technology

The 1 Up Fever

"In the Berlin city everyone is going crazy for a viral new app. Anyone with a smartphone can play a sort of Super Mario Bros arcade game in Augmented Reality. In the game a coin corresponds to 0.01 Bitcoins. Citizens' habits are tainted by the game. Coins are hidden all over the city, you can spot them just scanning around with your device, not always they are easy to grab. People started to leave their jobs in order to collect Coins in the streets. All over the city people are jumping and running around with their smartphones, trying to grab as many virtual coins as they can..." Continue reading →

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MIT researches find gold can control blood clotting

"Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, funded by the US National Science Foundation, have come up with a new technique to control blood clotting by using gold. The method involves small particles of gold and the use of infrared laser light. According to the researchers, who published their findings in the PLoS One journal, one of the main advantages of this method is that coagulation can be turned on or off as needed. Wound healing, surgery and other conditions require handling this process, mainly through the use of anticoagulants such as heparin or warfarin. However, reversing the effects of these drugs is difficult." Continue reading →

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Google’s Sergey Brin bankrolled world’s first synthetic beef hamburger ‘for animal welfare reasons’

"The man who has bankrolled the production of the world’s first lab-grown hamburger has been revealed as Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The internet entrepreneur has backed the project to the tune of €250,000 (£215,000), allowing scientists to grow enough meat in the lab to create a burger – as a proof of concept – that will be cooked and eaten in London on Monday. Brin, a computer scientist who set up Google with university colleague Larry Page, is one of the wealthiest men in the world and has a history of backing projects that sound as though they belong in science fiction movies." Continue reading →

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Woolly mammoth DNA may lead to a resurrection of the ancient beast

"The pioneering scientist who created Dolly the sheep has outlined how cells plucked from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses might one day help resurrect the ancient beasts. The notional procedure – bringing with it echoes of the Jurassic Park films – was spelled out by Sir Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh-based stem-cell scientist, whose team unveiled Dolly as the world's first cloned mammal in 1996. Though it is unlikely that a mammoth could be cloned in the same way as Dolly, more modern techniques that convert tissue cells into stem cells could potentially achieve the feat, Wilmut says in an article today for the academic journalism website, The Conversation." Continue reading →

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Scientists cook world’s first lab-grown, in-vitro hamburger

"The in-vitro burger, cultured from cattle stem cells, will be fried in a pan and tasted by two volunteers. The burger is the result of years of research by Dutch scientist Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht, who is working to show how meat grown in petri dishes might one day be a true alternative to meat from livestock. The meat in the burger has been made by knitting together around 20,000 strands of protein that has been cultured from cattle stem cells in Post’s lab. The tissue is grown by placing the cells in a ring, like a donut, around a hub of nutrient gel, Post explained." Continue reading →

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The Best Way to Profit From Private-Equity Crowdfunding

"Instagram and Tumblr are just a couple of examples of young companies that were acquired for hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars, making their earliest investors fantastically rich. Now, thanks to a vocal group of citizens, ordinary citizens will be able to invest a small and affordable amount of money in a company they believe in and in exchange receive an ownership stake. This revolutionary change is called equity crowdfunding, and hundreds of websites called 'funding portals' — sites like CircleUp and RockThePost, to name two — are popping up to help match startup companies with potential investors like you." Continue reading →

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A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (March 9th, 1993)

"People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money. Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it." Continue reading →

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Thousands now using online gun sales to avoid background checks: report

"Online gun sales have become a haven for buyers looking to avoid background checks, leading gun safety advocates concerned they are becoming more of a problem than sales at private gun shows, according to a new report by a progressive think tank. Among the advertisements for more than 15,000 guns on the sales site Armslist, in 10 states where lawmakers voted against bills that would have required background checks for private gun sales were nearly 2,000 listings by people looking to buy their firearms privately. 'Nobody’s monitoring this,' Hatalsky told the Post. 'Nobody has any ability to stop these people who are looking for private sellers.'" Continue reading →

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Hackers now stashing child pornography on business websites

"A new study from an online watchdog group shows a surge in complaints that hackers are manipulating both adult and regular business sites to spread viruses and images of children being sexually assaulted. According to the BBC, the group, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), has tracked 227 reports of use of 'orphan folders' to hide the offending material in the past six weeks. One example involved a furniture store site being used as a repository for the images of sexual abuse. 'What better way to scare someone into paying a ransom than to tell them that they have been spotted accessing child pornography?' Cluley told the Independent." Continue reading →

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