Lifeboat Foundation

By Andrew “bunnie” Huang — IEEE Spectrum
Companies that produce open-source hardware are few and far between. At least, they are if you define them in the usual way: an enterprise that provides documentation and permission sufficient for others to re-create, modify, improve, and even make their own versions of the devices it sells. And although open hardware has made strides in recent years—including an increasing number of companies adhering to these practices along with the establishment of the Open Source Hardware Association—it remains a niche industry.

You might guess the reason to be simple—such companies must be set up and run by idealists who lack any hardheaded business sense. Not true! What’s held back the open-source hardware movement is not a lack of business acumen; it’s the rapid evolution of electronic technology. Read More

By Charles Fleming and Roger Vincent
Hyperloop isn’t all hype.

A company behind the futuristic, high-speed transportation system fantasized by Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk has leased warehouse space in downtown Los Angeles and is rapidly adding new workers to a staff of 20 full-time employees.

Musk’s imaginary Hyperloop would use vacuum tubes to transport freight and passengers at speeds of 750 mph, racing from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. Until recently, it’s been little more than an idea.Read more

By Ryan Faith — Vice News

Bitcoin becomes more valuable as bitcoin transactions become more secure. That is an important thing to keep in mind when trying to understand why the hell bitcoin is being launched into space.

Why? Because what’s a more secure place for the computers processing bitcoin transactions than in orbit several miles above the earth? That’s why core bitcoin developer and founder of Dunvegan Space Systems Jeff Garzik has developed the BitSat program, which plans to launch computers on small, (relatively) cheap satellites in 2016.Read more

A realistic and desirable human destination would produce a different space program than what we have today.

“We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.” This is NASA’s Vision Statement. This is NASA’s reason for being, its purpose. This is a vision statement for science and knowledge. This vision statement was crafted in a solar system that has only one planet that is environmentally friendly to human life.

Thanks to the ongoing search for exoplanets, we’ve identified several planets in our galaxy that are Earth sized and in their star’s habitable zone. Based on statistics, potentially billions more are waiting to be found. We are just now developing the technology to detect them. But we’re nowhere near having the technology needed to get to visit them. They are simply too far away.

Now here is where I’d like to pose a what if question: What if there was another habitable planet just like Earth, right here in our own solar system? What would Earth’s space programs look like, if anyone with a good telescope could look up and see another world with oceans, and continents, and clouds, and green forests? I think that it is safe to say that space programs in this imaginary solar system would be vastly different than ours today. This is conjecture, but it seems likely that the vision statement above, would be more in line with making that new world available for humanity.

Continue reading “What If We Had Another Earth?” »

By Rich McCormick — The VergeFacebook’s ambitious plan to bring internet to the entire world with a fleet of broadband-beaming unmanned aerial vehicles has taken a step closer to fruition. The company’s vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh, told The Wall Street Journal that Facebook is planning “a real test flight” of its solar-powered internet drone this summer. A smaller version of the drone, one tenth the size of the planned product, was tested earlier this month.

The scheduled test flight would be the first time the full-sized internet drone — called Aquila — will take to the skies. Facebook says the vehicle will have the wingspan of a commercial passenger jet and the length of “six or seven [Toyota] Priuses,” but will only weigh as much as four car tires. The lightweight build should help the craft stay flying for weeks, months, or years at a time, using solar energy to keep itself aloft. Google, also in the process of developing its own internet-proliferation project, is using a different approach. The company’s Project Loon uses a swarm of balloons to disseminate broadband to unconnected portions of the world.Read more

By Davide Sher — 3DPrintingIndustry.com
The true implementation of wearable, 3D printed clothes is a gradual process that began with accessories (jewelry, eye-wear) and is now moving on to extremities, to eventually cover the entire body (a little bit like Siberian-style tattoos). After insoles, custom 3D printed shoes are now taking on momentum, going from an experimental novelty to something truly accessible. Especially with new announcements from such start-ups as Feetz and 3D Shoes.

When speaking with the founder of the Nrml store in Manhattan, Nikky Kaufmann, she explained how, in her business of creating custom 3D printed earphones, the idea of custom clothing and accessories was, in fact, very “normal”, hence the name of her shop. The idea is that custom wearable products are not something strange, as much as they have always been part of our human culture: before the assembly line industrial revolution, every article of clothing was tailor made. Now, consumers can return to the tailor-made goods, but with new methods that can make these products accessible to everyone at higher quantities.Read more

By Sarah Kessler — Fast Company
On Thursday morning, a handful of anti-gun-violence activists realized there is an app in the Google Play Store with their names on it—literally. The app, Gunfree Geo Marker, features a map pinpointing the home and work addresses of politicians, gun control organization employees, and “random anti-gun trolls” who “push the anti-gun agenda in any way, shape or form.”

Clicking on a person’s name in the menu reveals their address on a Google map, along with the app creator’s reasons for including that person in the app.Read more

By Nick Ellis — SingularityHub

Years ago, my brother, Matt, explained to me that there are three ways to push out the productivity curve: technology, capital, or people.

When we increase productivity, we increase wealth. However, when we discuss how these three forces impact the labor market, we often focus singularly on how technology either creates or destroys jobs and wealth.

Our fear – not entirely misplaced – is that robots will render most of us useless, and in doing so, cleave society into those who control the machines (educated titans of industry), and those who fall victim to them (uneducated poor workers). In this future, the majority of humans – helpless and tired – fall by the way-side on the road to progress.

Read more

Kat McGowan — Aeon
Every modern generation has had its own idiosyncratic obsession with telepathy, the hope that one human being might be able to read another person’s thoughts. In the late 19th century, when spiritualism was in vogue, mind-reading was a parlour game for the fashionable, and the philosopher William James considered telepathy and other psychic phenomena legitimate subjects of study for the new science of psychology. By the 1960s, the Pentagon was concerned about Soviet telepathy research and reports that they had established remote communications with submarine commanders. In the 1970s, one ambitious Apollo 14 astronaut took it upon himself to try broadcasting his brainwaves from the moon.

In our technologically obsessed era, the search for evidence of psychic communication has been replaced by a push to invent computerised telepathy machines. Just last year, an international team of neurobiologists in Spain, France and at Harvard ­set up systems that linked one brain to another and permitted two people to communicate using only their thoughts. The network was basically one massive kludge, including an electroencephalography cap to detect the sender’s neural activity, computer algorithms to transform neural signals into data that could be sent through the internet and, at the receiving end, a transcranial magnetic stimulation device to convert that data into magnetic pulses that cross another person’s skull and activate certain clusters of neurons with an electrical field. With this contraption, the researchers were able to send a signal of 140 bits (the word ‘ciao’) from one person’s brain to another.Read more