Lifeboat Foundation

In Brief

• A new phone concept designed by Philippe Starck and Jerome Olivet is a voice activated, gelatinous, transparent futuristic vision of where smartphones could go.
• Continuing with the trend of subtracting hardware, the phone contains no screen but will be capable of projecting 3D holograms.

The words gelatinous and smartphone might not seem like they belong in the same sentence together. In fact, they barely belong in the same dictionary together. But the Alo smartphone, an unfinished, unreleased technology, is described as a gelatinous, ergonomically shaped to fit the hand well, voice-activated and controlled smartphone. Designed by Jerome Olivet and Phillippe Starck, this design promises to be the future of smartphone technology.

This phone is unlike any current model, and its most notable feature (that we know of yet) is that it will be able to project holograms. Yes, you read that right. Any messages, photographs, or even movies would be able to be viewed as 3D holograms. And while an entirely voice-controlled smartphone might seem a little bit strange and difficult to use, it is supposedly designed to be remarkably user-friendly.

Continue reading “Could This Weird, Gelatinous Gadget be the Phone of the Future?” »

The delivery company is using drones to complement trucks, not replace them.

“The Pitch,” a podcast which launched its second season in January, aims to deliver a more realistic version of “Shark Tank.”

A major medical organization has endorsed human genetic modification for the first time. THe panel suggested that trials be limited at the moment.

Three months ago, Google announced it would in early 2017 launch support for high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) for machine learning and other specialized workloads. It’s now early 2017 and, true to its word, Google today officially made GPUs on the Google Cloud Platform available to developers. As expected, these are Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs, and developers will be able to attach up to eight of these to any custom Compute Engine machine.

These new GPU-based virtual machines are available in three Google data centers: us-east1, asia-east1 and europe-west1. Every K80 core features 2,496 of Nvidia’s stream processors with 12 GB of GDDR5 memory (the K80 board features two cores and 24 GB of RAM).

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Self-driving cars are about to face their toughest test.

This might be the only notebook you’ll ever need.

Fisher envisions an 80-story, 1,273-foot tower in Dubai with floors that can rotate 360 degrees in both directions. He said he got the idea for a rotating tower that continuously changes shape more than a decade ago while staring out of the Olympic Tower in New York.

“I noticed that from a certain spot you could see the East River and the Hudson River, both sides of Manhattan,” he said on Dynamic Architecture’s website. “That is when I thought to myself: ‘Why don’t we rotate the entire floor? That way, everybody can see both the East River and the Hudson River, as well as Saint Patrick’s Cathedral!’”

Continue reading “World’s first rotating, shape-shifting tower planned for Dubai” »

Mathematics professor Po-Shen Loh has created Expii, a free education tool that democratizes learning by turning your smartphone into a tutor.