Litecoin Creator Charlie Lee Predicts Bitcoin Halving Will Be Self-Fulfilling Prophecy – The Daily Hodl

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Litecoin creator Charlie Lee is sharing his views on the great Bitcoin debate of 2019.

In a new interview, Lee says he thinks Bitcoins halving, which will lower the reward miners receive for powering the network in half, may have a short-term effect on the price of BTC. Lee tells The Crypto Lark he thinks Bitcoins price may pump leading up to the halving and then deflate after the event happens in May.

Everyone is thinking about how [the halving] will affect the price. From my point of view, I think that, kind of like the Litecoin halving, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people think the price will go up, they will buy, which causes the price to go up. So I think well see some of that play into effect, and maybe after the halving we might see people sell the news, so to speak, and you might see a dip. But who knows. I think there is going to be a lot of price action this year because of the halving, which will be exciting

A lot of people say the halving is priced in because you know about it ahead of time. But the market is participated by humans, and humans are emotional and they try to fit patterns. With Litecoin last year, we saw the price go up quite a bit before the halving. And then after the halving, it actually dropped quite a bit. And that just happens. People were buying because they think the price will go up and after the halving happens, they just sell. Well see what happens with Bitcoin. It might follow the same pattern. I think it will, but who knows.

Lee, who famously sold all of his Litecoin in late 2017 to avoid any conflict of interest, also talks about his thesis that anyone interested in investing in the dangerously volatile crypto markets should buy Bitcoin before exploring the altcoin market.

I think for most people, they should actually invest in Bitcoin first. Bitcoin is the king of crypto. Its more of a for sure thing. Dont put all your money into a much more speculative altcoin that could go to zero much more easily than Bitcoin can. Similarly, I wouldnt tell everyone to put all their money into crypto. So, same thing. You shouldnt put all your money into an altcoin without having a decent amount of exposure to Bitcoin first.

Investing in Litecoin is more volatile than investing in Bitcoin. During the bear market, the ratio also drops, so your Litecoin hodlings drop a lot more than your Bitcoin holdings. And then during the bull market, the ratio goes up. So if youre holding Litecoin, youre actually making more money than when you hold Bitcoin. It all depends on when you get in.

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Litecoin Creator Charlie Lee Predicts Bitcoin Halving Will Be Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - The Daily Hodl

Could Bitcoin halving follow the same pattern as Litecoin? – AMBCrypto

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The upcoming Bitcoin halving set to happen sometime in May 2020, has been anticipated by many in the crypto community. Contributors and researchers have jumped into the discussion and made their comments on how the price fluctuations and the performance of the coin after the halving could play out.

Looking back,Litecoins halving in August 2019 resulted in a significant change in the coins price, market cap, and the hash rate. Crypto investors and enthusiasts had predicted back then that Litecoins halving would actually give some insights into Bitcoins halving slated in spring 2020.

Litecoins founder Charlie Lee in an interview talks about Bitcoin and if it might follow the same pattern as Litecoin, post the halving.

He stated,

With Litecoin last year, we saw the price go up quite a bit before the halving but dropped post the halving. Thats how it is. People were buying because they thought the price would go up and after the halving happened, they just sell Well see what happens with bitcoin I think Bitcoin will follow the same pattern. But you never know what might happen.

Well, if we look at it, Bitcoins price has been constantly fluctuating from the past couple of weeks but Lee, however, stated that Bitcoins price was indeed recovering. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $8,650.

Further commenting on all the hype that is usually built up around halving, Lee stated that irrespective of how things might turn out post Bitcoin halving, there would be a lot of price action in 2020.

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Could Bitcoin halving follow the same pattern as Litecoin? - AMBCrypto

Bitcoin not the only gainer: Litecoin, BNB, BCH and other alts exhibit an early lead – AMBCrypto

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Bitcoin closed January in bullish fashion, ending with a 30 percent-plus price increase. While this set a positive tone for what could be a big year to follow, with the halving less than 100 days away, the altcoins are not too far behind.

According to the latest report by Arcane Research, the mid-cap cryptocurrencies i.e. projects with a market capitalization between $2-$10 million saw the biggest price increase in the previous month. Whats curious to note was that despite the massively bullish month that Bitcoin endured, it came in last compared to the large-cap [$10 billion + market capitalization] and small-cap [lower than $2 billion market capitalization] currencies in the crypto-market.

Last week, Bitcoin consolidated over $9,000, with two key pieces of evidence attesting the same. First, Bitcoin broke a bearish channel that locked it below the $9,000 mark since June 2019, with only brief skirmishes in Q4 2019 owing to Chinas embrace of blockchain and their crypto-crackdown resumption. Secondly, the incline saw Bitcoin move over its 200-day moving average, another telltale sign.

The mid-cap cryptocurrencies didnt just move up, they moved up big time. The report stated that these cryptocurrencies have seen a 62 percent price upswing in the first 30 days of 2020. Leading crypto analytics tracker, CoinMarketCap lists six cryptocurrencies that fall within the mid-cap range, Binance Coin [BNB], Bitcoin Cash [BCH], Bitcoin SV [BSV], EOS, Litecoin [LTC], and the stablecoin Tether [USDT].

Of the six mentioned, Binance and Ethereum top the list moving up by over 42 percent in the month, owing to a slew of developments for their respective exchange and network.

Among the small-cap cryptocurrencies in the market, the report noted a significant rise for Dash and IOTA, with the two moving up by 9.8 percent and a whopping 14.8 percent. The top losers included the second-largest altcoin in the market, XRP losing 5.9 percent of its value, while the China-centric crypto NEM [XEM] dropped by 10.6 percent.

With one month of 2020 done and dusted and the many getting a leg-up on the king, it could be yet another case of Bitcoin giving the early lead to the altcoins.

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Bitcoin not the only gainer: Litecoin, BNB, BCH and other alts exhibit an early lead - AMBCrypto

Bring it on! Hack This Bitcoin Wallet And Win $250,000, GK8 Dares Hackers – Coinfomania

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Hackers are some of the notorious players in the cryptocurrency space as they continue to torment and steal from industry participants including crypto exchanges, custodians, and individuals. And now thesafety of the crypto industry now rests on the shoulders of cybersecurity firms.

GK8, a digital asset cyber-security company, has taken a bold move to create a hack-proof Bitcoin cold wallet to keep secure users funds. To prove that the wallet is indeed unhackable, GK8 has set up a $250,000 bug bounty to challenge hackers from around the world who think they can break into the wallet.

The cyber-security company claims the cold wallet cryptocurrency storage solution is the first-ever wallet that can handle the entire digital asset management process without the need for an internet connection.

Hence, it is confidently offering a bounty of $250,000 (AU$370,300) to anyone that can successfully break into its unhackable Bitcoin cold wallet. The bug bounty will start from February 3, 2020, according to the company.

At the said date, the address of the wallet and its live transaction information will be publicized. The participants have 24 hours to run their hacking scripts on GK8s Bitcoin cold wallet containing $125,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC).

Whoever breaks into the wallet first and provide a satisfactory explanation on how he/she succeeded will receive the whole fund in the wallet and additional rewards which will then sum up to $250,000.

