Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has announced the recipients of its most recent round of highly experimental projects it deems promising enough to fund. These NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts aren’t guaranteed to go all the way, but are rather sort of low-risk, high potential reward moonshots — science fiction they hope will be more the former than the latter.

The awards are a regular occurrence and divided into Phase I and Phase II: Phase I projects are more or less in the concept stage and will get around $125,000 over 9 months to see if they’re at all viable, essentially from “might work” to “should work.” Phase II projects get a more flexible amount, but as much as half a million dollars over 2 years, to see about going from “should work” to “works.”

The full list of awards can be found here, but I’ve selected a few I think are especially promising.

Continue reading “Stellar echoes, Venusian automatons and more gain NASA moonshot funding” »

Science-fiction author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Nowhere is that more true than in the tech world, where it’s easy to think that innovations, products and services available to us are ubiquitous, even when their distribution is, in fact, very limited.

Many of the innovations that we take for granted are simply not available elsewhere.

Continue reading “Silicon Valley is living in a bubble of technology that’s not accessible to the rest of the world” »

Scientists are proposing new methods of stabilizing the design of the first of its kind tiny and lightweight space probe.

(Photo : SciNews/YouTube screenshot)

Continue reading “Breakthrough Starshot Project Amps Up: Ball, Brakes To Be Added Into The Interstellar Sail” »

DARPA envisions this development to come in three waves of innovation, culminating in machines capable of abstract thought.

IBM recently announced that its speech recognition system achieved an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, coming closer to human parity. Here’s what it means for enterprises.

Every minute in the United States, 30 people require a blood transfusion. That equates to a lot of blood, and the problem is that not enough people donate. This bottleneck has long been an issue for medicine, and so many have been trying to find a way to artificially create large volumes to meet this demand.

A team of researchers from the University of Bristol and NHS Blood and Transplant may have finally cracked it. They’ve made a major breakthrough in the process of mass producing red blood cells, in what could technically be an unlimited supply of the stuff. While they now have a biological way of achieving this, they now need the manufacturing technology on a large enough scale in order to mass produce it.

Scientists have been able to create artificial blood before, but these earlier methods have been incredibly inefficient. They worked by taking stem cells, and then directly inducing them to form red blood cells. By doing this, they could create maybe 50,000 cells in one go, far short of the trillions typically needed for a blood transfusion.

Continue reading “Major Breakthrough Could Enable Mass Produced Artificial Blood” »

Bug-out bags/survival kits are a controversial topic. Everybody has a different philosophy about what makes a good one. This is Brent’s. While bigger and heavier than a lot of the bags you’ll see online, you can keep it in the closet by your front door or the trunk of your car, and you’ll be prepared for an emergency that could last many days. Brent’s kit doubles as a slick backpacking setup, so you’ll get to know your gear extremely well, and you get to have fun with it, too.

Still haven’t subscribed to WIRED on YouTube? ►► http://wrd.cm/15fP7B7

Continue reading “How to Pack for the Apocalypse” »

“A problem that I see with the current literature on open innovation is that while focusing predominantly on theoretical aspects of the concept (value proposition, strategic alignments, governance and management, human capital and culture), it pays little attention to the description of specific open innovation practices.”

Read more

by Tatiana Moroz

The most moving thing to me about music is it’s ability to change. It changes the mood, the atmosphere, and it fills us with emotion. It can unify mankind in the power of good and triumph over evil regimes. What most struck me was when we saw this in the 60’s and 70’s folk songs that became anthems for the civil rights, equality, and antiwar movements. Even as a little girl, I knew that this core drive and expression for freedom was critical to the success of humanity as we marched ever closer to the nightmarish visions painted in 1984 and Brave New World.

This is a heavy and serious purpose, but one I took to heart as I created songs of hope, sadness, life, beauty and love. I noticed that the music industry seemed averse to this type of meaning based songwriting, and the radio waves were filling with more vapid nonsense by the minute. However, I kept my head down and tried to educate myself on the ways we could organize society for the better.

Continue reading “Free The Art: Cryptocurrencies & communities unite with creators” »