Have already led some of the world’s largest companies … Monsanto … DuPont … Novartis … IBM … Hoechst … Compaq … GlaxoSmithKline … To declare that their future lies in life science. They have abandoned, sold, spun off core business divisions … And launched themselves into selling completely new products … Which is why so many chemical, seed, cosmetic, food, pharmaceutical companies … Are partnering, Merging, Growing. Some life-science companies will crash spectacularly … Others will get larger than Microsoft and Cisco … (Companies that are already larger than the economies of most of the world’s countries.). The world’s mega-mergers are going to be driven by digital and genetic code. Consider what is about to happen to medicine. You currently spend about nine times as much for doctors and medical interventions … As you do on medicines and prevention. In the measure that we understand how viruses, bacteria, and our bodies are programmed … And how they can be reprogrammed … Treatment will shift from emergency interventions … Toward deliberate and personalized prevention … (Just as dentistry did.). And we may end up spending just as much on pharmaceuticals as we do on doctors. These medicines do not have to be pills or injections … They could be a part of the food you eat every day, your soap or cosmetics … Perhaps you will inhale them or simply put various patches on your skin. (This is why Procter & Gamble is thinking of merging with a pharmaceutical company, why L’Oreal is hiring molecular biologists, and why Campbell’s is selling soups designed for hospital patients with specific diseases.)…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler ISBN-13: 978–0385522076
A Perspective on Artificial Intelligence: The Machine-Reading Revolution is Coming http://www.atomrain.com/it/
DAILY QUOTE: “…In summary, the future is a phenomenon that will be completely real someday even though it does not exist today .… Even if the future is approximately equal to today, it will also differ dramatically from today in many particular ways…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK:
Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler
The development of artificial intelligence — thrown into spotlight this week after Google spent hundreds of millions on new technology — could mean computers take over human jobs at a faster rate than new roles can be created, experts have warned Artificial intelligence could lead to mass unemployment if computers develop the capacity to take over human work, experts warned days after it emerged that Google had beat competitors to buy a firm specialising in this kind of technology.
Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, gave the stark warning after it emerged that Google had paid £400m for the British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind.
Do you want to fly on a suborbital space plane? What about a rocket launch all they way into orbit? A new commercial spaceflight training company wants to help you develop the right stuff for flying to space. Waypoint 2 Space — a Houston-based company aimed at helping commercial astronauts train for spaceflight — just received Federal Aviation Administration safety approval for their plan to train would-be astronauts. Officials with the company hope to start training commercial spaceflyers for private trips to space in spring of this year. People holding tickets aboard a private spacecraft or space fans interested in learning how to fly to space are eligible to purchase a training package.
Edible meat from a petri dish is just one of the many innovations from Singularity University in Silicon Valley. The WSJ’s Deborah Kan talks with Singularity CEO Rob Nail about his goal of affecting a billion people within 10 years.
DAILY QUOTE: By Michael Anissimov utters, “…One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK:
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau ISBN-13: 978–0767915038
We here at Digital Trends are big fans of 3D printing. Like so many others, we see it as one of the most potentially disruptive technologies currently on the market – something that could substantially change the way we shop, work, and create. Problem is, at the moment, consumer-level 3D printers are mostly an expensive way to make cheap plastic trinkets.
Of course, that will soon change – perhaps sooner than you think. This week, newly launched startup MarkForged announced the world’s first 3D printer capable of printing objects in carbon fiber, the super-strong and lightweight material. Dubbed the Mark One, the 3D printer also prints in fiberglass, nylon, and PLA (the common plastic filament used by many 3D printers).
