Lifeboat Foundation

Quoted: “Sometimes decentralization makes sense.

Filament is a startup that is taking two of the most overhyped ideas in the tech community—the block chain and the Internet of things—and applying them to the most boring problems the world has ever seen. Gathering data from farms, mines, oil platforms and other remote or highly secure places.

The combination could prove to be a powerful one because monitoring remote assets like oil wells or mining equipment is expensive whether you are using people driving around to manually check gear or trying to use sensitive electronic equipment and a pricey a satellite internet connection.

Instead Filament has built a rugged sensor package that it calls a Tap, and technology network that is the real secret sauce of the operation that allows its sensors to conduct business even when they aren’t actually connected to the internet. The company has attracted an array of investors who have put $5 million into the company, a graduate of the Techstars program. Bullpen Capital led the round with Verizon Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Samsung Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Haystack, Working Lab Capital, Techstars and others participating.

Continue reading “Blockchain for IoT? Yes!” »

Professor Kheifets and Dr. Igor Ivanov, from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering, and An international team of scientists studying ultrafast physics have solved a mystery of quantum mechanics, and found that quantum tunneling is an instantaneous process.

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A cutaway view of the proposed ARC reactor (credit: MIT ARC team)

MIT plans to create a new compact version of a tokamak fusion reactor with the goal of producing practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource in as little as a decade.

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, involves fusing pairs of hydrogen atoms together to form helium, accompanied by enormous releases of energy.

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Professor Hyun-Gyu Park of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a technique to analyze various target DNAs using an aptamer, a DNA fragment that can recognize and bind to a specific protein or enzyme. This technique will allow the development of affordable genetic diagnosis for new bacteria or virus, such as Middle Ease Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The research findings were published in the June issue of Chemical Communications, issued by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The paper was selected as a lead article of the journal.

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SSDs and other flash memory devices will soon get cheaper and larger thanks to big announcements from Toshiba and Intel. Both companies revealed new “3D NAND” memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data, unlike single-plane chips currently used. Toshiba said that it’s created the world’s first 48-layer NAND, yielding a 16GB chip with boosted speeds and reliability. The Japanese company invented flash memory in the first place and has the smallest NAND cells in the world at 15nm. Toshiba is now giving manufacturers engineering samples, but products using the new chips won’t arrive for another year or so.

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Based on our list of the 50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world.

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Fast-growing Dubai, where something new is always being added to the skyline, may have found a way to make construction move even faster.

In a bid to become a global hub of innovation, Dubai announced plans to build an office that will be “the most advanced 3-D printed structure ever built at this scale” and the first to be put into actual use.

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IBM Watson CTO: Quantum computing could advance artificial intelligence by orders of magnitude.

Quantum computers have already been used to test artificial intelligence by researchers in China, albeit in a very limited capacity. Earlier in 2015, a team from the country’s University of Science and Technology developed a quantum system capable of recognising handwritten characters in a demonstration they dubbed quantum artificial intelligence.

This demonstration was on a quantum computer using only four qubits, leading to speculation of what a system using hundreds – or even thousands – of qubits would be capable of. Such machines do not yet exist, at least not commercially, but Canada-based quantum computing firm D-Wave systems recently claimed it has built a 1,000 qubit quantum computer.

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We could build an artificial brain that believes itself to be conscious. Does that mean we have solved the hard problem?

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