Lifeboat Foundation

Driven by a need for convenience, an IT specialist from Sweden just opened the country’s first unstaffed store, which uses an app for access and scanning technology to make purchases.

After dropping what turned out to be his last jar of baby food on the floor, Robert Ilijason, who was then home alone with his son, had no choice but to make a drive to find a supermarket that was open and buy a new one.

This was no easy task, as shops close early in many rural areas, leaving individuals with nowhere to go to get any last minute necessities late at night.

Continue reading “The Store With No Employees: Sweden Opens The First Unstaffed Store” »

If you have the “blues” eat some “greens”.

You can be in excellent physical shape, with low cholesterol, a healthy body weight and good overall physical fitness — but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re healthy.

Bad news if you use RoundUp.

Local councils across Australia that use the weed killer glyphosate on nature-strips and playgrounds are being warned that the chemical probably causes cancer.

An updated World Health Organisation (WHO) warning for the herbicide, often trade marked as Roundup, is also routinely used in household gardens and farms.

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Annual list highlights the most important technology milestones.

Cambridge, MA – February 23, 2016: Today, MIT Technology Review publishes its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list (www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies). The list identifies innovations from the past year that solve difficult problems or create powerful new ways of using technology. These are the breakthroughs that will matter for years to come.

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher, states, “Each year, our editors search the globe to create this important list. From Beijing, China, where researchers are creating fungus-resistant wheat and boosting rice crop yields, to Seattle, where a spin-off company of the University of Washington is commercializing “passive Wi-Fi,” making data connections using 1/10,000^th as much power as existing Wi-Fi, the 10 Breakthrough Technologies represent the advancements we feel have the greatest potential to impact our lives for years to come.”

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Startups around the world are racing to become the globe’s premier source of “cultured meat.”

Are cotton candy machines the key to making full-scale artificial organs? Discovery News.

Around the world, the animals that pollinate our food crops — more than 20,000 species of bees, butterflies, bats and many others — are the subject of growing attention. An increasing number of pollinator species are thought to be in decline, threatened by a variety of mostly human pressures, and their struggles could pose significant risks for global food security and public health.

Until now, most assessments of pollinator health have been conducted on a regional basis, focusing on certain countries or parts of the world. But this week, a United Nations organization has released the first-ever global assessment of pollinators, highlighting their importance for worldwide food and nutrition, describing the threats they currently face and outlining strategies to protect them.

The report, which was released Friday by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), has been in the works since the summer of 2014. The research team consisted of more than 70 experts, who drew on the most up-to-date global pollinator science, as well as local and indigenous knowledge, to complete the assessment.

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This will make friends Vladimir and Marina happy.

Mushrooms and game meat in European regions where Chernobyl fallout was most intense still have excess radiation, but Burgundy truffles get the green light; foodies rejoice.

It’s been 30 years since the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine in which a fire and explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant unleashed a slew of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Swept along by winds and settled by heavy rains, radioactive particles, especially caesium-137 (137Cs), polluted large stretches of the European continent. And we all know the problem with radioactive things, they’ve got lasting power.

Continue reading “Scientists happily surprised to find truffles free of Chernobyl radiation” »

Fifteen miles away from where Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked out of their first office developing the technology that would become Google, a team of eleven engineers no older than 20 are hard at work on developing what they hope will be its replacement.

Their adoptive home, for the moment, is the co-working space Tim Draper set up as part of his Draper University startup program, and they’ve been assembled their by Jerry Yue, a 24-year-old serial entrepreneur.

Yue’s last startup, the Chinese food delivery service Benlai.com, raised $100 million at the end of last year and is on its way to joining the ranks of China’s unicorns.

Continue reading “Meet Brain, The AI Engine That Wants To Replace Search” »