daily scientific news

Thursday 1 October 2015

Would You Take a College Class on Cryptocurrencies Like Bitcoin?

From inauspicious beginnings to its current notoriety, Bitcoin has revolutionized the way we use and perceive money. Some see Bitcoin as the best kind of currency ever created; others warn that it's unsustainable and dangerously unregulated. Some of those arguments hold more water than others, but regardless of which side you take it's hard to argue against the opinion that Bitcoin and the other 700+ cryptocurrencies out there have plenty of room to improve.

We're also seeing academic efforts made to improve security as a whole as everyone comes to terms with the fact that cryptocurrency isn't going to be a temporary fad.

That's where academia comes in. Marked by the launch of Ledger, the first cryptocurrency research journal, we're seeing a big push toward the academic study and improvement of digital currency. Cornell University, for example, launched its Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) in July. The goal for these and other research efforts is to explore the inner workings of cryptocurrency systems in order to shape the future of money in the digital future.

Below, Singularity University's Brad Templeton gives a crash course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency:

As Andy Extance notes in Nature, academics and entrepreneurs are placing a particularly keen eye on Bitcoin's innovative online ledger -- the block chain -- which could serve as a model for developments toward e-contracts and secure voting systems. Everyone from economists to computer programmers to mathematicians are fascinated by the incorporation of game theory into Bitcoin's fundamental structure. We're also seeing academic efforts made to improve security as a whole as everyone comes to terms with the fact that cryptocurrency isn't going to be a temporary fad.

If anything, this shift just cements Bitcoin and similar currencies as a sure-thing for the foreseeable future.

Robert Montenegro is a writer, playwright, and dramaturg who lives in Washington DC. His beats include the following: tech, history, sports, geography, culture, and whatever Elon Musk has said on Twitter over the past couple days. He is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.You can follow him on Twitter at @Monteneggroll and visit his po'dunk website at robertmontenegro.com.

Elon Musk is the Concerned Dad in Every Car Commercial

by Natalie Shoemaker

Elon Musk wants to make sure humanity lives and lives better. His whole legacy is built around the idea of making the world a better place. His mission to convert every home to solar and colonize Mars are a testament to his dedication. Musk has taken another step to preserve human life: Meet Model X, a Tesla SUV vehicle built to defend its passengers from a biological attack.

Inside the car is a bio-weapon defense button in the dash display, which Musk says “gives you hospital level air quality” when the mode is activated. It pumps up the Model X’s HEPA air filter to maximum, which Musk says is strong enough to rid any toxins from a bio-weapon.

The Model X not only protects your loved ones against biological incidents, it's also able to protect against the standard car crash. Musk boasted in the announcement that the Model X has a 5 star crash test rating... if there was a 6 star, the Model X would get it.

When it comes to front-end crashes, it's simple calculation of force over distance. The Model X has no engine, which in standard cars gets pushed into the passenger cabin. The Model X, therefore, has a higher “crumple zone” to absorb and distribute the force of the impact. “It's the difference between jumping into a pool or a pool with a rock in it, so...” Musk joked.

When it came to the side pole impact test, the same results held true, beating (what was) the highest-rated SUV.

See the results for yourself:

Likewise, probability of rollover is reduced, probability of death is reduced from crashes and from inhaling toxic emissions.

Check out the full announcement here.

Natalie has been writing professionally for about 6 years. After graduating from Ithaca College with a degree in Feature Writing, she snagged a job at PCMag.com where she had the opportunity to review all the latest consumer gadgets. Since then she has become a writer for hire, freelancing for various websites. In her spare time, you may find her riding her motorcycle, reading YA novels, hiking, or playing video games. Follow her on Twitter: @nat_schumaker

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Staff

Entrepreneur, You Need a Manifesto | Makerbot's Bre Pettis

by DSN Editors

"The decisions made when you’re making a company are hard. And it’s much easier to live with them if you’ve made your own spiritual guidelines for how you’re going to live your company."- Bre Pettis, Makerbot

Bre Pettis, founder of MakerBot, a pioneer in consumer 3D printing, is interested in everything. He sees the world as an endless series of problems begging for creative solutions. Over the course of his career thus far, his curious brain has led him to puppetry, teaching, and ultimately to tech entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs as a class tend to be creative and multivalent. In other words: all over the place. In order to harness their energies and accomplish something great, Pettis argues (from his own experience), they need to bound themselves and their companies within a specific set of rules. Early on, Pettis’ guiding manifesto for himself and MakerBot was what he called “The Cult of Done,” the principle of seeing each project through to successful completion before moving onto the next. Sound obvious? Core values often sound deceptively simple, but they reign in tendencies (like leaving a trail of half-finished, abandoned initiatives) that over time can drag a business (and its founder) down.

