Lifeboat Foundation

Vicki Turk & Brian Anderson | Motherboard
“That’s another basic thing that the doom-and-gloom, death-is-preferable-to-the-future crowd seem to misunderstand. The world won’t just stay the same, with everyone trudging along in a state of boredom; it’ll keep changing. There’ll be new stuff to do because we’ll keep making new stuff. We’ll get those jetpacks we were promised, and that’s just the start.” Read more

Robert Szczerba | The Next Web
“The advancement of technology generally evokes a range of emotions in people from all walks of life. Some view technology as a great evil that slowly diminishes our humanity, while others view it as a way to bring the world closer together and to help solve some of our greatest challenges.” Read more

Steve Lohr | The New York Times

“The company and its partners say that technology, economics and policy changes are coming together to improve the odds of making the IBM venture a workable reality. They point to improvements in artificial intelligence, low-cost cloud computing and health policy that will reward keeping patients healthy instead of the fee-for-service model in which more treatments and procedures mean more revenue.” Read more

Angela Watercutter - Wired

As expected, writer/director J.J. Abrams didn’t show up empty-handed to Star Wars Celebration—and not just because he sent pizza to everyone waiting in line in Anaheim. He also came with a new teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Read more

Game-changing technologies can be a waste of money or a competitive advantage. It depends on the technology and the organization.

It seems like the term “game-changing” gets tossed around a lot lately. This is particularly true with respect to new technologies. But what does the term mean, what are the implications, and how can you measure it?

With regarding to what it means, I like the MacMillan dictionary definition for game-changing. It is defined as “Completely changing the way that something is done, thought about, or made.” The reason I like this definition is it captures the transformational nature of what springs to mind when I hear the term game-changing. This should be just what it says. Not just a whole new ball game, but a whole new type of game entirely.

Every industry is unique. What is a game-changer for one, might only be a minor disruption or improvement for another. For example, the internal combustion engine was a game-changer for the transportation industry. It was important, though less of a game-changer for the asphalt industry due to secondary effect of increased demand for paved roads.

Continue reading “Game-Changing Technologies” »

By Sarah Jenn — NewsBTC
In a step closer towards the institutionalization of bitcoin trading, a New York firm announced that it is expanding its operations to include trading in blocks of bitcoin. Genesis Trading, a division of SecondMarket, says that it is currently the only licensed broker-dealer that offers this service.

Genesis is now specializing its operations to focus on bitcoin trading with its own team of traders and support staff. According to its Chief Executive Brendan O’Connor, their plan is to generate business from the hedge funds and private investors who have shown an interest in the cryptocurrency. Read more

By Jason Dorrier — SingularityHub

Our smartphones can do a lot—compute, pin down our location, sense motion and orientation, send and receive wireless signals, take photographs and video. What if you could also learn exactly what chemical components were present in any object? A new invention out of Israel aims to enable just that.

“The tricorder is no longer science fiction,” a recent Tel Aviv University (TAU) article declared. While a number devices in recent years have inspired similar comparisons, maybe this one is a little closer. Read more

By Katie Peek — Popular Science
As you fall feet first across an event horizon—the point where nothing can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull—you don’t feel anything change. But eventually, gravity is so much stronger at your feet than your head that you’re stretched apart, like Play-Doh, until you snap. Or at least, that’s the picture physicists drew after Einstein proposed his theory of general relativity in 1915. In the past few years, new possibilities for your untimely end have emerged.

The thought experiments attempt to resolve a paradox that physicist Stephen Hawking outlined in the 1970s. He showed that in their current forms, the two major pillars of physics—quantum mechanics and general relativity—can’t both be true near a black hole. General relativity governs how very massive objects work, while quantum mechanics governs how very tiny objects work. In most of the universe, physicists can choose which set of rules to apply—general relativity for a galaxy cluster, quantum mech­anics for a particle accelerator—but a black hole is both very massive and very small. Read more

Maddie Stone — Gizmodo

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how spider silk is this crazy wonder material that may soon find its way into everything from electronics to ultra-strong fabrics. Now, there’s another reason to be excited about spider silk: doctors might one day use the stuff to grow you a new heart.

Growing new organs and tissues outside the body is the bleeding edge of biomedical research. Just imagine: if doctors could grow replacement hearts or kidneys from a patient’s own stem cells, that patient would no longer have to face the agonizing prospect of waiting to find a suitable donor. The risk of organ rejection would become nil. But there’s a lot of R&D to be done before we get there. One initial challenge has been finding a scaffold material to grow organ tissues on—something that’s non-toxic, will not impede cell growth, and will not, itself, be rejected by the body. That, it turns out, is a pretty tall order. Read more