We dare the hackers of the world to take a stab at cracking it, but they wont be able to, said Lior Lamesh, the co-founder and CEO of GK8.

GK8 Bitcoin cold wallet, if truly unhackable, will be a very welcomed development to the crypto space. Unarguably, it will guarantee that 99.9% of users Bitcoins are safe from hackers and could attract more people who are afraid of losing their funds.

While we continue to wait for the GK8 bounty result, the company is not the first to boast an unhackable cold wallet. John McAfee-backed BitFi develops a crypto wallet in June of 2018, saying it is an open-source and unhackable hardware wallet.

BitFi also offered a $250,000 bug bounty to anyone that could hack into the highly sophisticated crypto wallet, as claimed. In August the same year, the wallet was hacked twice, forcing them to remove the unhackable tag on its site.

Hackers are proving to be stubborn even to hardware wallets through dubious ways. In June last year, a Redditor raise the alarm about a fake Nano Ledger support phone number, which was already spreading all over the internet and scamming victims who are unaware.

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A top Silicon Valley futurist on how AI, AR and VR will shape fashion’s future – Vogue Business

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Key takeaways:

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Diamandis predicts that the future of shopping will be always on, thanks to ubiquitous augmented reality.

Artificial intelligence is in position to streamline and personalise the process, while virtual reality shopping can be successful if it creates a more social experience.

Brands should prepare for far more data collection by asking the right questions and using AI to correlate more details.

SAN FRANCISCO Heres the future of shopping, as Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Peter Diamandis sees it: augmented reality glasses will present an always-on shopping mode, artificially intelligent digital assistants will know your taste better than you and clothing will be made exactly to your measurements.

And it could happen faster than one might think, he says. Diamandiss book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, out today and co-written with Steven Kotler, outlines his vision for how a number of converging innovations will drastically and imminently change industries like retail and advertising.

Diamandis is in the business of looking toward the future. In 1994, he founded the X Prize Foundation, which rewards technological development and whose board of trustees include filmmaker James Cameron, media mogul Arianna Huffington and Google co-founder Larry Page. In 2008, he co-founded Singularity University, the Silicon Valley innovation school that counts Moncler among its pupils.

On the fashion front, Diamandis outlines three key developments on his radar: shopping through virtual reality, in which an AI fashion advisor is there to guide you; AR shopping that is supercharged by AI and 5G; and 3D printing and just-in-time manufacturing.

The proliferation of AI and AI assistants, he says, will play a significant role in intuiting what people want and influencing purchasing decisions.

The question is, can AI ultimately become a better fashion adviser to me than any human can?I believe the answer is going to be yes because AI will know me even better than myself, he says. But this decade is less about AI displacing humans [and] more about AI-human collaboration.

Here is what Diamandis thinks fashion should be thinking about in the 2020s. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AR and VR are two of your core pillars influencing fashion, but it seems that AR has so far been leading the charge.

If you look at comments by [Apple CEO] Tim Cook and others, they expect that augmented reality will be 10x the opportunity of VR. That's true.

We talk in the book about turning on shopping mode, so as you're walking down the street [wearing AR glasses], rather than seeing what the shop owner puts in the window, your AI knows what you're shopping for, your size and your favourite colours. Imagine looking into a window and seeing what's in the store that you might actually like. Even more interesting is if youre looking at a friends dress or jacket, and if you've got shopping mode on, the price and the designer pops up, and you can buy it right then.

What I find fascinating is being able to determine how the world sees you. Like [having] different ringtones depending on who is calling, imagine having a digital wardrobe so that when this group of friends sees you, you're wearing [one outfit], when strangers see you, youre wearing [something different].

Diamandis's new book, co-written with Steven Kotler, discusses how technological convergence could increase the pace of change in transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food and finance.

So why hasnt fashion been successful with VR? Three years ago, everyone in fashion was really excited about it.

VR has failed from the lack of being a social experience. But that's going to get solved. When you walk into a VR store, an AI fashion attendant will say, What are you looking for? And you can see in front of yourself a fashion show where everyone on the runway is you.

And there's also a digital twin of everything you own, which is fascinating. You can say, What is that going to look like with my shoes, my handbag, my tie? or whatever it might be.

A lot of these technologies are years away from becoming mainstream. Are there any specific technologies that a fashion brand should invest in now?

It's all about data and asking great questions, and I can start to ask AI to analyse it.

There is already a combination of sensors and networks, and we're heading toward a world where it's going to be possible for you to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere. Now, you can look up the GDP of Ghana in about 30 seconds, but if I asked you how many red sports cars have driven down the street in the last half hour? That's unlikely but the information is there.

Were heading toward what I call a trillion sensor economy which means that there will be cameras everywhere. So if I'm a fashion designer, I can ask, What colours are most popular today walking down Madison Avenue? Does it correlate with the temperature or the weather? Does it correlate with any fashion campaigns or Vogue covers?

While some of this technology might already exist, customers might not be ready to adopt it. How can brands navigate that without moving too fast?

The reality is for consumers to adopt; there really needs to be a 10x better price-performance improvement. It can't be a little bit better. It has to be a lot better. Sometimes you have to do that at your own cost to get people to shift over.

Amazon prioritised speed, cost and variety over profitability, but they won the world.But, its important to note, the adoption rate for technologies is accelerating.

Your book references the success of Amazon, but it hasnt yet mastered luxury fashion. Is Amazon well-positioned to offer luxury concessions?

Amazon's brand stands for cheaper, faster, more variety which is the opposite [of luxury]. Amazon is a global fulfilment house and a front-end for search. They'll have to do luxury goods through someone else's brand.

I mentor CEOs about software as a service and AI as a service. Every company today needs to rethink how they're building their organisation. You're not hiring the same old groups of people and building a giant org chart stuffed with people. You're now building an organisation where you have layers of software. Your fulfilment layer may be delivered by Amazon; your customer service layer may be provided by Amazon; your marketing may be provided by Amazon. And you're really at the top of the stack deciding what products you want to provide, shaping your brand.

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Gucci partners with Snap on AR-friendly glasses

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A top Silicon Valley futurist on how AI, AR and VR will shape fashion's future - Vogue Business

‘Futuring’ can help us survive the climate crisis. And guess what? You’re a futurist too – The Conversation AU

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Editors note: Today, on Trust Me, Im An Expert, we hear from Clare Cooper, design lecturer at the University of Sydney, on how futuring techniques can help us think collectively about life under a drastically hotter climate. Her accompanying essay is below.

Australians, no matter where we are, are coming to acknowledge that our summers and our autumns, winters and springs are forever changed.

We are, bit by bit, reviewing our assumptions. Whether we need to radically rethink our calendars, or question where and how we rebuild homes and towns, we face a choice: collective, creative adaptation or increased devastation.

How might this time next year feel - anxious, hot and sticky? How might it smell - like bushfire smoke? How might it taste - would seafood and berries still be on the menu in future summers as our climate changes? (One of my favourite placards at a recent climate rally was shit climate = shit wine).

When we think about this time next year, are we freaking out, or are we futuring?

Read more: Why we should make time for remembering the future

Futuring is sometimes called futures studies, futurology, scenario design or foresight thinking. It has been used in the business world for decades.

