Lifeboat Foundation

The “CSI Effect” has been described as being an increased expectation from jurors that forensic evidence will be presented in court that is instantaneous and unequivocal because that is how it is often presented for dramatic effect in television programs and movies. Of course, in reality forensic science, while exact in some respects is just as susceptible to the vagaries of measurements and analyses as any other part of science. In reality, crime scene investigators often spend seemingly inordinate amounts of time gathering and assessing evidence and then present it as probabilities rather than the kind of definitive result expected of a court room filled with actors rather than real people.

Circa 2015

Researchers have used an infrared laser to cool water by about 2°C (36°F) — a major breakthrough in the field. As they are cooled by the laser, the nanocrystals developed by the University of Washington team emit a reddish-green ‘glow’ (shown) that can be seen by the naked eye.

‘Typically, when you go to the movies and see Star Wars laser blasters, they heat things up’, senior author and assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Washington Peter Pauzauskie explained.

Continue reading “Laser that COOLS water is invented for the first time” »

Meet the gamers who remind us that when everybody plays, we all win. https://xbx.lv/2WvDLoa #GamingForEveryone #SuperBowl #SBLIII

A new breed of algorithms has mastered Atari video games 10 times faster than state-of-the-art AI, with a breakthrough approach to problem solving.

Designing AI that can negotiate planning problems, especially those where rewards are not immediately obvious, is one of the most important research challenges in advancing the field.

A famous 2015 study showed Google DeepMind AI learnt to play Atari video games like Video Pinball to human level, but notoriously failed to learn a path to the first key in 1980s video game Montezuma’s Revenge due to the game’s complexity.

Continue reading “Atari master: New AI smashes Google DeepMind in video game challenge” »

We’ll be honest, over the years on Translogic we’ve featured a lot of potentially scary tech. Like in many facets of life though, often the things that seem the most frightening actually turn out to be some of the most incredible. On this episode, we’ve hit new heights of both fear and amazement as our host Bucko actually gets to drive a fully functional, bipedal, outrageously badass mech suit. Stop reading. Just watch.

When a company reaches the top of the ladder, they typically kick it away so that others cannot climb up on it. The aim? To prevent competition. When this happens in the pharmaceutical world, in terms of patents, companies quickly apply for broad protection of their products, which can last decades, and, in doing so, they fence off entire research areas for others.

In this video, Tahir Amin an attorney Tahir Amin who specializes in patent law, explains how this “skewed” system hurts everyday people.

Your online profile is less a reflection of you than a caricature.

Whether you like it or not, commercial and public actors tend to trust the string of 1s and 0s that represent you more than the story you tell them. When filing a credit application at a bank or being recruited for a job, your social network, credit-card history, and postal address can be viewed as immutable facts more credible than your opinion.

But your online profile is not always built on facts. It is shaped by technology companies and advertisers who make key decisions based on their interpretation of seemingly benign data points: what movies you choose to watch, the time of day you tweet, or how long you take to click on a cat video.

Continue reading “Your digital identity has three layers, and you can only protect one of them” »

Decoder, developed in collaboration with a games developer, gets users to assume the role of an intelligence officer tasked with breaking up global criminal gangs (users are able to select a character and their backstory).

To meet the objective, users have to identify different combinations of number strings in missions littered with distraction.

Winning each mission means users unlock letters of the next criminal location (the higher the score, the more letters revealed).

Continue reading “Cambridge University releases a brain-training app that improves concentration akin to Ritalin” »

Taking a page from film noir spycraft, a team of researchers found a way to photograph an object while pointing a camera in the opposite direction.