Lifeboat Foundation

RT

A World Wide Web for robots just got more real as scientists ready to demo a project four years in the making: a cloud-based hive mind for robots to upload and download information and learn new tasks from each other, completely independent of humans.

Comparisons to The Terminator’s Skynet began flooding in all the way back in 2011, when a breakthrough was made after researchers at the University of Technology in Munich, Zaragoza, Stuttgart, and Philips assembled in Eindhoven to form the Robo Earth project.

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By Gregory Wallace — CNN Money

Bitcoin just got another cheerleader.

The Sacramento Kings NBA team just became the first major professional sports franchise to accept Bitcoin, according to an announcement from payment processor BitPay.

Continue reading “NBA's Sacramento Kings cash in on Bitcoin” »

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

In Back to the Future, Doc Brown tells Marty McFly, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need…roads.” Where (or more precisely, when) were they going? Why, the year 2015. As you may have noticed, we’re nowhere near Mr. Fusion or flying cars.

Robot cars, however, are likely coming to a road near you inside the next decade. And according to a recent IHS Automotive study, 54 million of them will hit the streets worldwide by 2035, and nearly all autos will be driverless by 2050.

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By Michael Molitch-Hou — 3D Printing Industry

The phrase “we want to lower the barrier of entry for brain-computer interfaces” may be the strongest indicator yet that you are, indeed, living in the future. In order to achieve that futuristic dream, Conor Russomanno and Joel Murphy have launched what’s become the infomercial of the 21st Century, a Kickstarter campaign. It’s called OpenBCI and it’s an open-source, 3D printable brain scanner.

OpenBCI is built around a 24-bit analog-to-digital converter called the ADS1299, from Texas Instruments, which measures EEG, as well as EMG (skeletal muscle) and ECG (heart) signals. It’s Arduino compatible, with designs and software all available on GitHub. After printing out the Spider Claw 3000 headset, you can connect the OpenBCI board from the campaign, along with electrodes to attach to your scalp, and begin measuring brain waves for a variety of uses. The software from OpenBCI is compatible with a number of different open source platforms, such as Processing, so that you can take the data and apply it to your own projects. 3D printing makes the OpenBCI even more accessible as it allows users with a variety of head shapes and sizes to print a headset tailored to their own head. Watch the Kickstarter video for a more detailed idea of how the OpenBCI project works:

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By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER — The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.

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By Holly Cave, The Guardian

There are three main toothpaste ingredients that may be made of nano-sized particles, so let’s brush up on the facts

The Consumer Products Inventory lists more than 1,600 products that are identified by the manufacturer as containing nanoparticles. So let’s take a look at what’s inside your household items. This week: toothpaste.

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Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff

When a group of cryptographers launched Zerocoin last year, they hoped their cryptography project could upgrade Bitcoin to be as anonymous as its most privacy-focused users have always wanted it to be. Now, after six months of waiting in vain for their code to be adopted by the Bitcoin community, they’re taking a bolder approach: Creating their own cryptocurrency, with privacy baked in from the start.

At the Real World Crypto conference Monday in New York, Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green announced the next phase in the evolution of Zerocoin: creating an alternative cryptocurrency with an infrastructure independent of Bitcoin. The new coins, which Green says will go into circulation in May in some sort of beta program, will have their own exchange rate with existing currencies, their own “miners” producing new coins, and their own public ledger of transactions known as the “blockchain,” just as Bitcoin does. But unlike Bitcoin, Zerocoin is designed to be spent and received without revealing any trace of a user’s identity.

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George Dvorsky on io9

We’re still decades — if not centuries — away from being able to transfer a mind to a supercomputer. It’s a fantastic future prospect that makes some people incredibly squeamish. But there are considerable benefits to living a digital life. Here’s why you should seriously consider uploading.

As I’ve pointed out before, uploading is not a given; there are many conceptual, technological, ethical, and security issues to overcome. But for the purposes of this Explainer, we’re going to assume that uploads, or digital mind transfers, will eventually be possible — whether it be from the scanning and mapping of a brain, serial brain sectioning, brain imaging, or some unknown process.

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By Drake Bennett — BloombergBusinessWeek

What if we built a super-smart artificial brain and no one cared? IBM (IBM) is facing that possibility. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is having a hard time making money off of its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, Watson. The company has always claimed that Watson was more than a publicity stunt, that it had revolutionary real-world applications in health care, investing, and other realms. IBM Chief Executive Officer Virginia Rometty has promised that Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, but according to the Journal, as of last October Watson was far behind projections, only bringing in $100 million.

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