December 2015 – Lifeboat News: The Blog

VetiGel: The Band-Aid of the future

Shailesh Prasad — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 03:48:21 +0000

VetiGel: A way to instantly stop bleeding.

A 17-year-old invented an ingenious way to instantly stop bleeding.

John McAfee says his new security product is a ‘f—ing game changer’

Sean Brazell — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 03:31:27 +0000

It’s an interesting idea, if not an original one. (it’s not) The problem is that, military grade encryption or not, it would be a single point of failure that could compromise your on AND offline security in one fell swoop.

Fugitive presidential candidate John McAfee is going back to his roots with a new security product that he calls “a f—ing game changer.”

Samsung has an all-in-one health chip for wearables

Shailesh Prasad — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:47:47 +0000

Samsung’s already wide product family is getting even bigger thanks to its new chip dubbed the “Samsung Bio-Processor.” As the company tells it, it’s already in mass production and is “specifically designed to allow accelerated development of innovative wearable products for consumers who are increasingly monitoring their health and fitness on a daily basis.” Phew. The announcement post goes on to say that the processor is the first all-in-one health solution chip and that since it’s packing a number of different control and sensor units (like a quintet of Analog Front Ends, a microcontroller unit, digital signal processor and eFlash memory) it can do all these tricks without the need for external processing.

The idea behind the silicon is to be the one-stop wearable fitness resource. Those five AFEs? One keeps track of bioelectrical impedance analysis, while the others focus on volumetric measurements of organs, an electrocardiogram and skin temperature, among other things. Bear in mind that Samsung’s latest smartwatch, the Gear S2, only tracks your heart rate. Same goes for the Apple Watch. Considering how err… interesting Samsung wearables tend to be, a possible scenario here is that the tech giant won’t keep the Bio-Processor all to itself. Nope, the real money here lies in potentially licensing it out to other folks, as it’s wont to do with its other self-made parts.

We won’t have to wait too long to see these in the wild, either: Samsung promises it’ll be packed into devices available early next year. If you’re wondering where, the inevitable follow-up to the aforementioned Gear S2 successor is a pretty likely bet. Whether that shows its face at CES or Mobile World Congress is the real question, though.

Human-machine superintelligence can solve the world’s most dire problems

Shailesh Prasad — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:47:34 +0000

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University.

In an article published in the journal Science, the authors present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Meet Nadine, a Human-Like Social Robot With Emotions

Dan Kummer — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:46:59 +0000

Getting there. Hands still look creepy though. I predict around 2020 they will attempt to stick a slimmed down version of the Atlas Robot into this.

Scientists recently unveiled “Nadine,” a socially intelligent, human-looking robot complete with “her own personality, mood and emotions.” http://abcn.ws/1kwQwKG

Mars Curiosity Engineer Rips NASA In New Book

Bruce Dorminey — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:46:25 +0000

New book by NASA JPL Curiosity Rover engineer has some hard truths about U.S. space policy. A good read.

A Mars Curiosity rover team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) writes in a forthcoming first-person narrative that the space agency as a whole “doesn’t do enough flight projects to forge a broad set of practical skills across [NASA].”

Adam Steltzner — a JPL engineer who was a familiar face during the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of the Mars Curiosity rover’s triumphant August 2012 landing — is refreshingly candid about U.S. space policy in the new book “The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation.”

“One of the problems with space exploration is that we never have enough iterations to allow us to fully learn from our mistakes,” writes Steltzner, officially, the phase lead and development manager for the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity).

www.animatedimages.org

Shailesh Prasad — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 19:48:01 +0000

Interesting Futurism Animation 10

Shailesh Prasad — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 19:47:37 +0000

The 2015 Round Up: Our Biggest Longevity Stories This Year

Roy — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 17:47:20 +0000

Just joined us? We break down 2015’s top aging and longevity stories.

Lunar Leap: Europe Is Reaching for a Moon Base by the 2030s — By Leonard David | Space.com

Odette Bohr Dienel — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 15:28:23 +0000

“There is growing interest in Europe to prioritize the moon as humanity’s next deep-space destination.”