A linguistic analysis done at Forbes’ request indicates that Newsweek fingered the wrong man when it tried to unmask the creator of the digital currency, Bitcoin. Bitcoin allows users to conduct transactions with no or low fees and a relative degree of privacy. There is close to $8 billion of the currency on the Internet. But the identity of its creator (or creators), who went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained shrouded in mystery.
Among the leaked Snowden National Security Agency (NSA) documents, the first to explicitly involve the UFO issue has just been released and is currently generating much media scrutiny. The 50 page document is a powerpoint presentation titled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations,” and was authored by the British equivalent of the NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The document was the subject to an in-depth story released this week by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first worked with Edward Snowden to release to the world official NSA surveillance of the general public, and foreign government officials. The leaked document details how the NSA is working with its “Five Eyes” partners in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to train its operatives in online covert operations. Greenwald’s article exposes how the NSA and its Five Eyes intelligence partners encourage a range of psychological warfare tools to discredit any targets discussing sensitive national security information. In the “Art of Deception” document three of the 50 slides show images of UFOs – one of which dates from 1950. The leaked document reveals a clear connection between online covert operations by the GCHQ and its intelligence partners on the UFO issue. It is smoking gun evidence that the international intelligence community is training its covert operatives to deceive the public on a range of sensitive national security issues including UFOs.
Thinking about the end of the world is something that most people try to avoid; for others, it’s a profession. The Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, UK specializes in looking at the ‘big-picture’ future of the human race, and notably, the risks that could wipe us out entirely.
As you’d probably imagine, the risks considered by the Institute include things like nuclear war and meteor strikes, but one perhaps unexpected area that it’s looking into is the potential threat posed by artificial intelligence. Could computers become so smart that they become our rivals, take all our jobs and eventually wipe us all out? This Terminator-style scenario used to seem like science fiction, but it’s starting to be taken seriously by those who watch the way technology is developing.
By Leonard David, Space.com’s Space Insider Columnist
If scientists do find life on Mars, it may be possible to beam Martian DNA back to Earth, according to a new idea growing in popularity. If Martian bugs are found, the idea of “faxing” life from Mars is an enticing prospect, spurred on by scientist, Craig Venter, famous for his early sequencing of the human genome.
Venter proposes that researchers analyze Martian DNA on the Red Planet and then radio back that sequence to synthesize the DNA on Earth. He put forth the notion in a book published last year called “Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of the Digital Age.” [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]
One of the greatest promises of the high-tech future, whether made explicitly or implicitly through shiny clean concept sketches, is that we will have efficient energy that doesn’t churn pollutants into the air and onto the streets. But here in the present, politicians and even many clean energy advocates maintain that a world run on hydrogen and wind, water and solar power is not yet possible due to technical challenges like energy storage and cost.
Yet Stanford University researchers led by civil engineer Mark Jacobsonhave developed detailed plans for each state in the union that to move to 100 percent wind, water and solar power by 2050 using only technology that’s already available. The plan, presented recently at the AAAS conference in Chicago, also forms the basis for The Solutions Project nonprofit.
“The conclusion is that it’s technically and economically feasible,” Jacobson told Singularity Hub.
In December 2001, American environmental activist Jim Puckett traveled to the town of Guiyu in southeast China to look for old computers. He’d learned that electronic waste from the West was finding its way to Guiyu, and the place apparently wasn’t what it used to be. For centuries, residents of Guiyu’s four villages had scratched out a living farming rice along the Lianjiang River. When Puckett arrived, one of the first things he saw was a man riding a bicycle stacked 15-feet high with computer keyboards. Puckett followed him to a village and, like Alice tailing the white rabbit through Wonderland, he discovered an upside-down world almost cartoonish in its horrors. Towering piles of monitors, printers, and fax machines lined streets and occupied front yards. In a neighboring village, women cooked circuit boards curbside in woks, and children played atop ash heaps. There were piles of burning wires, clouds of noxious fumes, and fields of gooey sludge. Puckett met people blackened head-to-toe with printer toner.
This tiny computer clips onto your ear and lets you scroll through a menu by winking or pause a song by scrunching your nose. The Samantha Stevens-ification of human interaction has begun.
It looks like we’re one step closer to becoming cyborgs with little chips implanted in our skulls. Researchers in Japan are currently developing the “Earclip wearable PC,” a tiny computer that clips onto your ear. It weighs all of 17-grams (0.59 ounces), but manages to house a GPS, compass, gyro-sensor, battery, barometer, speaker and microphone, and its functions are controlled by your facial expressions: the blink of an eye, a raise of an eyebrow, a click of the tongue. As inconspicuous as a hearing aid, it’s less dorky-looking than Google Glass.
“We have made this with the basic idea that people will wear it in the same way they wear earrings,” creator Kazuhiro Taniguchi, an engineer at Hiroshima City University, told AFP in a recent interview.
For big tech companies, drones are a shining, whirly emblem of the future. Amazon and Google say they would like to use them to deliver things to your doorstep, and now Facebook wants to use them to create Internet infrastructure.
Facebook reportedly has plans to buy Titan Aerospace, a company that makes “near-orbital, solar-powered drones which can fly for five years without needing to land,” for $60 million, according to TechCrunch. The basic idea is that these unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, would buzz over “the parts of the world without Internet access, beginning in Africa.”
Today we wish a very happy 116th birthday to Misao Okawa who was born in Japan in 1898, making her the world’s oldest person. When she was young, Einstein hadn’t yet grasped the mysteries of a relative universe, cars were becoming affordable and were thought as the saviour of horse-polluted cities and the telephone was the next big thing in communication.
More than a hundred years later, we oft cite Einstein’s famous equation of relativity without understanding it. Cars are tools of pollution and most cities tax their presence. And a great many people shun voice communications for instantaneous texts. A lot has changed in our understanding of the universe, technology and our morality over the past century. But when it comes to living longer lives, we seem to collectively forget some basic biology.
The media obsesses over the inevitable “secret” that centenarians (and super-centenarians, like Okawa, who live past 110) reveal as the reason for their exceptionally long life. In the case of Okawa, lots of sushi and eight hours sleep a day. Scientists study centenarians and their families to isolate the causes for longevity – so that we may be able to distribute it to everyone.