Lifeboat Foundation

by Michelle Starr — C/net
There are some concepts from sci-fi that really should never, ever see the light of day. The T-1000 — the murderous robot made of shifting liquid metal — is arguably one of them, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exhibit some interesting ideas, even if they do seem impossible.

Seem, of course, being the operative word — because researchers in China have just created the world’s first liquid metal robot that can both change shape and power itself.

“The soft machine looks rather intelligent and [can] deform itself according to the space it voyages in, just like [the] Terminator does from the science-fiction film,” Jing Liu from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, told New Scientist. “These unusual behaviours perfectly resemble the living organisms in nature.” Read more

Emerging Technology From the arXiv — MIT Technology Review

Materials scientists have discovered how to make black phosphorus nanosheets in large amounts, heralding a new era of nanoelectronic devices.

In the last few years, two-dimensional crystals have emerged as some of the most exciting new materials to play with. Consequently, materials scientists have been falling over themselves to discover the extraordinary properties of graphene, boron nitride, molybdenum disulphide, and so on.

A late-comer to this group is black phosphorus, in which phosphorus atoms join together to form a two-dimensional puckered sheet. Last year, researchers built a field-effect transistor out of black phosphorus and showed that it performed remarkably well. This research suggested that black phosphorous could have a bright future in nanoelectronic devices.

Continue reading “Black Phosphorus: The Birth of a New Wonder Material” »

Quoted: “Ethereum will also be a decentralised exchange system, but with one big distinction. While Bitcoin allows transactions, Ethereum aims to offer a system by which arbitrary messages can be passed to the blockchain. More to the point, these messages can contain code, written in a Turing-complete scripting language native to Ethereum. In simple terms, Ethereum claims to allow users to write entire programs and have the blockchain execute them on the creator’s behalf. Crucially, Turing-completeness means that in theory any program that could be made to run on a computer should run in Ethereum.” And, quoted: “As a more concrete use-case, Ethereum could be utilised to create smart contracts, pieces of code that once deployed become autonomous agents in their own right, executing pre-programmed instructions. An example could be escrow services, which automatically release funds to a seller once a buyer verifies that they have received the agreed products.”

Read Part One of this Series here » Ethereum — Bitcoin 2.0? And, What Is Ethereum.

Read Part Two of this Series here » Ethereum — Opportunities and Challenges.

Read Part Three of this Series here » Ethereum — A Summary.

Quoted: “Bitcoin technology offers a fundamentally different approach to vote collection with its decentralized and automated secure protocol. It solves the problems of both paper ballot and electronic voting machines, enabling a cost effective, efficient, open system that is easily audited by both individual voters and the entire community. Bitcoin technology can enable a system where every voter can verify that their vote was counted, see votes for different candidates/issues cast in real time, and be sure that there is no fraud or manipulation by election workers.”

Read the article here » http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239809?hootPostID=ba473f…aacc8412c7

Quoted: “The Factom team suggested that its proposal could be leveraged to execute some of the crypto 2.0 functionalities that are beginning to take shape on the market today. These include creating trustless audit chains, property title chains, record keeping for sensitive personal, medical and corporate materials, and public accountability mechanisms.

During the AMA, the Factom president was asked how the technology could be leveraged to shape the average person’s daily life.”

Kirby responded:

“Factom creates permanent records that can’t be changed later. In a Factom world, there’s no more robo-signing scandals. In a Factom world, there are no more missing voting records. In a Factom world, you know where every dollar of government money was spent. Basically, the whole world is made up of record keeping and, as a consumer, you’re at the mercy of the fragmented systems that run these records.”

Continue reading “BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology — FACTOM” »

Preamble: Bitcoin 1.0 is currency — the deployment of cryptocurrencies in applications related to cash such as currency transfer, remittance, and digital payment systems. Bitcoin 2.0 is contracts — the whole slate of economic, market, and financial applications using the blockchain that are more extensive than simple cash transactions like stocks, bonds, futures, loans, mortgages, titles, smart property, and smart contracts

Bitcoin 3.0 is blockchain applications beyond currency, finance, and markets, particularly in the areas of government, health, science, literacy, culture, and art.

Read the article here » http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20141110

Kurweil AI

A new Terminator T-1000 robot-style material made of wax and foam — and capable of switching between hard and soft states — could be used to build morphing surgical robots that move through the body to reach a desired location without damaging organs or vessels along the way.

Robots built from the material, described in a new paper in the journal Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, could also be used in search-and-rescue operations to squeeze through rubble looking for survivors, says Anette Hosoi, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and applied mathematics who led the research team.

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Kurzweil AI

A team of Korean researchers has synthesized hexagonal carbon nanosheets similar to graphene, using a polymer. The new material is free of the defects and complexity involved in producing graphene, and can substitute for graphene as transparent electrodes for organic solar cells and in semiconductor chips, the researchers say.

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Christina Sarich — Nation of Change

Scenes from the movie Slumdog Millionaire accurately depict India’s latest consumer-influenced economy. Tree groves are littered with a rainbow color of plastic bags like some kind of ominous carnival wreckage. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and other ‘garbage’ liters the streets in a land where city officials have long forsaken their duties of providing a pristine infrastructure to its inhabitants, but a professor of chemistry in Madurai, India thinks that the trash lining his country’s roads and fields could be utilized as a ‘wonderful resource,” transforming common plastic liter, from thicker acrylics to bottles and grocery bags, into a substitute for bitumen in asphalt.

The ‘Plastic Man,’ as Rajagopalan Vasudevan is known in India, travels throughout the country instructing engineers how to apply his technology to recycle the trash copiously littering streets from Punjab to Tamil Nadu. To date, more than 3000 miles of plastic roads have been laid in at least 11 states.

Read more