Lifeboat Foundation

This innovative technique has been used to cure blindness.

This extraordinary train is designed by train Kazuyo Sejima, who was recently awarded Pritzker Prize, which is given as a Nobel Prize of architecture. Sejima is an architect from a Japanese company Sanaa. He claimed that without a doubt the train will be not totally unseen but it will be super-reflective. It seems to be partially invisible because of its pure mirrored shell. This task was very challenging for the architects as well as for the engineers. After this successful mission, they have concluded that this design can be put on to the active trains as well.

Sejima has got authorization from the Seibu Railway Co, that for celebrating its 100th anniversary of Red Arrow express commuter train, they have to remodel the outer surface and inside of it. The invisible train is likely to be launched in 2018 and this express will travel over 178 km (111 miles) all over Japan. In an interview held last week, Sejima said “The limited express travels will pass through beautiful panorama like mountains of Chichibu. This will be a great reason for the passengers to travel on this train.”

The whole news about the partially invisible train is not revealed by the inventors but Dezeen magazine has published that its outer surface will have semi-transparent and mirrored panels, and its boxy shape created into a silver bullet. We already came through extraordinary bullet train designed by Japan and now this semi-transparent train seems really exciting. This will be the latest invention which we have not come through till now.

Continue reading “Japan Is Designing An Invisible Train To Be Launched By 2018” »

At the Hyperloop Hotel, guests could zoom between a network of cities, eliminating the need for planes. The concept won a 2017 Radical Innovation Award.

Samuel West is obsessed with failures. In fact, the innovation researcher and organizational psychologist collects them—and now his collection is on display.

The Museum of Failure, West’s brainchild, celebrates the absurd and hilarious wrong turns that companies have taken in their product development—from Colgate’s unappetizing beef lasagna, to Harley Davidson’s leathery-scented perfume, to Bic’s sexist “for Her” lady’s pen.

But it’s more than that, too. West’s bigger point, he says, is he’s sick of everyone worshipping success. Every failure is uniquely spectacular, says West, while success is nauseatingly repetitive. True innovation requires learning from the complexities of each failure—a skill that, he says, most companies fail to hone. Opening this June in Helsingborg, Sweden, the museum seeks to de-stigmatize personal and professional failure.

Continue reading “Sweden’s Museum of Failure: A spectacular catalogue of the world’s worst innovations” »

Apple live streamed their Worldwide Developers Conference keynote this afternoon. During the talk, they unveiled a new kind of AI system, HopePod.

Today, Apple is holding its Worldwide Developers Conference. So far, they have announced a host of updates. For example, during the presentation, the company noted that their watchOS 4 is going to include advanced AI and be far more personalized.

IBM, in partnership with Samsung and GlobalFoundries (which manufactures chips for Qualcomm and AMD, among others), has developed a process for building 5nm chips. Two years ago IBM unveiled a 7nm process, and Samsung will likely ship 7nm chips next year, but today’s announcement sounds like an even more important breakthrough in chip design.

Watch the moment India’s space program made a massive breakthrough.

Individuals who mine Bitcoins needn’t be miners. We call them ‘miners’ because they are awarded BTC as they solve mathematical computations. The competition to unearth these reserve coins also serves a vital purpose. They validate the transactions of Bitcoin users all over the world: buyers, loans & debt settlement, exchange transactions, inter-bank transfers, etc. They are not really miners. They are more accurately engaged in transaction validation or ‘bookkeeping’.

There are numerous proposals for how to incentivize miners once all 21 million coins have been mined/awarded in May 2140. Depending upon the network load and the value of each coin, we may need to agree on an alternate incentive earlier than 2140. At the opening of the 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, Andreas Antonopolous proposed some validator incentive alternatives. One very novel suggestion was based on game theory and involved competition and status rather than cash payments.

I envision an alternative approach—one that also addresses the problem of miners and users having different goals. In an ideal world the locus of users should intersect more fully with the overseers…

To achieve this, I have proposed that every wallet be capable of also mining, even if the wallet is simply a smartphone app or part of a cloud account at an exchange service. To get uses participating in validating the transactions of peers, any transaction fee could be waived for anyone who completes 1 validation for each n transactions. (Say one validation for every five or ten transactions). In this manner, everyone pitches in a small amount of resources to maintain a robust network.

Continue reading “How to Incentivize Bitcoin miners after all 21M BTC are awarded” »

A bit of every speculative propulsion system.

When Greg Matloff’s “Solar Sail Starships: Clipper Ships of the Galaxy” appeared in JBIS in 1981, the science fictional treatments of interstellar sails I had been reading suddenly took on scientific plausibility. Later, I would read Robert Forward’s work, and realize that an interstellar community was growing in space agencies, universities and the pages of journals. Since those days, Matloff’s contributions to the field have kept coming at a prodigious rate, with valuable papers and books exploring not only how we might reach the stars but what we can do in our own Solar System to ensure a bright future for humanity. In today’s essay, Greg looks at interstellar propulsion candidates and ponders the context provided by Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions small sailcraft moving at 20 percent of the speed of light, bound for Proxima Centauri. What can we learn from the effort, and what alternatives should we consider as we ponder the conundrum of interstellar propulsion?

by Dr. Greg Matloff

Continue reading “Near-Term Interstellar Probes: Some Gentle Suggestions” »