SMART CAPS IN THE FUTURE, EVEN YOUR DISH DETERGENT WILL BE SPYING ON YOU__: FUTURE SOCIETY

The News Today

 __12.12.18 

smart caps 
Bust A Cap
It’s the future. You’re running low on dish detergent, so the container starts bugging you to buy more. Maybe it even cuts you out of the process by ordering more soap online on its own.
That’s the idea behind Water.io, a hardware company that’s working on a range of “smart caps” that keep track of how much stuff is left in a container.

Track Race 

Water.io envisions a cap for water bottles, another for pill bottles, and another for detergents. The caps will tell you if you’re hydrating enough, track whether you’re taking all your pills — and, yes, put in orders when you’re running low on soap.

It’s a neat idea. But in the end, it’s just one more way for retailers to collect data about your shopping and consumption habits. Just remember that, like online ads, these smart caps could eventually become annoying — or even invasive.

BrandMore Water.io CEO Kobi Bentkovski spelled out the vision in a new interview with Fast Company.
“We are enabling the brands of consumer packaged goods to get data from their products,” he said. “The moment they know who their customers are, how customers are using a product, and when the product is going to run out is the moment they can compete with Amazon and the private brands of the retailers.” 
That sounds great for brands. But here at The Byte, we’ll just keeping buying detergent when we see that we’re running low.




This article was officially published by futurism.com

Astronomers Just Found a Dwarf Planet Three Times As Far Away As Pluto

        FAROUT

It's the most distant body ever spotted orbiting the Sun.

Victor Tangermanna day ago

News

/Astronomer

/Dwarf Planet

/Nasa

“Far Out!”

It’s official: astronomers found a new dwarf planet in our solar system — and it’s the most distant object ever observed in our solar system.

“I said ‘far out!’ when I discovered it, and it’s a very far out object,” said astronomer Scott Shepard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, as quoted by New Scientist. 

The tiny planet is called 2018 VG18 — later nicknamed “Farout” by the team that discovered it — and it’s about 3.5 as far away as Pluto, some 18 billion kilometers (11.2 billion miles) away. That’s more than 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun — and about the same distance as Voyager 2, the NASA probe that launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space this month.

Farout was spotted by the Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii on November 10 by Shepard and several colleagues, according to a statement on Carnegie Institution for Science’s website.

Unusual Orbits

So far, Farout is still deeply mysterious. But one aspect already attracting scientific interest is its unusual orbit. Farout orbits at an unusual angle, along with other so-called “trans-Neptunian objects.”  There’s been a lot of speculation in recent years about what might be causing those astronomical bodies’ unusual trajectory.

One of the most popular explanations is the possible existence of a ninth planet, or Planet X. In fact, the astronomers discovered Farout while searching for the existence of a ninth planet, according to the statement. Most recent data suggests it could also be a group of objects within the same gravitational field.

Slow And Pinkish

But we can glean at least some details about Farout. Farout is estimated to be 500 km in diameter, and to take more than 1,000 years to orbit the Sun. It also has a pinkish hue, according to the researchers.

“With new wide-field digital cameras on some of the world’s largest telescopes, we are finally exploring our Solar System’s fringes, far beyond Pluto,” said Chad Trujillo, astronomer from Northern Arizona University.

The discovery shows that even though researchers are now routinely finding planets orbiting other stars, there are still planet-sized undiscovered objects in our own solar system. It really goes to show how much there still is to learn about our relatively small corner of the galaxy.




This article was officially published by futurism.com

CANADA LEGALIZED WEED, AND IT COULD BE A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR SCIENTISTS

Weed Research

Canada legalized cannabis for recreational use today, and stoners across the country are rejoicing at the move, which opens up the sale of cured marijuana and derivatives, such as oils, in commercial shops.

But the legalization isn’t just a savvy policy decision in terms of tax revenue, tourism, and criminal justice reform — it’s also, according to scientists, an extraordinary opportunity for researchers who believe the cannabis plant could yield promising new medical treatments.

Pot Science

A worthwhile feature in the magazine Science leads with the story of Jonathan Page, an accomplished plant biologist who studied genes that affect oil production in the cannabis plant while living in Germany.

When he returned to his Canadian homeland, though, Page hit a roadblock. He applied for a job at the country’s National Research Council (NRC), and during an interview, he proposed studying how the cannabis plant produces cannabinoids, a class of compounds that act on the human body in complex ways.

He got the job, but when he reported for work, his boss told him that the research project was a non-starter — because cannabis was officially illegal, the NRC couldn’t study it.

High Time

Now that Canada has legalized cannabis, according to Science, the nation’s scientists have an opportunity to lead world research on the cannabis genome and the plant’s potential pharmaceutical uses, which could range from pain management to seizure treatments.

The move could also lead to the brain drain from countries that still block cannabis research, including the United States. In 2013, Page gave up his government position to start a cannabis research company called Anandia. Greg Baute, a researcher who bred tomatoes for Monsanto in California, left the U.S. this year to join the Canadian Anandia, where he now runs the company’s breeding and genetics program.

