By Holly Cave, The Guardian
There are three main toothpaste ingredients that may be made of nano-sized particles, so let’s brush up on the facts
The Consumer Products Inventory lists more than 1,600 products that are identified by the manufacturer as containing nanoparticles. So let’s take a look at what’s inside your household items. This week: toothpaste.
Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff
When a group of cryptographers launched Zerocoin last year, they hoped their cryptography project could upgrade Bitcoin to be as anonymous as its most privacy-focused users have always wanted it to be. Now, after six months of waiting in vain for their code to be adopted by the Bitcoin community, they’re taking a bolder approach: Creating their own cryptocurrency, with privacy baked in from the start.
At the Real World Crypto conference Monday in New York, Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green announced the next phase in the evolution of Zerocoin: creating an alternative cryptocurrency with an infrastructure independent of Bitcoin. The new coins, which Green says will go into circulation in May in some sort of beta program, will have their own exchange rate with existing currencies, their own “miners” producing new coins, and their own public ledger of transactions known as the “blockchain,” just as Bitcoin does. But unlike Bitcoin, Zerocoin is designed to be spent and received without revealing any trace of a user’s identity.
We’re still decades — if not centuries — away from being able to transfer a mind to a supercomputer. It’s a fantastic future prospect that makes some people incredibly squeamish. But there are considerable benefits to living a digital life. Here’s why you should seriously consider uploading.
As I’ve pointed out before, uploading is not a given; there are many conceptual, technological, ethical, and security issues to overcome. But for the purposes of this Explainer, we’re going to assume that uploads, or digital mind transfers, will eventually be possible — whether it be from the scanning and mapping of a brain, serial brain sectioning, brain imaging, or some unknown process.
What if we built a super-smart artificial brain and no one cared? IBM (IBM) is facing that possibility. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is having a hard time making money off of its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, Watson. The company has always claimed that Watson was more than a publicity stunt, that it had revolutionary real-world applications in health care, investing, and other realms. IBM Chief Executive Officer Virginia Rometty has promised that Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, but according to the Journal, as of last October Watson was far behind projections, only bringing in $100 million.
Written By: Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub
Box Brands has launched the first-ever burrito-making robots at two locations on Santa Monica Boulevard — inside Mobile and 76 gas stations.
The orange Burritobox offers 6 types of burrito, including a breakfast burrito, and several sauces. The customer selects the burrito desired and which sauces from a touch-screen menu, then swipes a credit card. One minute later, the machine dispenses a hot “hand”-rolled burrito.
Written By: Cameron Scott — Singularity Hub
Up to now, wearable computing has been a niche market dominated, but for Google Glass, by startups. Yet, with the tiny size and low cost of sensors and chips, wearable computing could be a huge market in which smart sensors in everything from baby diapers to workout gear connect to users’ smartphones, giving them constant insight into how things formerly hidden are operating.
It may sound like yet another techno-topian promise, and before the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show it might have been. But at the annual Las Vegas tech blowout earlier this month, Intel, one of the weightiest firms in the tech industry, endorsed wearable computing with the launch of a new chip designed for it.
Hardware Battlefield entrant Pocket Drones blew past their initial goal of $30,000 last night after launching on our stage at CES 2014. The company, run by long-time friends and moderators of the Drone User’s Group, Tim Reuter, TJ Johnson, and Chance Roth, built their drones as an alternative to expensive, bulky toy drones.
Joel Flickinger’s two-bedroom home in the hills above Oakland, Calif., hums with custom-built computing gear. Just inside the front door, in a room anyone else might use as a den, he’s placed a desk next to a fireplace that supports a massive monitor, with cables snaking right and left toward two computers, each about the size of a case of beer. Flickinger has spent more than $20,000 on these rigs and on a slower model that runs from the basement. They operate continuously, cranking out enough heat to warm the house and racking up $400 a month in electric bills. There isn’t much by way of décor, other than handwritten inspirational Post-it notes:
“I make money easily,” one reads. “Money flows to me.” “I am a money magnet.”
Flickinger, 37, a software engineer and IT consultant by trade, doesn’t leave the house much these days. He’s a full-time Bitcoin miner.
Ryan Bushey — Business Insider
At The University of Southern California, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has built a colossal 3D printer that can build a house in 24 hours. Khoshnevis’s robot comes equipped with a nozzle that spews out concrete and can build a home based on a set computer pattern.
We first saw this on MSN.com. The technology, known as Contour Crafting, could completely revolutionize the construction industry. Discover Magazine’s Brad Lemley explains that workers would lay down two rails for the robot to operate on.
