Lifeboat Foundation

By Chris Gayomali — Fast Company

For big tech companies, drones are a shining, whirly emblem of the future. Amazon and Google say they would like to use them to deliver things to your doorstep, and now Facebook wants to use them to create Internet infrastructure.

Facebook reportedly has plans to buy Titan Aerospace, a company that makes “near-orbital, solar-powered drones which can fly for five years without needing to land,” for $60 million, according to TechCrunch. The basic idea is that these unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, would buzz over “the parts of the world without Internet access, beginning in Africa.”

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By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham and Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford

Today we wish a very happy 116th birthday to Misao Okawa who was born in Japan in 1898, making her the world’s oldest person. When she was young, Einstein hadn’t yet grasped the mysteries of a relative universe, cars were becoming affordable and were thought as the saviour of horse-polluted cities and the telephone was the next big thing in communication.

More than a hundred years later, we oft cite Einstein’s famous equation of relativity without understanding it. Cars are tools of pollution and most cities tax their presence. And a great many people shun voice communications for instantaneous texts. A lot has changed in our understanding of the universe, technology and our morality over the past century. But when it comes to living longer lives, we seem to collectively forget some basic biology.

The media obsesses over the inevitable “secret” that centenarians (and super-centenarians, like Okawa, who live past 110) reveal as the reason for their exceptionally long life. In the case of Okawa, lots of sushi and eight hours sleep a day. Scientists study centenarians and their families to isolate the causes for longevity – so that we may be able to distribute it to everyone.

Continue reading “The false allure of centenarians — Why centenarians epitomise our fears about growing old” »

Michael Terpin — CNN Money

The concept of special economic zones to assist the development of a new industry is common worldwide. So why isn’t there one yet for Bitcoin?

Despite the collapse of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, digital currencies are one of the fastest growing, disruptive technologies of the past several decades.

But the only places in the United States that are speaking up about Bitcoin are those who want to add additional layers of regulations and red tape.
Remarkably, it’s the two states that would benefit most from this innovation and from greater adoption of Bitcoin: the nation’s financial center (New York) and the hub of innovation (California).

New York’s top financial cop, Benjamin Lawsky, has railed against Bitcoin because of concerns about usage by criminals. He said that it is better to stop all possible money laundering before one knows it really exists than to let “1,000 flowers bloom on the innovation side.”

Continue reading “Viva Bitcoin Vegas?” »

By Harry Corlett — SpaceNews
Neil Armstrong is dead. The space shuttle program is no more. The Constellation program has been canceled, and the main spacecraft is a wheezy 50-year-old Soyuz. Our cosmic escapades feel distant. All those memories of daring men and women of “The Right Stuff” will soon be lost in time, like tears in rain, unless as a species we recognize the urgent need to venture to the stars.

On Jan. 31, NASA honored all the members of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia who perished while “furthering the cause of exploration and discovery.” Surely they would be devastated that their bravery and sacrifice might have been in vain as the great American pioneer flame gutters in the winds of political expediency.

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LIST OF UPDATES (MARCH 03 THROUGH MARCH 10/2014). By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Making nanoelectronics last longer for medical devices and ‘cyborgs’
http://www.kurzweilai.net/making-nanoelectronics-last-longer…es-cyborgs

Are you ready for the Internet of Cops?
http://www.kurzweilai.net/are-you-ready-for-the-internet-of-cops

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

Brian Armstrong — TechCrunch

Mt.Gox is gone. The one-time biggest Bitcoin exchange closed its doors this week and filed for bankruptcy this morning. Questions about the future of Bitcoin have once again been up-leveled to the headlines of nearly every major media outlet.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a string of issues in the Bitcoin space, from the transaction malleability bug that ultimately closed Mt.Gox’s doors to a corresponding distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that delayed transfers on multiple exchanges and services. These attacks, along with recent phishing scams and money-laundering arrests, have cast doubt on the Bitcoin space and caused consumer panic — which is fair.

But what hasn’t been communicated well is how those who are truly invested in the future of Bitcoin remain totally confident, because with every attack, breach, and arrest, Bitcoin is getting stronger and proving to consumers and businesses it is not going away.

Here is what is not being said about Bitcoin that should be.

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By Eduard Gismatullin — Irish Examiner

More than 70 individuals with a combined wealth of $200bn (€145bn) are investing in space projects including travel, Knight Frank said ahead of its release of The Wealth Report 2014 on Wednesday.

A suborbital trip from London to Sydney will take about two hours and 12 minutes or one-tenth the time of flying by plane.

Continue reading “Property investors to use space travel” »

Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub

Silicon Valley sprung up on big open stretches of land where military installations had once been. Early semiconductor and computing businesses needed the space. But as Moore’s law progressed and mobile computing became the thing, the tech industry crept up into the seven-by-seven mile peninsula that is San Francisco. The city’s South of Market district is now nearly a strip mall of tech startups.

But tucked away in one of the neighborhood’s utilitarian office buildings is a technology company that harkens back to the early days of Silicon Valley: Planet Labs, founded by former NASA engineers, which builds satellites to photograph the Earth. Even so, the company doesn’t need a ton of space: Its satellites are about the size of a breadbox. The company recently recruited a batch of Stanford University students and built 28 satellites in 17 days in its cramped SoMa offices (pictured above).

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By Carolyn Cox — Geekosystem

Tomorrow is apparently “Future Day,” and not just in the same way that today is present day. March 1st is an unofficial holiday for transhumanists, designed to “elevat[e]the human condition” and maybe help us prepare for the robot uprising.

Started in 2012, “Future Day” was created Ben Goertzel and Adam A.Ford of the transhuman nonprofit Humanity+ to engender conversations about humanity’s role in a rapidly changing world. Future Day’s website states,

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