Futuring means thinking systematically about the future, drawing on scientific data, analysing trends, imagining scenarios (both plausible and unlikely) and thinking creatively. A crucial part of the process is thinking hard about the kind of future we might want to avoid and the steps needed to work toward a certain desired future.

But futurists arent magical people who sweep in and solve problems for you. They facilitate discussions and collaboration but the answers ultimately come from communities themselves. Artists and writers have been creatively imagining the future for millennia. Futuring is a crucial part of design and culture-building.

My research looks at how futuring can help communities work toward a just and fair transition to a drastically warmer world and greater weather extremes.

Collaborative futuring invites audiences to respond to probable, possible, plausible and preposterous future scenarios as the climate crisis sets in. This process can reveal assumptions, biases and possible courses of action.

Read more: How we forecast future technologies

Futuring is not predicting futures.

Its a way of mixing informed projections with imaginative critical design to invite us to think differently about our current predicaments. That can help us step back from the moment of panic and instead proactively design steps to change things for the better not 20 years from now, but from today.

If you peeked into a futuring workshop with adults, you might see a lot of lively conversations and a bunch of post-it notes. For kids, you might see them making collages, or creating cardboard prototypes of emerging technology.

You might have done some futuring today, talking with friends and family about changes you might make as it becomes obvious our summers will grow only hotter.

Ive seen futuring occur at my daughters school, where children are invited to imagine being on the other side of a difficult problem, and then work out the steps needed to get there.

Read more: 'This situation brings me to despair': two reef scientists share their climate grief

When we are imagining this time next year, are we limiting our (mostly city-dwelling) thinking to how we avoid the conditions we faced in this summer?

For example, are we thinking about staying away from bushfire-prone areas, or buying air purifiers and face masks? For those who can afford it, are we thinking about booking extended overseas holidays?

Or are we challenging each other to think beyond such avoidance strategies: to imagine a post-Murdoch press and a post-fossil fuel lobby future? Can we imagine ways to respond to extreme weather beyond individual prepping?

Including a diverse range of voices, especially Indigenous community members, is crucial to a just transition to a warmer world. We cant allow a changed climate to mean comfortable adaptation for a wealthy elite while everyone else suffers.

Many of us have joined climate protests in recent months and years.

But more work needs to be done and bigger questions asked. What steps are needed to meet demands for public ownership of a renewable energy system: more support for those battling and displaced by bushfires? How do we work toward First Nations justice, including funding for Indigenous-led land management, jobs on Country, and land and water rights?

It is not enough to pin an image of our future to a wall and pray we get there.

Short term fixes in the form of drought or emergency relief wont address the fact that extreme weather events are not going away.

Responsible, useful futuring mixes equal parts of imagination and informed projections. Its not wild speculation. Futuring practitioners draw on scientific and social data, and weave it with the stories, concerns and desires of those present to find new ways into a problem.

Read more: What would a fair energy transition look like?

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating last year criticised the Morrison government for what he saw as a lack of vision:

If you look, there is no panorama. Theres no vista. Theres no shape. Theres no talk about where Australia fits in the world.

Prime Minister Scott Morrisons performance during the unfolding bushfire horrors widely perceived as lacklustre suggests growing thirst for bolder vision on dealing with the new normal.

In their book Design and the Question of History, design scholars Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Susan Stewart argue that we should speak of catastrophe in order to avoid it.

Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote

prophesying the advent of that catastrophe as passionately and vociferously as we can manage is the sole chance of making the unavoidable avoidable and perhaps even the inevitable impossible to happen.

We owe it to those worst affected by the climate crisis and to ourselves to dedicate time to collaborative futuring as we rethink life in an increasingly hostile climate.

The next time youre having a chat about this time, next year, are you collectively fretting or collaboratively futuring?

Everything you need to know about how to listen to a podcast is here.

Additional audio credits

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks.

Not Much by Podington Bear, from Free Music Archive

Above Us by David Szesztay, from Free Music Archive

Pshaw by Podington Bear, from Free Music Archive

Podcast episode recorded and edited by Sunanda Creagh.

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'Futuring' can help us survive the climate crisis. And guess what? You're a futurist too - The Conversation AU

The fashion futurist: how Vogue’s wartime editor revolutionised women’s lives – The Guardian

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Amid the rubble of a bombed building stands a woman, immaculate in hat and gloves, wearing the kind of nipped-in suit that screams 1940s chic.

Her back is to the camera, her expression unreadable as she surveys the wreckage. But the caption reads: Fashion is indestructible. Even in the midst of horror, this image by the legendary fashion photographer Cecil Beaton is saying, womens lives go on. Yet they cannot be untouched by the world around them, nor unchanged by it.

The picture was conceived for British Vogue in 1941 by its wartime editor Audrey Withers, and, as a new biography by the historian Julie Summers makes clear, captures something of her pioneering beliefs. Dressed For War tells the story of a woman who brought frontline war reporting to her pages alongside features on spring hats, arguing passionately that female readers should be equally curious about both. It is simply not modern, she wrote in 1946, to be unaware of or uninterested in what is going on all around you.

But like many women whose horizons expanded dramatically during wartime, Withers struggled with the pressure to retreat back into a traditional role afterwards. The editor who had the ear of powerful men in government, and often proofed her pages from a makeshift office in the cellar as bombs fell overhead, had thrived on the idea of doing something meaningful. When she was putting Vogue to bed, she was in her element, says Summers. She was being bombed, but she was doing this, and at that moment she realised that Vogue had a purpose beyond promulgating fashion. It was really about influencing womens lives. Not for nothing did the head of the board of trade once call her the most powerful woman in London.

Summers first became fascinated by her while researching a book on wartime fashion for the Imperial War Museum, only to discover a more personal connection. I was having lunch with an uncle and I told him how enthused I was about this woman, and he just leant back in his chair and went: Darling, didnt you know she was Grandpas cousin? And I didnt know. It was, she explains, a big family but she hadnt heard the story before: Withers was not one to blow her own trumpet.

Withers was born in 1905, into an unusually free-thinking family. Her mother, Mary, had been university-educated, while Summers describes her father, Percy, a doctor who had stopped work through ill health, as a very liberal father who fostered self-reliance in his daughters. The young Audrey read English at Oxford, worked in a bookshop and then got a job in publishing before being made redundant, on the grounds (then perfectly legal) that the company wanted a man instead. She was devastated, but that led her to answer a newspaper ad for a subeditor at Vogue, where she flourished. She was only 35 when, with her American boss stranded overseas by the war, she stepped into the editors chair.

The practical challenges of publishing in wartime were daunting. Paper was rationed and, by 1941, so were clothes, an existential problem for an industry built on craving the new and pretty. (Were she alive today, Withers would surely recognise the pressure on glossy magazines to stop pushing fast fashion because of its impact on the planet; Summers thinks she would have been all over current thinking with remodelling and reusing clothes: for environmental reasons). Staff were bombed out of their homes and the magazines Old Bond Street headquarters was hit at least once. The idea of writing about hemlines amid such death and destruction may seem incongruous, but maintaining some semblance of normality on the home front was seen as an important act of defiance against the Nazis. Besides, it soon emerged that Vogue had a role in the war effort.

