Lifeboat Foundation

This free vending machine offers food and supplies to the homeless.

Howdy folks.

I hope you’ll find today’s post as interesting as I do. It’s a bit of brain candy and outlines an exciting vision for the future of digital identities.

Over the last 12 months we’ve invested in incubating a set of ideas for using Blockchain (and other distributed ledger technologies) to create new types of digital identities, identities designed from the ground up to enhance personal privacy, security and control. We’re pretty excited by what we’ve learned and by the new partnerships we’ve formed in the process. Today we’re taking the opportunity to share our thinking and direction with you. This blog is part of a series and follows on Peggy Johnson’s blog post announcing that Microsoft has joined the ID2020 initiative. If you haven’t already Peggy’s post, I would recommend reading it first.

Continue reading “Decentralized Digital Identities and Blockchain – The Future as We See It” »

Summary: A research team at UCSD discovered a key enzyme that plays a role in burning calories during both obesity and dieting and sabotages weight loss. Moreover, these scientists may have just found an existing drug that counteracts this enzyme. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Ever wonder why dieting often leads to a plateau in weight loss? It happens because the body is trying to maintain a steady weight by regulating the expenditure of energy. How this happens has remained a mystery until now.

In a paper published on February 8 in the journal Cell, a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine led by Alan Saltiel, Ph.D. has identified a key enzyme that sabotages weight loss efforts during dieting. Dr. Saltiel is the director of UCSD’s Institute for Diabetes and Metabolic Health, and says.

Continue reading “Researchers discover key enzyme sabotaging our weight loss” »

This pillow is dedicated to reducing acid reflux. This is the MedCline Reflux Relief System. It reclines your body, so stomach acid can’t reach your esophagus.

Liz Jassin, Business Insider:

I’ve had acid reflux for five years. I went to the doctor, and they gave me a long list of foods to cut out of my diet to reduce my reflux symptoms. No chocolate. No alcohol. No coffee. Which, I can’t do that. No spicy foods, to cut acidic foods. It was a ridiculous list that I couldn’t cut out.

Continue reading “This pillow claims to reduce acid reflux symptoms — I decided to try it” »

Are you Ice cream lover? What a stupid question! We all love Ice cream and it loves us (except for those that are lactose intolerant, you have our sympathies).Scientists in Japan have come up with a ‘cool’ solution to stop ice cream from melting before you have had time to finish it. They’ve invented one that doesn’t melt.

Most ice cream starts melting just moments after it is scooped from a container and placed into a bowl or on a cone. Because of this, people have taken to eating it quickly. But now that may change, as a team in Japan has found a way to maintain the shape of ice cream no matter how slowly it is eaten.

Continue reading “Japanese Scientists Created Ice Cream That Doesn’t Melt” »

A new study suggests that printing drugs on a QR code that patients can scan with their phones could pave the way for personalized medicine.

As a group, simple creatures following simple rules can display a surprising amount of complexity, efficiency, and even creativity. Known as swarm intelligence, this trait is found throughout nature, but researchers have recently begun using it to transform various fields such as robotics, data mining, medicine, and blockchains.

Ants, for example, can only perform a limited range of functions, but an ant colony can build bridges, create superhighways of food and information, wage war, and enslave other ant species—all of which are beyond the comprehension of any single ant. Likewise, schools of fish, flocks of birds, beehives, and other species exhibit behavior indicative of planning by a higher intelligence that doesn’t actually exist.

Continue reading “How Swarm Intelligence Is Making Simple Tech Much Smarter” »

A zero-soil vertical farm is growing fresh greens stacked over 30 feet high.

Make sure to follow Focal Point for more stories like this!

But Altered Carbon is only the latest bit of transhumanism to hit TV recently. From Black Mirror’s cookies and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ mind-invading telepaths and alien bodysnatchers to Star Trek: Discovery’s surgical espionage and Travelers’ time-jumping consciousness, the classic tropes of body-hopping, body-swapping, and otherwise commandeering has exploded in an era on the brink, one in which longevity technology is accelerating more rapidly than ever, all while most people still trying to survive regular threats to basic corporeal health and safety.

Nobody wants these dumb meat-sack bodies anymore. Now TV is asking if what replaces them will be any better.

Continue reading “‘Altered Carbon’ and TV’s New Wave of Transhumanism” »