Lifeboat Foundation

A new experiment to give away money as “basic income” is underway in Germany. In 2014, Michael Bohmeyer, a 31-year-old German entrepreneur, launched “My Basic Income” (“Mein Grundeinkommen”), and this month, the project, made possible through crowdfunding, issued $1,100 checks to 26 people to use however they want. Leftists in Germany tend to support the idea…

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VIDEO: You may never need to wash your jeans again.

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Interstellar is one of the best sci-fi movies of the last decade, imagining a post-apocalyptic human population that needs to be saved from a dying Earth. A nearby black hole has the answers to humanity’s problems, and the brilliant script tells us we can enter a black hole and then use it to transcend space and time. In the film, the black hole also leaks out information that can save us, and it is captured by a complex computer as it’s being entered. That might seem implausible, but since we don’t know a lot about how black holes work, we can certainly accept such an outlandish proposition in the context of the movie.

In real life, however, physicists are trying to figure out how to access the secrets of a black hole. And it looks like some researchers have a theory to retrieve information from it, though it’s not quite as exciting as the complex bookcase that Interstellar proposes.

DON’T MISS: The biggest ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ plot holes explained

Continue reading “Researchers say retrieving information from a black hole might be possible” »

Lions and tigers and bears oh my… wink

It’s mind blowing. And beautiful.

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“You like your Tesla, but does your Tesla like you?” My new story for TechCrunch on robots understanding beauty and even whether they like your appearance or not:

Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic pets.

But people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.

Continue reading “The First International Beauty Contest Judged By Robots” »

It’s summer in December at the Arctic Circle this week.

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It’s a new resin.

Researchers at Panasonic PCRFY −0.78% in Japan have developed a new kind of resin that has the potential to make personal health electronics leaner and comfier.

The stretchy tech, announced by the company on Dec. 28, can be used as a base for electronic materials. Its physical properties makes electronics easier to apply to skin or clothing—like a Band-Aid or a tattoo, rather than a watch or a strap.

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Andrew Ng hands me a tiny device that wraps around my ear and connects to a smartphone via a small cable. It looks like a throwback—a smartphone earpiece without a Bluetooth connection. But it’s really a glimpse of the future. In a way, this tiny device allows the blind to see.

Ng is the chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu, and this is one of the company’s latest prototypes. It’s called DuLight. The device contains a tiny camera that captures whatever is in front of you—a person’s face, a street sign, a package of food—and sends the images to an app on your smartphone. The app analyzes the images, determines what they depict, and generates an audio description that’s heard through to your earpiece. If you can’t see, you can at least get an idea of what’s in front of you.

Artificial intelligence is changing not only the way we use our computers and smartphones but the way we interact with the real world.

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Are you a current or aspiring researcher working in the #aging field? Then you may be interested in the 23rd annual RAND Summer Institute in Santa Monica. This July, institute participants will attend a series of master lectures that offer insights into the science of aging, and the relationships between the aging field and health, economic status, and public policy. Register by March 15.

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