How are humans going to become extinct? 24 April 2013Last updated at 05:42 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Prepare to meet your maker: Will humans become extinct at our own hand?
What are the greatest global threats to humanity? Are we on the verge of our own unexpected extinction? An international team of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is investigating the biggest dangers. And they argue in a research paper, Existential Risk as a Global Priority, that international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks. China visa changes could attract job-hunting IT pros. High performance access to file storage A change to China’s visa laws due to come into force this (northern) summer could make the People’s Republic a more attractive destination for ex-pat IT professionals up for the challenge, but the vital details on exactly which skills are needed are still being worked out.
The Exit and Entry Administration Law comes into force in July, introducing for the first time multi-entry visas which are valid for five years, as well as six-month visas for short-term recruits, according to China Daily. Oh, those crazy Frenchies: Facebook faces family photo tax in France. High performance access to file storage Facebook should pay the French government for hosting the holiday photos and status updates of the French people, a new report commissioned by the French government has suggested.
The new 200-page report* on taxing the digital economy - commissioned by four French Cabinet Ministers - proposes that France should tax data collection. The touted idea would see new tax bills from the French government landing on Google, Facebook, Amazon and any other web companies that store data about their French users. The report was commissioned in July by Fleur Pellerin, France's Minister for Small and Medium Enterprise, Innovation and the Digital Economy, backed by three colleagues amid government frustration about the low tax American web giants were paying in France.
Web companies pay under 1 per cent of what a standard French company would pay in tax, according to figures from Le Monde. Forget your password: The future is 'passthoughts' (Phys.org) —Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password, according to School of Information researchers.
A new study explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a substitute for passwords. The project was led by School of Information professor John Chuang, along with Hamilton Nguyen, an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; Charles Wang, a first-year I School MIMS student; and Benjamin Johnson, formerly a postdoctoral scholar at the I School.
Chuang presented the team's findings this week at the 2013 Workshop on Usable Security at the Seventeenth International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security in Okinawa, Japan. Since the 1980s, computer scientists have proposed the use of biometrics for computer authentication. All that has changed, though, with recent developments in biosensor technologies. New consumer-grade EEG devices.
Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of "4D printing" A federal judge has thrown out a patent claim against Rackspace, ruling that mathematical algorithms can’t be patented.
The ruling in the Eastern Disrict stemmed from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA asserting that processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation. Chief Judge Leonard Davis based the ruling on U.S. Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. According to Rackspace, this is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.
Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense. Rob Tiller, Red Hat’s Assistant General Counsel for IP, said: Giant robot jellyfish reporting for recon duty, sir (video) Stromer Electric Bicycle. A Doctor Hacks His iPhone To Detect A Parasite That Plagues Billions. Recently it seems like tech startups that promise to turn the smart phone into a mobile lab are coming out of the woodwork.
But it turns out that sometimes it doesn’t take engineers, Silicon Valley funds, or a sexy elevator pitch to get the job done: just a group of compassionate doctors with an eagerness to make due with limited materials. While researching victims of intestinal worms in Tanzania, Canadian infectious disease specialist Isaac Bogoch didn’t always have access to a microscope to search for signs of hookworms and other parasites in stool samples. Man Has 75 Percent of His Skull Replaced By a 3D Printed Implant. Feel like you have lost your head?
No problem, simply print yourself another. An unnamed man from the US was able to do just that, courtesy of Oxford Performance Materials (OPM) in Connecticut. He had his cranium scanned by a 3D scanner before the prosthesis was formed to fit his features, and the resulting plate was surgically implanted earlier this week. The technology, called the OsteoFab Patient Specific Cranial Device, received FDA approval on February 18 of this year, and it’s now ready to take the field of medical 3D printing to a level that is literally head and shoulders above the competition.