Eric Paley, a Managing Partner of Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund, spends his professional life evaluating promising entrepreneurs and their companies. Founder Collective has an impressive track record of picking winners.

Here are his thoughts on what make Bre Pettis and his company extraordinary:

The Visionaries series is brought to you by DSN in collaboration with Founder Collective. In it, we profile remarkable entrepreneurs and the ideas and practices that make them great.

Image Credit: Thos Robinson/Getty Images

Wednesday 30 September 2015

A War On Drugs That’s Actually Worth Fighting

by Simon Oxenham

The image above shows a Chinese policeman wading through a sea of confiscated fake medicines. It is now estimated that between 100,000 and a million people die every year due to fake medicine. Yet this remains a topic that rarely receives any attention whatsoever, despite being a problem far more suited to police intervention than the “war on drugs”, which takes up the lions share of drug-related law enforcement and criminal justice resources.

The argument against fake medicines is obvious: fake medicines have no possible benefit, yet cause countless deaths. In theory it is a problem far better suited to police intervention than illegal drug use, because unlike recreational drug users, victims of fake drugs are unwilling and conduct their business in the open.

So why has so little been done? There is a very important distinction between “counterfeit drugs” and “fake drugs”. Many drugs are far too expensive for patients in poor parts of the world or without insurance, so plenty of people are forced to buy counterfeits. These are illegal generic drugs, whose makers do not pay for intellectual property. This is a very different crime to that of the producers of fake drugs, which are drugs that are designed to look like real drugs, but in fact contain no medicine. By any standard, the latter is a crime on a far grander scale.

The producers of counterfeit medications are responsible for the only affordable life saving medications in plenty of parts of the world. From one perspective, they are modern day Robin Hoods who save potentially millions of lives.

Much of the world’s law enforcement agencies currently see no distinction between these two categories of crime, which is one key reason the more serious crime of producing fake drugs so often flies under the radar.

There are obvious financial reasons for pharmaceutical companies and other vested interests to fail to attack the problem of fake drugs. The very existence of fake drugs encourages patients to take genuine medication instead of generic or counterfeit medication that may be as effective. Making the problem of fake drugs go away could therefore actually threaten their bottom line.

An investigation by Newsweek has shone a light on the problem, pointing out that even the World Health Organisation makes no distinction between “fake” and “counterfeit”, using one catch-all term that obfuscates the problem: SSFC - “ substandard, spurious, falsely labeled, falsified and counterfeit”. This is patently ridiculous. The producers of counterfeit medications are responsible for the only affordable life saving medications in plenty of parts of the world. From one perspective, they are modern day Robin Hoods who save potentially millions of lives. The producers of fake drugs on the other hand are knowingly responsible for nothing but pain, misery and death through the very worst kind of fraud. The first step in the war against fake drugs, is understanding the difference.

Read the full investigation at Newsweek. Follow Simon Oxenham on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, RSS, or join the mailing list to get each week's post straight to your inbox. Image Credit: Stringer/Getty

The Horsepower Map of the United States

by Frank Jacobs

Remember the days when progress was measured not in bandwidth but in horsepower? Of course not; you're not 100 years old. And so you never pored over this map as an impressionable teenager.

This Horsepower Map of the United States distorts the area of each state to reflect the amount of horsepower installed. Not actual horses, mind you – the year is 1933, not 1833 – but horsepower as a unit of measure for mechanical power (i.e. 1 hp = 746 watt) and ultimately industrial output.

What this cartogram shows, therefore, is where the industrial muscle of the U.S. was located back in the early 1930s. Basically, the Rust Belt before it rusted.

The attention is immediately drawn to Pennsylvania, so big and square that it looks like the very cornerstone of America's industrial might. Ohio and New York are the two other main powerhouses; and to a lesser extent Massachusetts (and the rest of the New England states) and Illinois (plus other states in the Midwest).

