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Feb 21, 2018

A Computer Glitch Let a Trader Claim $20 Trillion in Free Bitcoin

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, computing

Computing error lets people grab Bitcoin tokens for $0 on Japan’s Zaif exchange.

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Feb 21, 2018

Dev Report: IBM & Unity Partner to Offer AI Tool That Could Make Augmented Reality Apps Smarter

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, robotics/AI, space

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6WRNqdOMXmc

This month, the power of artificial intelligence will be coming to more augmented reality developers as a leader in the game and 3D software development space and a major force behind the current school of cloud-based AI have officially announced a new partnership.

In a post on Unity’s website on Tuesday, the company revealed a partnership with computing giant IBM to launch the IBM Watson Unity SDK. This programming interface will open up new cloud-based AI services for developers to use in their applications. And, with AR and AI having become increasingly intertwined technologies, this is only good news for AR developers.

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Feb 21, 2018

He Took a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up His New Camera

Posted by in categories: cosmology, electronics

Astronomers rarely see the beginnings of these explosions, but an Argentine amateur’s lucky picture helped them study the start of a massive star’s violent death.

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Feb 21, 2018

Step Inside the World of Transhumanism, Where Death Is Only Temporary

Posted by in categories: life extension, transhumanism

Fascinating!


Transhumanists believe in a future of human immortality. A community in Russia is working to make it happen.

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Feb 21, 2018

Astronomers Just Found Some of The Most Massive Black Holes Discovered in Our Universe

Posted by in categories: cosmology, evolution, physics

A study on dozens of galaxies within several billion light years of our own has revealed black holes that far exceed our expectations on just how big these monsters can grow.

The discovery not only helps us better understand the evolution of our Universe’s building blocks, it leaves us with a new intriguing question – just how do black holes like these get to be so incredibly massive?

By now, the collapsed cores of massive stars known as black holes need no introduction. We’ve heard about their cosmic crashes rippling space-time, watched them belch, and expect to capture the closest look yet at their nature very soon.

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Feb 21, 2018

You’ll want to keep an eye on these 10 breakthrough technologies this year

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

Dueling neural networks. Artificial embryos. AI in the cloud. Welcome to our annual list of the 10 technology advances we think will shape the way we work and live now and for years to come.

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Feb 21, 2018

DNA data storage system is on the rise — find out how to store yours

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, media & arts

Scientists from the University of Washington and Microsoft are improving their system for preserving digital data in strands of synthetic DNA — and they’re giving you the chance to participate.

The UW-Microsoft team laid out the method in a research paper published this week in Nature Biotechnology.

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Feb 21, 2018

AI being used for ‘malicious purposes’, warn experts

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, drones, military, robotics/AI

From healthcare to warfare, machine-based thinking is revolutionising the way we live, exposing us to the benefits and the risks. Twenty-six world experts in emerging technologies say cybercrime will grow and drones will be misused in the next decade.

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Feb 21, 2018

Will We Ever Be Able to Upload a Mind to a New Body?

Posted by in categories: mapping, neuroscience, robotics/AI

The Netflix series takes place hundreds of years in the future, but references versions of technology that have been in development for years, like brain mapping, human and AI neural links, and mind uploading to computers. Millions of dollars has been bumped into technological ideas that promise, one day, our brains will be turned digital. That said, there are those who believe the human mind is too complex, and our consciousness too nuanced, to be recreated in a digital product. And none of that even goes into what would happen if someone’s digitized mind was placed into real human flesh.

Will we ever be able to upload our minds into other bodies? Furthermore, should we? And honestly, if we ever achieved such a feat, could we even call ourselves human anymore? On this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to experts in neuroscience, philosophy and futurism.

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Feb 20, 2018

Using a laser to wirelessly charge a smartphone safely across a room

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering, mobile phones, wearables

Although mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones let us communicate, work and access information wirelessly, their batteries must still be charged by plugging them in to an outlet. But engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time developed a method to safely charge a smartphone wirelessly using a laser.

As the team reports in a paper published online in December in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable & Ubiquitous Technologies, a narrow, invisible beam from a laser emitter can deliver charge to a sitting across a room — and can potentially charge a smartphone as quickly as a standard USB cable. To accomplish this, the team mounted a thin power cell to the back of a smartphone, which charges the smartphone using power from the laser. In addition, the team custom-designed safety features — including a metal, flat-plate heatsink on the smartphone to dissipate from the laser, as well as a reflector-based mechanism to shut off the laser if a person tries to move in the charging beam’s path.

“Safety was our focus in designing this system,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “We have designed, constructed and tested this laser-based charging system with a rapid-response safety mechanism, which ensures that the laser emitter will terminate the charging beam before a person comes into the path of the laser.”

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