Withers met regularly with the Treasury and the Ministry of Information, who saw magazines as a better channel than newspapers for communicating with women about the sacrifices that would be needed. And Vogue was seen as particularly important, because its readers were influential women who could set trends. Initially, the message was they should keep shopping for the benefit of the economy, but all that changed in 1941; clothing factories were making military uniforms, rationing came in, and women were urged to make do and mend old clothes. (Even Withers rewore the same few outfits endlessly; Summers says her wardrobe consisted of little more than three suits and some blouses for work, one wool dress for evenings, and slacks and a jumper at weekends).

Vogue commissioned designers to show what could be done with utility clothing, a government-approved range available to buy with ration coupons. It ran features on growing your own vegetables and even promoted short haircuts, amid fears about female factory workers getting their hair tangled in machinery.

But Withers wasnt content merely to churn out propaganda. She wanted her readers to really get the war, says Summers. Which is where Lee Miller, the model turned war photographer and reporter, came in.

Miller was American, enabling her to get accreditation via the American military (British troops wouldnt accommodate a female photographer). But she needed a press sponsor and Withers stepped in. One of Millers first dispatches for Vogue was from St Malo on the Brittany coast, where she had expected to be covering a surrender to the Americans but instead found herself in the thick of battle, capturing pictures of what would turn out to be napalm attacks: the war censor refused to let Vogue use them.

Miller also had an eye for things a man might have missed. Arriving in newly liberated Paris, she sent back pictures of a hair salon where small boys powered the dryers by pedalling furiously on bicycles hooked up to a furnace. In Munich, she got into Hitlers private apartment after he had fled and had herself photographed in his bathtub, her dirty army-issue boots placed on his primrose-yellow bathmat.

But she wrote for Vogue, too, about the massacres of women and children in occupied France and sent back harrowing images of skeletal bodies from the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Withers agonised over whether her war-weary readers could cope with this, but eventually included one picture, berating herself later for not running as many as the newspapers did.

Unsurprisingly, both women found adjusting to peacetime difficult. After the atrocities she had witnessed, Summer says, Miller suffered from PTSD but she also struggled to find substitutes for the intense adrenaline highs of war reporting. Withers, meanwhile, was battling against her American publishers expectations that she would meekly return to producing a conventional fashion paper.

In 1946, she wrote a long memo to her American editor-in-chief Edna Chase, arguing passionately that Vogues future was to cover every subject in which the intelligent sophisticated woman is currently interested, and that its politics must be progressive. Politics could not be ignored, Withers argued, when it shaped everything in womens lives from education and health to prices in shops. Moreover, to avoid political arguments was political in itself, because it meant consenting to the status quo and that was innately conservative: One is being every whit as political, for instance, in giving ones tacit approval to things as they are in pressing for change. It is an old rightwing trick to sit tight and say nothing (because thats the best way of keeping things as they are) and to accuse the left wing of being political because it is forced to be vocal in advocating anything new.

It is striking how contemporary that argument sounds, now that British Vogue urges its readers to become forces for change while American Teen Vogue takes on Donald Trump. But it was too much for Chase, who said that Vogue should develop the taste and manners of its readers and let them set the pattern of their political thinking themselves.

She had lost that argument, but Withers kept pushing the boundaries throughout the 50s. She hired a female motoring correspondent, at a time when very few women drove themselves, and argued that women should feature in Vogue in their own right rather than as famous mens wives. (Tellingly, the woman in that fashion is indestructible picture wasnt a professional model, but the BBCs first female TV announcer). She prided herself on hiring as beauty editor Evelyn Forbes, a mother of four who was the breadwinner in her marriage, at a time when middle-class women were still expected to stop work after getting married.

Withers herself did not have children, which Summers suspects may have been by choice. She and her salesman husband, Jock, were a famously glamorous, social couple, but Jock was repeatedly unfaithful and they eventually divorced.

Yet painful as his pursuit of other women must have been, in some ways their rather distant relationship was professionally liberating. I think Jocks interest in other women almost gave Audrey the licence to run her own life as she wanted, says Summers, who points out that she wouldnt have been free to work such long hours had she had a husband waiting impatiently at home. I think they drifted apart, but she never hated Jock.

After the divorce, she married a man called Victor Kennett, who had propositioned her years earlier, while she was still with Jock (she briefly considered leaving her husband at the time, but feared a scandal). Kennett was more possessive of her time, and when Withers retired from Vogue in 1959 she largely retreated from public life one reason, Summers thinks, she did not remain as well known as other pioneering women of the era. But now, perhaps, her moment has come.

Dressed for War: the Story of Audrey Withers, Vogue Editor Extraordinaire from the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties, by Julie Summers, is published by Simon & Schuster on 6 February (RRP 20). To order a copy for 17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over 15.

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Scientists Want to Explore Ocean With "Cyborg Jellyfish" – Futurism

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A team of Stanford and Caltech scientists attached low-power microelectronics to the undersides of jellyfish to create biohybrid robots that swim three times as fast as normal ones.

The idea is to one day allow cyborg jellyfish, equipped with sensors, to explore the vast depths of our planets oceans rather than relying on unwieldy and inefficient submarines, Scientific American reports.

In a trial, the scientists were capable of using electrical jolts from microelectronic controllers to make jellyfish swim not only faster but also more efficiently,according to a paper published in Science Advances today.

Weve shown that theyre capable of moving much faster than they normally do, without an undue cost on their metabolism, said co-author and Stanford bioengineering PhD candidate Nicole Xu, in a statement.

This reveals that jellyfish possess an untapped ability for faster, more efficient swimming, Xu added. They just dont usually have a reason to do so.

Thanks to the simplicity of the design, the electronics use orders of magnitude less external power per mass than other aquatic robots, according to the paper.

The jellyfish cyborgs could revolutionize the way we explore the mysteries of the planets oceans. To do that, the researchers are already looking to take their project a step further by adding controls, using only a few modifications to the microelectronics.

If we can find a way to direct these jellyfish and also equip them with sensors to track things like ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen levels, and so on, we could create a truly global ocean network where each of the jellyfish robots costs a few dollars to instrument and feeds themselves energy from prey already in the ocean, said lead author and Caltech mechanical engineer John Dabiri.

READ MORE: Cyborg Jellyfish Could One Day Explore the Ocean [Scientific American]

More on cyborgs: This Biohacker Conference Sounds Absolutely Outrageous

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Scientists Want to Explore Ocean With "Cyborg Jellyfish" - Futurism

Smart Bandage Detects Infections, Auto-Releases Antibiotic – Futurism

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A colorful new weapon has emerged in the war on antibiotic resistance.

On Wednesday, researchers in China published a study in the journal ACS Central Science detailing their creation of a new kind of smart bandage. At first, when you apply it to a wound, the bandage is green. But if it detects a bacterial infection, the bandage turns yellow and releases a built-in antibiotic to treat the infection.

And if the bandage senses the presence of drug-resistant bacteria the kind that traditional antibiotics alone can have trouble killing it releases the antibiotic and turns red. As that point, doctors can shine a light on the bandage, which causes the material to release special molecules that can kill the bacteria or at least weaken it enough to improve the efficacy of the antibiotic.

