Search Results for: energy

Blockchain technology new major role in equalizing American cities

Becky

The city of Austin is currently piloting a program in which its 2,000 homeless residents will be given a unique identifier that’s safely and securely recorded on the blockchain. This identifier will help individuals consolidate their records and seek out crucial services. Service providers will also be able to access the information. If successful, we’ll have a new, more efficient way to communicate and ensure that the right people are at the table to help the homeless. In Austin and around the country, it seems that blockchain technology is opening a range…

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A New Smart wall May Soon Help You Control Your Home

Becky

Forget a smart speaker, soon you may be able to control your smart home with a few taps on your wall. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research have developed a way to make your walls smart, at a cost of $20 per meter, as spotted by NBC News. Dubbed Wall++, the researchers found that they could use conductive paint and a custom sensor board to create electrodes and turn a standard wall into a gesture-sensing touchpad and an “electromagnetic sensor to detect and track electrical devices and appliances.”…

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Instagram New data portability tool.

Becky
fACEBOOK,INSTAGRAM,MESSANGER

Instagram is building its own data portability tool which will allow users to download a copy of everything they’ve ever shared on the platform, similar to how Facebook’s download your information tool works. The platform confirmed the news to TechCrunch. The tool could help Instagram users monitor how much of their data is on the platform. It will also help Facebook, which owns Instagram, comply with the forthcoming European data privacy rule, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will require all data to be portable. The rule will also require…

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How to Find Out If Your Facebook Data Was Stolen by Cambridge Analytica

Becky

Roughly 87 million people had their Facebook data stolen by the political research firm Cambridge Analytica. And starting today, Facebook will finally notify the people who had their information scooped up. About 70 million are in the US, while the rest are primarily in the UK, Indonesia, and the Philippines. How can you find out if your Facebook information was compromised? A notification will appear at the top of your Facebook newsfeed, along with a new button for changing your privacy settings. Even if your information wasn’t swallowed up by…

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New Research Reveals Cellphone Radiation to Humans

Becky

Male rats showed a small increase in a kind of heart tumor after exposure to massive amounts of cellphone radiation, a new government study reports. But don’t read too much into that, experts say — because those rats bathed in more radiation than even the heaviest cellphone users would experience. There are ongoing worries about whether cellphones can give you cancer — especially brain cancer, since our phones spend so much time near our faces. It’s true that cell phones do emit radiation but it’s radiofrequency radiation, which is much…

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New Study Shows that Top Video Games Depict Unrealistic Drugs Use

Becky

Harmful narcotics often give unlikely strength and health boosts to characters, a study of real and made-up drugs in best-selling video games has highlighted. The report also details how players are often prompted to create drug cocktails to gain new or enhanced abilities. The work was done by Archstone, an addiction awareness organisation. It said parents needed to be cautious about what their children are playing and learning. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), which assigns age and content ratings to games in the US, says it is happy with…

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Huawei New Hands with PCITC to Embrace Smart Factory 2.0

Becky

Huawei Joins New Hands with PCITC. Our Earth faces increasingly grave environmental problems. Although more people have realized the significance of environmental protection and have chosen shared bicycles and electric cars as part of their low-carbon lifestyles, yet we still rely heavily on non-renewable energy such as petroleum. How much oil is left and how long will it last? According to estimates from conservative experts, the sustained oil reserves left may last only 30 to 40 years at present rates of consumption, and the next oil crisis may happen much…

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The Unfortunate Side Effect of LED Lighting

Light pollution has increased worldwide because of the prevalence of energy saving LED lights. However, the problem isn’t with the lights themselves — but the fact that the world is getting brighter because LEDs are illuminating places we didn’t bother to light before. And that has its own environmental cost. The findings were published in the journal Science Advances, and found that artificially lit outdoor surfaces grew at a pace of 2.2 percent each year between 2012 and 2016. “With few exceptions, growth in lighting occurred throughout South America, Africa,…

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Eco-friendly bitcoin competitor Chia, Invented

Becky

A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week, and legendary coder Bram Cohen wants to fix that. Considering he invented the ubiquitous peer-to-peer file transfer protocol BitTorrent, you should take him seriously. Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain. “The idea…

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IOT and cybersecurity: tomorrow’s threats today

A growing number of devices and appliances are now getting connected to a network, and to each other, to provide additional, enhanced features. We are beginning to see some of this potential being realised and the number of connected devices is growing fast. Cisco predicts that 50 billion new devices will be connected to the internet by 2020. Additionally, IoT connected cars are able to monitor and adapt to both internal performance quality and external environment, allowing modern cars to provide a new level of safety that was before unattainable.…

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