The South and West are remarkably insignificant: Florida seems about the size of Vermont and Kentucky fits in Rhode Island twice; while California is smaller than New Jersey and Texas is outsized by Connecticut.

Some states are so tiny, horsepower-wise, that they're barely visible on the map. The combined industrial wattage of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota is still smaller than that of Maine.

As they say: the past is a different country. But so is the future. How will tomorrow's economic performance be measured? And where will America's muscles bulge?

Map found here on the excellent Making Maps blog.

Strange Maps #743

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

Edward Snowden Opens Twitter Account, Follows Only the NSA

by Daphne Muller

It sounds like a Late Show joke, but it’s not: Edward Snowden joined Twitter yesterday and his first follow was the NSA.

At a pace faster than Caitlyn Jenner’s Twitter debut, Snowden’s account has over a million followers. One has to wonder what took him so long to come around to the social media site. Even Twitter got excited and published at heat map of who and where people were tweeting about @Snowden.

Today @Snowden joined Twitter, and here's the world's response. http://pic.twitter.com/d6HgVvdRsf
— Twitter (@twitter) September 29, 2015

His timing coincides with a yet-to-be-announced collaboration with the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He’s also been busy leaking more stories about NSA surveillance to The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald.

As Snowden’s public profile continues to grow, it will be interesting to see how governments navigate their criticisms of him. His NSA follow is and obvious political statement about the irony of the internet as both a medium for worldwide social exchanges as well as massive surveillance.

So far, the NSA isn’t following him back.

A 6-Hour Workday: America Should Follow Sweden's Lead

by Robert Montenegro

I'm personally very grateful for the 40-hour work week, given that we'd probably still be pseudo-slaves if not for the efforts and sacrifices of late 19th-century labor demonstrators. I'm glad for the 8-hour work day because it beats the heck out of a 12-hour work day and a 100-hour work week. That said, it's entirely possible that a six-hour work day would be even better for all parties involved, and not just because I'm looking to spend more time zapping through my Netflix queue.

Consider Sweden, a country that's frequently regarded as one of the world's most awesome (in spite of the shade my friend Orion Jones likes to throw its way). More and more Swedish companies have begun experimenting with the six-hour work day -- and many of them are sticking by the switch after being pleased with the results. The argument in favor generally begins like this:

"I think the eight-hour workday is not as effective as one would think... Some people would argue that [a six-hour day] is a costly measure for the company, but that is based on a conventional conception that people are effective 100% of an eight-hour day."

Enacting a six-hour day is fairly simple. You ask your employees to minimize personal business (that means no social media), discard useless meetings, and encourage folks to spend more time with their families and on restful activities...

That's Linus Feldt, CEO of Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, as quoted in this piece by Adele Peters. Feldt explains that his company's work hour reduction has led to more-focused employees wasting a whole lot less time on non-work tasks and in pointless meetings. It's also given Filimundus and similar firms an opportunity to prove they're dedicated to their workers and value their lives outside of the office. That's the sort of thing that nips turnover in the bud.

Boston College professor Juliet Schor thinks Americans work too much. Compared to the rest of the world, they do.

Think about it this way: What do you value more, time or money? Would you rather have a 40+ hr/wk job that pays well or a 30 hr/wk job that pays a little less, but offers you the chance at more freedom? Either choice is acceptable depending on your priorities and ambition, but I'd hazard a guess that the 30-hour gig would be a lot more popular with job seekers.

Will the 6-hour work day ever gain traction in the United States?

Enacting a six-hour day is fairly simple. You ask your employees to minimize personal business (that means no social media), discard useless meetings, and encourage folks to spend more time with their families and on restful activities so they'll be ready to go-go the next day. Companies like Filimundus have found that cutting away the inefficiency that comes with the long work day allows them to get as much done in six hours as they did in eight, but with much happier employees.

Will the 6-hour work day ever gain traction in the United States? I have some serious doubts; we, as a culture, are awfully set in our ways, even if our ways are dumb and ineffective. But maybe some forward-thinking, labor-friendly employer will find a way to pull it off while maintaining steady profit. We'll just have to wait and see.