Hot Issues – Page 5

Breakthrough Thinking, Global Warming, Hacking, Hot Issues, Latest News

Japan’s massive new borehole project to reach Earth’s mantle

May 2, 2017

Not since the drilling of the Russia’s Kola Borehole have scientists ventured this deep.

Japanese scientists have announced a plan to drill through the Earth’s crust and reach the mantle. The major initiative would be a first for humankind. Despite multiple previous attempts and multiple boreholes of significant depth, we’ve never managed to drill far enough to see what lies beneath the Earth’s rocky crust. Instead, our knowledge of the mantle is mostly based on indirect observations, like the speed at which seismic waves propagate through the planet’s internal geometry.

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AI, Analysis, Biotech, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Hot Issues, Medical Breakthrough

Regrowing our own body parts

April 30, 2017

The ability to regenerate body parts has always been a fascinating prospect, inspiring characters like Wolverine who can instantly heal themselves and regrow body parts they’ve lost — and now regeneration has inspired scientific research.

Many species in the animal kingdom can regenerate: arthropods (like scorpions) can regrow appendages, some annelids (like worms) can regenerate from only a few segments of their body, echinoderms (like starfish) can both self-amputate and re-grow limbs, amphibians (like salamanders and newts) can regenerate a limb in as little as a month, and some reptiles can regenerate their tails.

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Alzheimer's Disease, Business, Economy, Employment, Health & Fitness, Hot Issues

Only 3% of seniors wait until 70 to collect social security even thought it’d mean a 76% larger payment

April 29, 2017

Social Security is a program that forms the financial foundation for a majority of our nation’s retired workers, and that’s not expected to change anytime soon. We’re really dependent on Social Security income, and that could be a problem

Data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) shows that 61% of all current retired workers receiving benefits count on Social Security to provide at least half of their monthly income.

Continue reading… “Only 3% of seniors wait until 70 to collect social security even thought it’d mean a 76% larger payment”

Breakthrough Thinking, Hacking, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Hot Issues, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine

Human head transplant less than a year away

April 28, 2017

By this time next year, if all goes according to plan, the world’s first human head transplant will have taken place, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero has revealed.

In early 2015, Canavero made headlines around the world when he announced that he would perform the ground-breaking surgery within two years. Now, he has revealed in an interview with German magazine OOOM that it’s going to take place within 10 months, in China.

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Drone, drones, Hackers, Hacking, Hot Issues, Human Behavior, Law Enforcement, Legal Issues, privacy, Video, women

Backyard skinny-dippers losing privacy to peeping drone stalkers

April 28, 2017

Recent advances in technology mean we can no longer rely on fences or barriers around our homes to protect our privacy. This was certainly the case for Darwin resident Karli Hyatt, who on Tuesday explained how a drone invaded the security and privacy of her suburban backyard.

Hyatt had returned home last week from an evening gym session, undressed and jumped into her secluded backyard pool. She thought she was “skinny-dipping” in private. Within minutes, though, a small camera-mounted quadcopter drone was hovering close overhead. Hyatt is certain it was watching her, although there was no operator to be seen.

She describes the experience as initially shocking and has ongoing concerns about who might have been flying the drone and why. The result is an erosion of trust and cohesion in her neighborhood and a feeling of insecurity in her own home.

Continue reading… “Backyard skinny-dippers losing privacy to peeping drone stalkers”

Corporate Manipulation, Economy, Hot Issues, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

Have we reached peak beer?

April 26, 2017

When craft brewers get together, we agree that this is the greatest time in history to be a beer drinker in America. In 1981, there were only 82 breweries in the United States, and our beer, fizzy and flavorless, was the laughingstock of the beer world. Today, America is home to over 5,300 small, innovative craft breweries making unique, flavorful, creative brews.

But we also agree that the horizon isn’t so bright. After years of 15 percent growth, the craft sector is down to the single digits. Part of that is to be expected in a maturing part of any market — but it’s also a result of a pushback by a handful of gargantuan global brewers, aided by slack government antitrust oversight. I worry that yet another major shift in the beer landscape is upon us — and this time, American consumers will be the losers.

Continue reading… “Have we reached peak beer?”

Home Technology, Hot Issues, Internet of Things, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

The maker of an internet-connected garage door disabled a customer’s device over a bad review

April 20, 2017

There’s a new, dystopian risk to using internet-connected gadgets: If you complain, the company that made it might remotely kill your product.

This is what happened to one customer who bought Garadget — an internet-connected garage door opener. It lets you remotely lock or unlock your garage with an app, or see if it’s open.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Energy, Engineering, Hot Issues, Solar Energy, Solar Power

How graphene is going to transform the way we get power

April 15, 2017

Futurist Thomas Frey: In 2002, when Dr. Bor Jang, a little-known researcher in Akron, Ohio, filed his patent for graphene, few people had a clue as to how revolutionary it would be. Certainly not the people at the Nobel Foundation who forgot to check the patent registry and instead awarded the Nobel Prize for graphene to scientists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov from the University of Manchester.

As the poster child for the emerging new super materials industry, graphene is a form of ultra thin carbon just one atom thick. If you can imagine something a million times thinner than a single sheet of paper, you get the picture.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Problems, Hot Issues, Science & Technology News

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming as biased as we are

April 5, 2017

When you perform a Google search for every day queries, you don’t typically expect systemic racism to rear its ugly head. Yet, if you’re a woman searching for a hairstyle, that’s exactly what you might find.

A simple Google image search for ‘women’s professional hairstyles’ returns the following:

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Big Problems, Computer Security, Hackers, Hacking, Home Technology, Hot Issues, Internet, Internet of Things, privacy, Science & Technology News

The World Wide Web’s inventor warns it’s in peril on 28th anniversary

March 21, 2017

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, now wants to save it.

The computer scientist who wrote the blueprint for what would become the World Wide Web 28 years ago today is alarmed at what has happened to it in the past year.

“Over the past 12 months, I’ve become increasingly worried about three new trends, which I believe we must tackle in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool which serves all of humanity,” he said in a statement issued from London. He cited compromised personal data; fake news that he says has “spread like wildfire”; and the lack of regulation in political advertising, which he says threatens democracy.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Crime Prevention, Hot Issues, Machine Learning

How to Upgrade Judges with Machine Learning

March 20, 2017

When should a criminal defendant be required to await trial in jail rather than at home? Software could significantly improve judges’ ability to make that call—reducing crime or the number of people stuck waiting in jail.

In a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists and computer scientists trained an algorithm to predict whether defendants were a flight risk from their rap sheet and court records using data from hundreds of thousands of cases in New York City. When tested on over a hundred thousand more cases that it hadn’t seen before, the algorithm proved better at predicting what defendants will do after release than judges.

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brain-computer interfaces, Elon Musk, Future, Futurist, Genes, Genetics, Hot Issues, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

An End to Aging: Can Science Allow Humans to To Become Immortal?

March 22, 2017

AGING — A LAW OR A SUGGESTION?

The inevitability of aging may be no more than yet another biological theory that scientific advances will retire in the near future. Some scientists today say that longevity is a societal concept that we may no longer need to uphold as a static law of nature, but instead, as one that can be rewritten to our benefit.

Researchers from fields spanning genetics to artificial intelligence (AI) are working towards a future where we will have to stop using a “midlife crisis” to justify our ill-advised decisions (but is it really ever the wrong time to buy a Porsche?).

While there have been innumerable theoretical ideas and initiatives for dodging the Grim Reaper, many actual strategies that are being developed today fall into one of two camps: biomedical or technological.

Continue reading… “An End to Aging: Can Science Allow Humans to To Become Immortal?”