Lifeboat Foundation

Every modern economy wants its own version of Silicon Valley and in Japan the urge to find or create one is just as strong. Although the country’s pedigree as an innovator is not in doubt, rapidly adapting to the digital age has proven challenging for its once-mighty consumer electronics companies.

Fukuoka, Kyoto and Tokyo’s Shibuya district are all staking their claim.

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A UK supermarket has become the first in the world to let shoppers pay for groceries using just the veins in their fingertips.

Customers at the Costcutter store, at Brunel University in London, can now pay using their unique vein pattern to identify themselves.

The firm behind the technology, Sthaler, has said it is in “serious talks” with other major UK supermarkets to adopt hi-tech finger vein scanners at pay points across thousands of stores.

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A Sandia National Laboratories-led team has for the first time used optics rather than electronics to switch a nanometer-thick thin film device from completely dark to completely transparent, or light, at a speed of trillionths of a second.

The team led by principal investigator Igal Brener published a Nature Photonics paper this spring with collaborators at North Carolina State University. The paper describes work on optical information processing, such as switching or light polarization control using light as the control beam, at terahertz speeds, a rate much faster than what is achievable today by electronic means, and a smaller overall device size than other all-optical switching technologies.

Electrons spinning around inside devices like those used in telecommunications equipment have a speed limit due to a slow charging rate and poor heat dissipation, so if significantly faster operation is the goal, electrons might have to give way to photons.

Continue reading “Nanotechnology experts create first terahertz-speed polarization optical switch” »

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Moving PCB production in-house can save over 60% in prototyping time, produce better products, and greatly reduce the supply chain.

How will our relationship to technology evolve in the future? Will we regard it as something apart from ourselves, part of ourselves, or as a new area of evolution? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott explains that we are a part of a technological cosmos. Do you agree with Scott that technology is built into the universe, waiting to be discovered?

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Self Driving Cars and Ethics. It’s a topic that has been debated in blogs, op-eds, academic research papers, and youtube videos. Everyone wants to know, if a self-driving car has to choose between sacrificing its occupant, or terminating a car full of nobel prize winners, who will it pick? Will it be programmed to sacrifice for the greater good, or protect itself — and its occupants — at all costs? But in the swirl of hypothetical discussion around jaywalking Grandmas, buses full of school-children, Kantian Ethics and cost-maps, one crucial question is being forgotten:

What about the Squirrels?

Continue reading “Life or Death: Will Robo-Cars Swerve for Squirrels?” »

Plenty of companies are working on through-the-air charging for consumer electronics, but they face a lot of problems. One company believes it has licked all of these problems.