Lifeboat Foundation

Early adopters, speculators and Geeks are never sufficient to bring a new paradigm to market. Mass appeal and adoption of a mechanism that requires education and a change of behavior is never ‘fait accompli’—until it reaches a tipping point. Once at the tipping point, it can go viral without a structured PR campaign and with risks tied only to technology and scalability.

Continue reading “What will it take for Bitcoin to be widely adopted?” »

( via: Hashem Al-Ghaili )

Take a glass thread a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Use it as a wire between two metals. Hit it with a laser pulse that lasts a millionth of a billionth of a second.

Remarkable things happen.

The glass-like material is transformed ever so briefly into something akin to a metal. And the laser generates a burst of electrical current across this tiny electrical circuit. It does so far faster than any traditional way of producing electricity and in the absence of an applied voltage. Further, the direction and magnitude of the current can be controlled simply by varying the shape of the laser—by changing its phase.

Could the electric car save our climate?

Would you want to be a Martian?

Would you share your thoughts if we could communicate directly from brain to brain?

Would you move to the Moon?

Read more

A group of physicists are questioning our understanding of how quarks — a type of elementary particle — arrange themselves under extreme conditions. And their quest is revealing that elements beyond the edge of the periodic table might be fair weirder than we thought.

Deep in the depths of the periodic table there are monsters made of a unique arrangement of subatomic particles. As far as elements go, they come no bigger than oganesson – a behemoth that contains 118 protons and has an atomic mass of just under 300.

That’s not to say protons and neutrons can’t be arranged into even bigger clumps and still remain somewhat stable for longer than an eye blink. But for all practical purposes, nobody has discovered it yet.

Continue reading “A Strange Type of Matter Might Lie Inside Neutron Stars, And It Breaks The Periodic Table” »