When the team tested the smart bandage on mice, it improved the healing times for wounds containing either drug-sensitive or drug-resistant E. coli bacteria.

Because the bandages themselves can detect and treat the bacteria, they can dramatically cut the time between when an infection forms and when treatment begins. The added capability to know when the bacteria is drug-resistant could make the bandages even more helpful, given that the rise in antibiotic resistance is a full-on global health crisis in need of creative solutions.

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Smart Bandage Detects Infections, Auto-Releases Antibiotic - Futurism

Google Says Its Chatbot Is Capable of Near-Human Conversation – Futurism

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Better Tay

If youve ever tried to have a conversation with a chatbot, you know that even todays state-of-the-art systems arent exactly eloquent, regularly doling out nonsensical orpainfully generic responses.

Now, though, Google has created Meena, a chatbot it says is better than any other its tested a claim the company supports using a new metric it developed specifically to measure an AIs conversational abilities.

After creating Meena, a process detailed in a paper published on the preprint server arXiv, Google needed a way to evaluate the chatbot. To that end, it developed something it calls the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA).

To compute this metric, Google asked human workers to conduct about 100 free-form conversations with Meena and several other open-domain chatbots. Each time the chatbot responded, the worker had to answer two questions about the response.

First, did it make logical and contextual sense within the conversation? If yes, they then had to answer the question, Was it specific to the conversation? This was to weed out any generic responses for example, if the human wrote that they liked tennis, and the chatbot responded, Thats nice, the response would be tagged as not specific.

Google determined that an average human would achieve an SSA score of 86 percent.

The other chatbots in the teams study scored between 31 percent and 56 percent. Meena, however, scored a 79 percent putting the AI closer to the level of conversation expected from a human than another chatbot.

READ MORE: Meena is Googles attempt at making true conversational AI [VentureBeat]

More on chatbots: Taylor Swift Reportedly Threatened Microsoft Over Racist Chatbot

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Google Says Its Chatbot Is Capable of Near-Human Conversation - Futurism

The Politics of Fast – Governing

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Speed has never mattered more. Increasing velocity to a near-breaking point is celebrated in business and sports both for its own sake and for the damage it does to slow-footed competitors so much so that speed has become a strategy in its own right. Although said more quietly than in years past, the mantra of Silicon Valley's boardrooms and engineering teams continues to be "move fast and break things."

As a result, in the last decade we've seen incredible technological innovations leading to just as incredible economic and political disruptions. Consider that barely more than a decade ago, Uber and Airbnb were just small startups, social media had virtually no impact on national security, electric cars were rare enough to be a curiosity (and self-driving vehicles were more dream than reality), and we talked to each other on our phones instead of having our phones talk to us. But according to two influential observers of technology and society, when it comes to change and disruption, we ain't seen nothing yet.

In their new book The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Simon & Schuster), Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler are unequivocal about not only what is coming but, more importantly, how fast it will be here. The cite the work of the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil and forecast that, because of converging technologies and exponential growth in computing power, we will experience "twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. ... This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs such as affordable aerial ridesharing will not be an occasional affair. They'll be happening all the time." Then, in either an exciting or ominous prediction depending on your faith in humanity, they add, "It means, of course, that flying cars are just the beginning."

And flying cars are just the beginning. The authors fly through life-and-society-changing disruptions that they see on the horizon, from gene editing to touchable holograms to the doubling of lifespans. As a human being, many of these innovations are exciting. As a policymaker, each is mind-bending for its implications for governance, funding and the social contract.

Consider, for example, increasing longevity through such emerging technologies as gene editing and the printing of replacement body parts. If in the not-so-far future people will be living 20 or 30 years longer, what does that do to Social Security, the environment, the health-care system, housing and jobs, the family structure, politics, and so much more? And what if it's only a small percentage of the population who can afford these interventions and life expectancy for the poor continues to fall?

None of these questions are answered in the book, nor could they be. After all, many of the biggest impacts of any innovation will be unintended or inconceivable. Who would've thought that a site to connect Harvard students would later become a company that dwarfs most national economies and can be manipulated by Russian bots, all while rewriting the social lives of a generation?

For those of us in policymaking, the question is whether we can keep up. First, can we bring our own processes up to the modern expectations? When companies are anticipating their customers' needs and wants and delivering them near instantly, government can't continue to take weeks and months to respond to paper forms delivered only during business hours often closed during lunch to a clerk in an inconvenient and unwelcoming government building. Not only will we anger our constituencies but also will, if we haven't already, be seen as irrelevant and obsolete.

Second, what we do as regulators is even more important. As the authors make clear, in a globalized and convergent world, there is very little change that can or will be stopped. But speed for speed's sake will not produce great or equitable solutions. Government will need to understand, engage and iterate policies quickly with each disruption.

At the end of the book, the authors warn, "Now, for certain, trying to grope with a century's worth of technological change unfolding over the next decade is a tall order, and trying to do this with our local and linear brains makes it ever more complicated." It's crucial that we, as policymakers, understand the changes coming to nearly every aspect of our lives and society. It's even more crucial that we, in partnership with the inventors, companies, ethicists and watchdogs, develop iterative processes to manage these changes with equity in mind even if it slows things down a bit.

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The Politics of Fast - Governing

Someone Hacked Dozens of United Nations Servers – Futurism

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Cyber Threat

The United Nations was the target of a sophisticated hack in the summer of 2019, according to a confidential internal report obtained by The New Humanitarian.

The report claims that the hack affected dozens of UN servers and compromised staff records, health insurance, and commercial contract data. But most workers affected by the hack are only hearing about it now.

The hackers targeted servers at the United Nations Geneva and Vienna offices, as well as at the Geneva-based Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

After viewing the report, Jake Williams, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec, told the Associated Presshe believes the hack was an act of espionage.

The attackers have a goal in mind and are deploying malware to machines that they believe serve some purpose for them, Williams explained.

According to the report, which is dated September 20, 2019, the UN hack began in mid-July 2019 and was detected the next month. However, many of the staff affected only heard about it following the reports leak.

Staff at large, including me, were not informed, Ian Richards, president of the Staff Council at the United Nations, told the AP. All we received was an email (on Sept. 26) informing us about infrastructure maintenance work.

READ MORE: Leaked report shows United Nations suffered hack [Associated Press]

More on cyberattacks: Hacker Group Seizes Twitter, Facebook Accounts of 15 NFL Teams

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Someone Hacked Dozens of United Nations Servers - Futurism

Litecoin, Stellars Lumen, and Trons TRX Daily Analysis 29/01/20 – Yahoo Finance

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Litecoin

Litecoin rose by 3.68% on Tuesday. Following on from a 4.19% rally on Monday, Litecoin ended the day at $60.62.

A bullish start to the day saw Litecoin rally to an early morning intraday high $61.44 before hitting reverse.

Litecoin broke through the first major resistance level at $60.05 before sliding to a late afternoon intraday low $57.17.

In spite of the pullback, Litecoin steered clear of the first major support level at $56.31. Late in the day, Litecoin broke back through the first major resistance level to wrap up the day at $60 levels.

At the time of writing, Litecoin was up by 0.28% to $60.79. A mixed start to the day saw Litecoin rise from an early morning low $60.25 to a high $62.40 before falling back.

