The secret global network of private super jewelers

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An elite group of artists are growing in influence and reach. Here’s the key to cracking their codes.

Pictured above: Hemmerle emerald, agate, and sapphire necklace; diamond and bronze bangle, and earrings, all with ancient Egyptian faiance amulets.

I call them the Super Jewelers. They create only a limited number of one-of-a-kind pieces. They sell only by appointment. They work with the rarest of stones and the most innovative of materials, and for only the most discerning of people. Their names are spoken frequently by those fluent in the secret language of jewelry snobs, but otherwise they are purposefully unknown.

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What happens when you let employees pick how much they want to be paid? This company decided to find out.

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Smarkets CEO Jason Trost lets employees pick how much they want to get paid. Smarkets

Smarkets, a betting startup based in London, lets employees pick how much they want to get paid.

The system works through social consensus, and each employee’s salary information is published in the company’s internal wiki.

There are pros and cons to the process, but ultimately it works, Smarkets CEO Jason Trost said.

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Scientists grow full-sized, beating humanity hearts from stem cells

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It’s the closest we’ve come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab.

Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient’s body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients’ own cells. Now a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has gotten one step closer, using adult skin cells to regenerate functional human heart tissue, according to a study published recently in the journal Circulation Research.

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The Woman Who Smashed Codes: The Untold Story of Cryptography Pioneer Elizebeth Friedman

 

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How an unsung heroine established a new field of science and helped defeat the Nazis with pencil, paper, and perseverance.

While computing pioneer Alan Turing was breaking Nazi communication in England, eleven thousand women, unbeknownst to their contemporaries and to most of us who constitute their posterity, were breaking enemy code in America — unsung heroines who helped defeat the Nazis and win WWII.

Among them was American cryptography pioneer Elizebeth Friedman (August 26, 1892–October 31, 1980). The subject of Jason Fagone’s excellent biography The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (public library), Friedman triumphed over at least three Enigma machines and cracked dozens of different radio circuits to decipher more than four thousand Nazi messages that saved innumerable lives, only to have J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI take credit for her invisible, instrumental work.

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Spotify will now let artists directly upload their music to the platform

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Spotify has announced a new beta feature that will allow independent artists to upload their music directly to the platform instead of through a label or digital aggregator. Normally, artists who aren’t signed to a major label (which can directly upload music to Spotify) have to pay a fee to a third-party service like Tunecore to upload their music to Spotify. The upload feature will be contained within the service’s existing Spotify for Artists platform, which, among other things, allows artists to view data about their listeners and directly submit their songs for editorial playlist consideration.

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‘Moore’s Law is dead’: Three predictions about the computers of tomorrow

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Experts from chip designer Arm on how chip design will evolve to ensure performance keeps advancing.

“Moore’s Law is dead. Moore’s Law is over.”

So says Mike Muller, chief technology officer at chip designer Arm, the Japanese-owned company whose processor cores are found inside nearly all mobile phones.

Given Moore’s Law has been the engine driving the breakneck pace at which computers have advanced over the past 50 years this statement might seem worrying.

But Muller is more sanguine.

“On one level it’s true, but I’d say, certainly from my perspective and Arm’s perspective, we don’t care,” he said, speaking at the Arm Research Summit 2018.

Muller and his colleagues have good reasons for their indifference to the end of Moore’s Law, the prediction that the number of transistors on computer processors will double every two years.

For one, the bulk of Arm-based processors are sold into the embedded computing market, where there is still plenty of scope for transistors to get smaller and chips to get faster.

But more importantly, Arm believes the regular boosts to computing performance that used to come from Moore’s Law will continue, and will instead stem from changes to how chips are designed.

Here are three ways that Arm expects processor design will evolve and advance.

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New era in virtual reality therapy for common phobias

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This image provided by Oxford VR in July 2018 shows a virtual reality viewpoint from a simulation designed to help people with a fear of heights. Virtual reality therapy can help patients by exposing them gradually to their greatest terrors. The technology is just now reaching the mainstream after 20 years of research. (Oxford VR via AP) (Associated Press)

Dick Tracey didn’t have to visit a tall building to get over his fear of heights. He put on a virtual reality headset.

Through VR, he rode an elevator to a high-rise atrium that looked so real he fell to his knees.

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Why DNA is The most exciting programming language today

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When Sean Parker was young, he cofounded Napster and changed the way we listen to music. In his twenties, he helped jump-start Facebook and changed the way we interact with each other. Now, at age 38, he’s set on changing something else: the way we treat disease. The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which he founded in 2016, has dedicated $250 million toward using new technologies like Crispr to teach the human body to vanquish cancer. Alex Marson is a scientist building the tools to do just that. His research at UC San Francisco and the Parker Institute rejiggers the DNA of T cells—your immune system’s sentinels—to better recognize and attack malignant mutineers. Parker and Marson sat down to talk about Crispr, genome editing, and the most exciting coding language today: DNA. —Megan Molteni

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The tiny nations plotting to become tax havens for cryptocurrency

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Success could transform these territories into cryptocurrency tax havens and safe spaces, and models for smaller economies of the future.

Payday won’t be the same next year for the soccer players of Gibraltar United, a team in the premier division of the sport’s league in the British overseas territory. Only a part of their salary will hit their bank accounts, and the rest will come to them in the form of cryptocurrencies. But the soccer team is no outlier there. Nor is Gibraltar unique — it’s among a growing set of tiny territories betting on cryptocurrencies as economic weapons of the future.

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
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