“There are these super basic, huge questions that need to be answered,” Baute told Science. “You can do these really straightforward experiments and get these huge results.”.           




   This article was officially published by futurism.com

MICROSOFT’S UNDERWATER DATA CENTER IS ACTUALLY WORKING, SAYS CEO

An Ocean Of Data

Think water and electricity don’t mix? A new kind of data center is turning that idea on its head.

Back in 2016 we reported on Project Natick, Microsoft’s moonshot idea of building data centers underwater, where they’d be cooled by the chilly water of the ocean. Now, with one of the centers deployed off the coast of Scotland, CEO Satya Nadella says the company could build more across the globe to support its cloud computing platform.

“Since 50 percent of the world’s population lives close to water bodies, we think this is the way we want to think about future data center regions and expansion,” he told attendees at the Microsoft Future Decoded conference, according to ZDNet.

Tiny Pod

The data center off the coast of Scotland is a 40-foot pod containing 864 servers, with a liquid cooling system that transfers heat from the computers into the ocean. It’s powered by wind from the Orkney Islands grid and should last for about five years.

The small size of the center comes with numerous benefits. Microsoft could deploy more of the centers in other locations, reducing the distance between the servers and Microsoft cloud users to cut latency.

“It was very fast to build, the entire supply chain of it, from start to finish, was 90 days,” said Nadella.

First Of Many

Microsoft will spend at least the next year observing the Scotland data center. If it continues to work as hoped, the company could eventually build entire collections of underwater pods, each housing upwards of several thousand servers.

And as long as they’re air-tight, their close proximity to water will serve as a benefit and not a cause for concern.
                                           
            This article was officially published by Futurism.com

A WORK OF AI-GENERATED ART JUST SOLD FOR VASTLY MORE THAN EXPECTED

AI Auction

Back in August, we reported that a piece of art generated by an artificial intelligence was scheduled to go on auction at Christie’s, a prominent British auction house.

Today the auction went through, and the portrait sold for vastly more than expected. Christie’s anticipated it would fetch between $7,000 and $10,000 — but it instead sold for an impressive $432,000.

Art Thou

The piece, “Edmond de Belamy,” is part of a series of works created by a group of three Parisian AI enthusiasts.

One of the creators of the piece, Hugo Caselles-Dupré, told Motherboard that he doesn’t foresee algorithms replacing human artists — at least for the time being.

“Today, it’s not about algorithms that are replacing people,” Caselles-Dupré said. “In the future, we might have to be careful about this, but today, they’re more like a tool.”
                                                   This article was officially published by futurism.com

FACEBOOK SEES A FUTURE IN AUGMENTED REALITY GLASSES

Zuckerglass

The year is 2025. You’re trying to pay attention to your nephew blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, but bright-red Facebook notifications keep flickering in your peripheral vision.

The social media giant really wants its breakout hardware device to be a pair of augmented reality glasses. That’s according to the company’s head of AR, Ficus Kirkpatrick, who blabbed to TechCrunch during an AR event last week in LA.

“We want to see [AR] glasses come into reality,” Kirkpatrick said, “and I think we want to play our part in helping to bring them there.”

Eye Spy

This isn’t the first sign that Facebook wants to dominate the AR space. It bought the breakout VR company Oculus in 2014. Last year, it filed a patent for what look an awful lot like smart spectacles.

If heads-up glasses are the company’s next push, it’ll need to overcome decades of missteps in the space, from Nintendo’s disastrous Virtual Boy to Google’s failed-and-revived Project Glass. And Kirkpatrick cautioned to TechCrunch that the tech likely won’t be here for at least five years.

If the company dreams up a compelling product, though, we’re all going to need to ask ourselves whether we want Facebook notifications clogging up our views as much as they already do our screens.

AN IBM AI INVENTED PERFUMES THAT’LL SOON SELL IN 4,000 STORES

Eau De AI

We already knew that IBM’s artificial intelligence (AI) Watson was a “Jeopardy” champion that dabbled in cancer diagnosis and life insurance.

Now, according to a new story in Vox, a cousin of Watson has accomplished an even finer task: creating perfumes. Soon, these AI-invented perfumes will go on sale in about 4,000 locations in Brazil.

Smell Curve

Fragrances have traditionally been created by sought-after perfumers. But Symrise, a German fragrance company with clients including Avon and Coty, recently struck a deal with IBM to see how its AI tools could be used to modernize the process.

IBM created an algorithm — its name is Philyra, according to Datanami — that studies fragrance formulas and customer data, then spits out new perfumes inspired by those training materials.

Nose Warmer

The first results of the collaboration are two scents, and the AI-invented perfumes will soon go on sale at O Boticário, a prominent Brazilian beauty chain. Spokespeople declined to confirm to Vox precisely which fragrances were invented by the AI.

It’s a sure sign, though, that AI creations are starting to leak out into the world of consumer products — and next time you sniff a sampler, it’s possible that it wasn’t formulated by a human at all.