Litecoin broke through the 23.6% FIB of $62 and the first major resistance level at $62.32 early on.

Litecoin would need to break back through 23.6% FIB to support a run at the first major resistance level at $62.32.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Litecoin to break back through to $61 levels.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the 23.6% FIB and first major resistance level would likely limit any upside.

In the event of another crypto breakout, the second major resistance level at $64.01 would likely limit any upside on the day.

Failure to break back through the 23.6% FIB could see Litecoin come under pressure.

A fall back through the morning low $60.25 to sub-$60 levels would bring the first major support level at $58.05 into play.

Barring a crypto meltdown, however, Litecoin should steer clear of Tuesdays low $57.17.

Major Support Level: $58.05

Major Resistance Level: $62.32

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $62

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $78

62% FIB Retracement Level: $104

Stellars Lumen rose by 0.78% on Tuesday. Following on from a 1.87% gain on Monday, Stellars Lumen ended the day at $0.060676.

A choppy start to the day saw Stellars Lumen fall to a late morning intraday low $0.059087 before finding support.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $0.05816, Stellars Lumen rallied to an early afternoon intraday high $0.061917.

Stellars Lumen broke through the first major resistance level at $0.06112 before falling back to sub-$0.060 levels.

Finding support late on, Stellars Lumen broke back through the first major resistance level before easing back to $0.060 levels.

At the time of writing, Stellars Lumen was up by 0.80% to $0.061161. A bullish start to the day saw Stellars Lumen rise from an early morning low $0.060802 to a high $0.061544.

Stellars Lumen left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Story continues

Stellars Lumen would need to break back through the morning high $0.061544 to support a run at the first major resistance level at $0.06203.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Stellars Lumen to break back through the Tuesdays high $0.061917.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level at $0.06203 and Tuesdays high should limit any upside.

Failure to move back through the morning high $0.061544 could see Stellars Lumen hit reverse.

A fall through to sub-$0.06060 levels would bring the first major support level at $0.05920 into play.

Barring a crypto meltdown, however, Stellars Lumen should steer clear of sub-$0.059 levels.

Major Support Level: $0.05920

Major Resistance Level: $0.06203

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $0.1051

38% FIB Retracement Level: $0.1433

62% FIB Retracement Level: $0.2050

Trons TRX surged by 8.97% on Tuesday. Following on from a 1.09% gain on Monday, Trons TRX end the day at $0.018681.

Tracking the broader market, Trons TRX rallied from an early morning intraday low $0.017144 to an early afternoon intraday high $0.018942.

Trons TRX broke through the major resistance levels before falling back to sub-$0.018 levels.

Finding late support, Trons TRX broke back through the major resistance levels to close out the day at $0.018 levels.

At the time of writing, Trons TRX was up by 1.37% to $0.018936. A mixed start to the day saw Trons TRX fall to an early morning low $0.018573 before striking a high $0.018936.

Trons TRX left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Trons TRX would need to move through Tuesdays high $0.018942 levels to support a run at the first major resistance level at $0.01937.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Trons TRX to break through to $0.019 levels.

Barring an extended crypto rally, first major resistance level, and Tuesdays high would likely pin Trons TRX back.

Failure to move through to Tuesdays high could see Trons TRX hit reverse.

A fall back through the morning low $0.018573 to sub-$0.01830 levels would bring the first major support level at $0.01757 into play.

Barring a crypto meltdown, however, Trons TRX should steer well clear of the second major support level at $0.01646 on the day.

Major Support Level: $0.01757

Major Resistance Level: $0.01937

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $0.0322

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $0.0452

62% FIB Retracement Level: $0.0663

Please let us know what you think in the comments below

Thanks, Bob

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

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Litecoin, Stellars Lumen, and Trons TRX Daily Analysis 29/01/20 - Yahoo Finance

A 2020 Introduction to Litecoin (LTC) – CoinCodex

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Key highlights:

If you're a crypto veteran, you probably don't need an introductiononLitecoin, butnewcomers often misunderstand LTC at first glance.

Many people expect that LTC is some sort of an alternative cryptocurrency with unique use-cases that should be used in specific scenarios etc, but that's not really the case.

Often referred to as the silver to Bitcoin's gold, Litecoin is one of the oldest public open-source cryptocurrencies out there and it is as simple as it sounds: A lite version of Bitcoin.

It was initially conceived and launched back in 2011, by computer scientist Charlie Lee, who understood Bitcoin's block size, transaction times and fees would eventually lead to unavoidable bottlenecks.

Hence, Litecoin can be considered as the first derivative of Bitcoin which simply changed some of Bitcoin's core parameters, and introduced minor technical modifications to create a digital peer-to-peer (p2p) payment network similar to Bitcoin, yet more efficient from a few angles.

Charlie Lee, who previously worked for Googleand Coinbase, says that Litecoin is not meant to compete with Bitcoin, but rather to accompany it, and carry some of its weight to ensure stability and integrity even during crypto rush hours.

Being slightly faster andcheaper in terms of fees, Litecoin can indeed be considered as Bitcoin that's tailored for day-to-day usage.

Litecoin Network's native currency is naturally LTC, and unlike Bitcoin, its total supply is set to 84 million units. Currently, over 63 million LTC units are circulating, which is over 75% of the total supply.

Litecoin occupies the 7th spot by market capitalization with $3.5 billion, while LTC is currently being traded at around $56 a piece. During its very peak, Litecoin reached a market cap of $20 billion and one LTC was changing hands at around $370.

Utilizing a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus architecture similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin uses miners to validate and promote transactions on the network. A transaction can take up to 2 minutes during normal congestion times.

The block reward for a successful LTC miner is set to 12.5 LTC and it will halvein August of2023. Conversely, Bitcoin's next halving is expected to happen this May.

It is correct to assume that Bitcoin and Litecoin are very similar architecture-wise, yet some key differences between the two projects create a standalone rivalry.

The most noticeable difference would be the fact that Bitcoin uses the standard NSA SHA-256 military-grade algorithm which is commonly used by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and more computing giants due to its strong security. On the other hand, Litecoin uses Scrypt algorithm, which is less energy-intensive, butextremely memory-intensive.

In simpler terms, Bitcoin can now only be efficientlymined with Application Specific Integrated Circuits, commonly known as ASICs, while Litecoin could be mined with regular CPUs and GPUs making it more accessible.

At the same time, Litecoin has significantly lower fees and faster transaction times when compared to Bitcoin.A drawback of Litecoin is that it has alow rate of adoption, especially when compared to Bitcoin.

As you should have figured out already, Litecoin is not that complex neither it aims to disrupt the cryptocurrency scene as many other digital currencies tend to do in an attempt to compete with Bitcoin.

In opposition to many other altcoins, the people behind the Litecoin project often say that it is made to accompany Bitcoin through its journey, and its goals are simply to offer faster and cheaper monetary transactions when Bitcoin is struggling.

Should you get a 2020 introduction to Bitcoin to compare both projects for yourself? Feel free to read our relevant article.

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A 2020 Introduction to Litecoin (LTC) - CoinCodex

Three Catalysts that Could Send Bitcoin Price Higher in February – newsBTC

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It is February 1 and bitcoin is up by a modest 0.52 percent.

