Lifeboat Foundation

The Elemind headband is a soft, lightweight, and flexible wearable designed to be worn throughout the night, regardless of one’s sleeping position. It can collect information using brainwaves and pairs with a smartphone, where users can find details about their sleep patterns.

Where the headband is effective is its ability to use neuromodulation to impact the brainwaves, directing them from wakeful patterns to those of deeper sleep. “Elemind works like noise-cancellation for the brain. You can switch off the world, switch off the stress, and go to sleep faster,” explained Meredith Perry, the CEO and co-founder of Elemind.

Bank of America sees a multi-year upgrade cycle for smartphones and the iPhone thanks to the launch of the IntelliPhone.

Researchers at the University of Colorado discovered a key technique that could lead to a smartphone battery that charges in a minute.

A new discovery could pave the way for supercapacitors that can charge phones and laptops in 60 seconds and electric cars in a mere ten minutes.

In a press release, the University of Colorado at Boulder announced that its researchers have achieved a breakthrough when it comes to our understanding of the way charged ion particles behave — a discovery that could be the key to figuring out the logistics for the long-anticipated energy storage capabilities of supercapacitors.

Supercapacitors have long been proposed as a means of charging electronics lightning-fast, but until now, figuring out how to increase the energy density to match or exceed those of lithium-ion batteries has, for the most part, eluded scientists. Compared to conventional batteries, which can store as much as ten times more energy than today’s supercapacitors, this technology has remained in the realm of the possible but not yet practical.

YouTube Music is humming along.

Those who know Oxford University for its literary luminaries might be surprised to learn that some of the most important reflections on emerging technologies come from its hallowed halls. While the leading tech innovators in Silicon Valley capture imaginations with their bold visions of future singularities, mind-machine melding, and digital immortality by 2045, they rarely engage as deeply with the philosophical issues surrounding such developments as their like-minded scholars over the pond. This essay will briefly highlight some of the key contributions of Oxford University’s professors Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu to the transhumanist movement. It will also show how this movement’s focus on radical autonomy in biotechnical enhancements shapes the wider global bioethical conversation.

As the lead author of the Transhumanist FAQ, Bostrom provides the closest the movement has to an institutional catechism. He is, in a sense, the Ratzinger of Transhumanism. The first paragraph of the seminal text emphasizes the evolutionary vision of his school. Transhumanism’s incessant pursuit of radical technological transformation is “based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.” Current humans are but one intriguing yet greatly improvable iteration of human existence. Think of the first iPhone and how unattractive 2007’s most cutting-edge technology is in 2024.

Continue reading “Training Transhumanists at Oxford University” »

A hacker has defaced the website of the pcTattletale spyware application, found on the booking systems of several Wyndham hotels in the United States, and leaked over a dozen archives containing database and source code data.

As Vice reported three years ago, this stalkerware app was also found leaking real-time screenshots from Android phones.

Continue reading “Hacker defaces spyware app’s site, dumps database and source code” »

Researchers have developed techniques to manufacture different types of glass in space, uncovering potential for advancements in optical technology.

Thanks to human ingenuity and zero gravity, we reap important benefits from science in space. Consider smartphones with built-in navigation systems and cameras.

Continue reading “Neutrons Illuminate the Mysteries of Space Glass” »

Still, ChatGPT operates in a mostly siloed fashion. It can’t yet venture out “into the wild” to execute online tasks. For example, if you wanted to buy a milk frother on Amazon for under $100, ChatGPT might be able to recommend a product or two, and even provide links, but it can’t actually navigate Amazon and make the purchase.

Why? Besides obvious concerns, like letting a flawed AI model go on a shopping spree with your credit card, one challenge lies in training AI to successfully navigate graphical user interfaces (GUIs), like your laptop or smartphone screen.

But even the current version of GPT-4 seems to grasp the basic steps of online shopping. That’s the takeaway of a recent preprint paper in which AI researchers described how they successfully trained a GPT-4-based agent to “buy” products on Amazon. The agent, dubbed the MM-Navigator, did not actually purchase products, but it was able to analyze screenshots of an iOS smartphone screen and specify the appropriate action and where it should click, with impressive accuracy.