Lifeboat Foundation

Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub

With improved visualization tools and souped-up computers to crunch the massive numbers involved in studying the 100 billion neurons in the human brain, many researchers, including the U.S. government, are trying to map the brain’s wiring, or “connectome.” Some researchers have dived right in to studying the massive human brain, but others see the mouse brain, with just 75 million neurons, as a more logical place to start.

A new atlas of study results related to the mouse connectome offers the equivalent of a highway map, with local roads to be filled in later. The atlas, described in a recent paper in Nature, represents more than four years of work undertaken at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a private nonprofit funded by a grant by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

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Fast Company Staff — Fast Company

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Pete Brook — Wired

If U.S. citizens knew how it felt to be targeted by deadly flying robots, it might shape domestic attitudes toward the Obama administration’s drone program. Artist Tomas Van Houtryve is using video and photography to foster that discussion by putting average Americans under drone-like surveillance.

“The drone has become the preferred tool of the ‘War on Terror,’” says Van Houtryve. “We live in the most media-connected age ever, and yet the American public has no visual narrative of the drone war. This is a secret war, making it easier to push to the back of our minds or only think about in abstract terms.”

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Matthew Bennett — Quartz

Last October, Ridley Scott and more than a thousand extras and film crew arrived in Andalusia, in southern Spain, to shoot Exodus, his new epic about the life of Moses starring Christian Bale. “They spent a whole month here”, Piluca Querol, the director of the Andalusia Film Commission, told Quartz: “It’s the first time unemployment has gone down in Almería at that time of year, thanks to all of the construction.”

The movie industry is an important contributor to the economy in Andalusia, the region with the highest unemployment rate in all of Europe (pdf). “Film producers use drones a lot,” Querol said, “especially in pre-production to get things ready, prepare shots and look for possible camera positions.” She added, “of course [drone images] promote Spain abroad, in our case as a great place to film movies”.

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Jason Clenfield and Pavel Alpeyev — Bloomberg


In the five years since bitcoin was created, the hunt for them has consumed enough electricity to keep the Eiffel Tower lit for 260 years. One man’s way around the utility bills: the family power plant.

Alex Wilhelm is a bitcoin miner, one of thousands who use computers to solve complex math problems and get their hands on the digital currency. The expatriate living in Tokyo has 30 remote-controlled servers mining virtual gold in an old brick building in the Austrian countryside. His father is donating the electricity, which comes from a water-driven turbine that survived a World War II bombing raid and once powered the entire village of Tattendorf, where Wilhelm grew up.

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Zack Burgess — Crains Detroit Business


The next time you grab a sandwich, order a pizza or pay for IT services, you may not have to reach for your wallet. Instead, you could have the option of paying the bill with bitcoins.

Businesses including the Bronx Deli in Farmington, Dynamic Technologies in Livonia, Athena Coney Island in Novi and Papa Romano’s in Troy affirm the use of bitcoin currency. According to coinmap.org, a website that tracks the businesses using it, there are at least 10 in the area that accept bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn’t regulated as a currency or security, though federal regulators, most recently the Securities and Exchange Commission, have raised red flags about it. In March, the SEC sent an inquiry and data request to the currency’s creator, an elusive person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto doesn’t believe the SEC has any legal grounds.

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Tyler Lee — Ubergizmo


So we’ve seen how 3D printers can be used to print medical-related gadgets, such as a portion of a skull, and while those are great and serve as viable alternatives compared to current implants and whatnot, wouldn’t it be better if those 3D printed medical gadgets/accessories could actively help your healing process as well?Well perhaps now it can, thanks to a prototype cast which not only acts as a regular cast, but at the same time uses ultrasonic vibrations that will help speed up the bone healing time. This design was put together by Turkish student, Denis Karasahin, who managed to win the 2014 Golden A’Design Award for his idea.

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Peter Braun — Digital Trends


Koenigsegg has gone from sketches on napkins to making some of the fastest most desirable cars money can buy.

Just how has it accomplished this in the face of established marquees like Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini? Secret Swedish government backing? The favor of the mighty gods of Valhalla? It is possible – especially that second one.

What we can say for sure is that it has been willing – from the start – to take risks on new technology. And on the revolutionary One:1 that new technology is 3D printing.

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Richard Corliss — Time

Johnny Depp dies and is reborn as a computer brain in Transcendence, the latest science-fiction thriller about artificial intelligence. Smart machines that may serve or dominate mankind are as old as Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, or Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. — and as recent as this week’s episode of The Simpsons, in which Dr. Frink revives the dead Homer as a chatty screensaver. They have also inhabited some of the finest SF movies, including Dark Star, Star Wars, Star Trek the Motion Picture, Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator and RoboCop. The list is inspiring and nearly endless.

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