The benchmark cryptocurrency left an impressive month behind in January, returning 30.27 percent in profits against an otherwise gloomy global market outlook. The wild move upside marked bitcoins best January close in seven years, convincing traders that the gains could grow further heading into February.

Bitcoin maintaining gains to open February in a green territory | Source: Yahoo Finance

So it appears, bitcoins bullish continuation theory actually has merits in the form of both fundamental and technical factors. NewsBTC has listed the top three upside catalysts among them, as follows.

The first signs of explosive growth in bitcoin prices came on the sidelines of a US-Iran geopolitical conflict. The cryptocurrencys gains followed similar moves in the gold market as investors appetite for safe-haven assets surged. That brought an otherwise unpopular gold-bitcoin correlation to its four-year peak.

That was according to Arcane Research, a data analysis firm, that noted an increasing correlation efficiency of 0.3 between the two assets in mid-January. The company said in its report:

This [correlation] will without a doubt strengthen the digital gold narrative for bitcoin.

Correlation between Bitcoin and gold touches 0.3 | Source: CoinMetrics, Arcane Research

The surge in bitcoin and gold prices was also visible against the backdrop of the Coronavirus, a regional health epidemic that killed more than 150 people in China and infected more than 3,000 all across the world. Global financial reports indicated that investors piled into bitcoin to hedge against dwindling global equities.

With US stocks registering one of its weakest months in January, spooked by Coronavirus, it is likely for investors to keep their one foot in safe-havens this February. Bitcoin could benefit from it.

Those who do not believe in any correlation between traditional assets and bitcoin could find their bullish bias in the latters technical indicators.

The upside in bitcoin prices in January took the cryptocurrency above two very strong technical indicators. On the daily chart, it was the 200-daily moving average (or 200-DMA). Meanwhile, on the weekly chart, the indicator was the 50-weekly moving average (50-WMA).

Blued 200-DMA in First Chart; Blacked 50-WMA in Second Chart | Source: TradingView.com, Coinbase

In a majority of cases wherein bitcoin held its grounds above both the moving averages, the price rallied exponentially. Therefore, it is now likely that the cryptocurrency would stay above them heading into February, which serves as a strong bullish case for it.

Noted on-chain analyst Willy Woo said in January that any gains in Litecoin prices should signal a similar price rally for bitcoin.

The Adaptive Fund partner correctly predicted a breakout in the LTC/USD rate based on a so-called Litecoin Difficulty Ribbon, adding that he wouldnt be surprised if that does not turn out to be bullish for BTC/USD.

The altcoin closed January in the green territory, rising by a massive 65 percent.

If history repeats, bitcoin could soon follow Litecoins gains to establish a new Q1 top.

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Three Catalysts that Could Send Bitcoin Price Higher in February - newsBTC

Black holes caught in the act of swallowing stars – Science Magazine

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Models suggest black holes can stretch devoured stars into long streamers.

By Daniel CleryJan. 28, 2020 , 5:05 PM

At the center of nearly every galaxy lies a monster, a giant black hole millions or even billions of times heavier than the Sun. Some, known as quasars or active galactic nuclei, shine brightly from across the universe as they continuously devour surrounding gas. But most are dormant, lurking invisibly for thousands of yearsuntil a star passes too close and is ripped to shreds. That triggers a monthslong tidal disruption event (TDE), which can shine as brightly as a supernova.

Until a few years ago, astronomers had spotted only a handful of TDEs. But now, a new generation of wide-field surveys is catching more of them soon after they startyielding new insights into the violent events and the hidden population of black holes that drives them.

Were still in the trenches, trying to understand the physical mechanisms powering these emissions, says Suvi Gezari of the University of Maryland, College Park. Earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Gezari presented an analysis of 39 TDEs: 22 from recent years and 17 detected in the first 18 months of operation of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a 1.2-meter survey telescope in California.

In the standard TDE picture, the gravity of the black hole shreds an approaching star into strands like spaghetti. The black hole immediately swallows half the stars matter while the rest arcs away in long streamers. These rapidly fall back and settle into an accretion disk that steadily feeds material into the black hole, growing so hot that it emits copious x-rays.

An x-ray mapping satellite spotted the first TDEs in the 1990s. Now, optical surveys like the ZTF are picking up the fast-changing events and capturing telltale details of the visible glow. They are also alerting other observatories, such as NASAs Swift telescope, to make follow-up observations at ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths.

The fingerprints of certain gases in the spectra of the visible light can reveal what kind of star went down the black holes maw. Gezari and her colleagues found that the TDE spectra fell into three classes, dominated by hydrogen, helium, or a mixture of gases. Hydrogen likely signals large, young stars, whereas helium events could point to the cores of older stars whose hydrogen shells were stripped awayperhaps by an earlier brush with the black hole. She says the proportions reveal something about the populations of stars at the very centers of galaxies, at distances from Earth that would otherwise be impossible to probe.

If astronomers could turn the light into a reading of how quickly material is being sucked in, they might be able to determine a black holes masssomething usually estimated crudely by measuring the size of its galaxy. For that, however, We need to understand the astrophysics of the process with greater clarity, says Tsvi Piran of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For a few TDEs, astronomers have been able to compare the rise and fall of the visible glow with x-ray measurements made from spaceand puzzlingly, the two dont match. The x-rays often flare irregularly, appear late, or are absent altogether.

The x-rays could be steady but obscured by a cloud of gas, hundreds of times bigger than the black hole, that forms from a backlog of material, says Kate Alexander of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Its like the black hole gets indigestion because it eats too much too fast. Piran thinks its more likely that the x-rays are generated in bursts, as clumps of matter fall into the black hole. Either way, astronomers arent ready to glean a black holes mass from a TDEs brilliance.

Theory does suggest black holes can become too massive to trigger TDEs. Above a mass of 100 million suns, black holes should swallow stars whole rather than tearing them apart as they approach. So far, all of the growing number of TDEs come from smaller galaxies, suggesting the limit is real.

TDEs could even provide a window into a more elusive black hole characteristic: its spin. Dheeraj Pasham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has studied the soft x-ray emissions of three TDEs that pulse in semiregular beats. He says similar, higher frequency beats have been observed coming from smaller, stellar-mass black holes, and he suspects the pulsing reflects the black holes spin. Constraints on this property could help solve an enduring mystery: whether giant black holes form by slowly accreting stellar matter over their lifetimea process expected to produce a fast spinor by merging with the giant black holes from other galactic cores, which would result in a slower spin. An x-ray survey of many TDEs could reveal which process dominates.

With the tally of captured TDEs growing fast, and hundreds or even thousands of discoveries per year expected from new surveys, researchers are hopeful that the events will answer more questions. My dream is for TDEs to be some kind of ruler or scale for black hole mass, Gezari says. Were not there yet but were getting closer.

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Figuring out what the Milky Way looks like is akin to a murder mystery – New Scientist

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How can we get a picture of the whole Milky Way if we are inside it? Good sleuthing is needed to combine all the clues, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

ALL of the students in my astrophysics class last semester had to give a final presentation. In one, a student showed everyone an image of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as viewed from Earth. The student then showed another image of a spiral galaxy, suggesting that it reflected our own. Because it was a class focused on stars the students are taking on galaxies this semester a question came from the audience: how can we get a picture of the whole Milky Way if we are inside it? We cant.

In this sense, astrophysics is like a Midsomer

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Figuring out what the Milky Way looks like is akin to a murder mystery - New Scientist

Department of Energy to use IU’s Big Red 200 supercomputer; Purdue University Fort Wayne offering astronomy concentration – FW Business

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Indiana Universitys newly dedicated Big Red 200, its $9.6 million artificial intelligence supercomputer,

IU dedicated Big Red 200 as part of its Day of Commemoration Bicentennial event Jan. 20. It is the first in a revolutionary new Cray, Inc. line of exascale supercomputers that the Hewlett Packard Enterprise company has branded Shasta.

Department of Energy laboratories plan to install larger Shasta iterations in the coming years as part of an Exascale Computing Project to develop the worlds fastest supercomputers, with exascale speeds exceeding 10 to the eighteenth power calculations per second.

To illustrate the speed of what is now Indianas fastest supercomputer, IU said Big Red can perform the same number of calculations in 1 second that everyone in the state could perform together over 28 years if they could each perform one calculation per second nonstop during that period.

I am excited about utilizing the AI capabilities of Big Red 200 to accelerate the research programs in the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at the IU School of Medicine, Tatiana Foroud, the departments chairwoman, said in an announcement.

I believe this new AI-capable supercomputer will enable breakthrough discoveries across a broad range of research areas, including neurodegeneration and the study of Alzheimers disease, she said.

Importantly, Big Red 200 will be an essential resource for the Precision Health Initiative, one of the Indiana University Grand Challenges, which is designed to enhance the prevention, treatment and health outcomes of human diseases through a more precise analysis of the genetic, developmental, behavioral and environmental factors that shape an individuals health.

In addition to medicine, Big Red will support IU advanced research in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics.

The 200 was added to Big Reds name to commemorate IUs Bicentennial. The new supercomputer is replacing a supercomputer that is becoming obsolete, which was installed in 2013 as the deep learning revolution was gaining steam.

PFW adds astronomy concentration

The physics department at Purdue University Fort Wayne plans to start offering northeast Indianas only concentration in astronomy and astrophysics this coming fall.

Students completing the four-year program will graduate with a bachelors degree in physics with an astronomy concentration.

In addition to astrophysics, it will include classes in planetary astronomy and beginning and advanced stellar astronomy and cosmology.

The program also will offer optics and optics laboratory special sections as well as instrumentation-related classes such as electronics for scientists, instrumentation and spectroscopy or atomic and molecular physics.

Students in the program also will learn how a telescope works and how to build and use one.

The students who choose to follow the astrophysicist path will have a skill set in project management and will be able to design an instrument package for a satellite. Mark Masters, professor and chair of the physics department, said in an announcement.

Much like physics students, the astronomy students can apply their experimental, data analysis, and other skills to many different fields, he said.

They are problem solvers. They will be able to have careers that range from the financial industry, programming, engineers, technicians, and astronomers.

PFWs fall 2020 class schedule will be posted online by the end of February with staggered registration starting in March.

Elevate Nexus continues pitch competitions

Entrepreneurs in the region had until Feb. 3 to apply for participation in the second Elevate Nexus Regional Pitch Competitions.

Elevate Ventures planned to select finalists Feb. 4 in order to invite them to participate in their regions version of the business plan pitch competition.

The Northern Regions version was scheduled for Feb. 25 at Innovation Park at Notre Dame, 1400 E. Angela Blvd. in South Bend.

Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures started the Elevate Nexus program last year to help colleges and universities in the state that did not already have them to initiate the investment pitch competitions.

The first of Elevates regional pitch competitions leading to a statewide competition took place last October.

Of 75 applicants, 67 finalists were invited to compete in that contest, which provided the entrepreneurs 10 minutes each to convince a panel of regional judges their companies would be the most likely to provide the best returns on seed and pre-seed investments.

The competition awarded pre-seed investments of $20,000 each to nine businesses and seed investments of $80,000 each to six businesses, including Pierceton-based CoolCorp Inc. and Warsaw-based Eclipse Orthopaedics.

In addition to the funding, competition winners became Elevate portfolio companies and gained access to its network of advisers and resources, the announcement said.

The winners also were invited to pitch to judges in a similar, statewide competition with $40,000 pre-seed and $100,000 seed investments. That event will take place April 14 as part of Elevates annual Kinetic conference.

Abbott honors Team Stroy at Statehouse

State Rep. David Abbott, R-Rome City, recently honored Fort Wayne native Morgan Malm at the Statehouse along with other winners of Purdue Universitys 2019 Student Soybean Product Innovation Competition.

Funded by the Indiana Soybean Alliance through a soybean checkoff program, Abbott said the competition challenges students to create a new industrial product using soybeans.

Malm was pursuing a food science doctorate at Purdue last year when she and classmates Natalie Stephenson and Ruth Zhong placed first for their development of a biodegradable, environmentally friendly straw they dubbed Stroy.

Malm developed a structure for the straw of soy protein film, and then because it was water soluble, she searched the candy and pharmaceutical industries for an existing coating that could protect it for several hours after it came in contact with water.

The alliance had provided $300 to develop the prototype. Archer Daniels Midland had donated the soy protein for it, and the team bought two other ingredients for it on Amazon.

Members of Team Stroy received a $20,000 prize for their months-long effort. The innovation the group showed is nothing short of remarkable, Abbott said in a news release.

This soy-based straw looks and feels almost exactly like a plastic straw, while being completely bio-degradable. Soybeans are used for so many things in society, and this product could potentially boost Indianas soybean production.

The trio hopes to market the Stroy to the restaurant, fast-food chain and coffee and snack shop industry.

Its feasible this invention could affect the states agricultural and economic growth as soybean production could rise, Abbott said.

A group of soybean farmers, marketing specialists and scientists judging the contest at Purdue appreciated the fact that the prototype for the biodegradable, soy-based Stroy offers the material consistency of a plastic straw but breaks down in a matter of days if it is thrown away

Col. Stohler to keynote NIBCC luncheon

Col. Michael Stohler, commander of the 122nd Fighter Wing in Fort Wayne, will keynote the first luncheon of the decade for the Northeast Indiana Base Community Council.

His presentation entitled Your Citizen Airmen will provide an overview of the 122nd and what it does for the country and community. The luncheon will take place at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 12 at the Parkview Mirro Center, 10622 Parkview Plaza Drive in Fort Wayne.

Stohler has commanded the 122nd since April 2018 when its previous commander, Patrick Renwick, was promoted to brigadier general from colonel and began serving as a senior adviser to the adjutant general of the Indiana Air National Guard in Indianapolis.

With more than 4,100 hours in the F-16 and A-10 fighter aircraft, the command pilot has logged 833 hours during 161 combat sorties supporting operations Southern Watch, Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom and Inherent Resolve.

During his Inherent Resolve service, he became the first commander of the reactivated Red Tails of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group.

Stohler served as the Indiana Air Guards state director of operations at its Joint Forces Headquarters in Indianapolis prior to leading the 122nd.

He works as a commercial pilot out of Fort Wayne International Airport when not serving in the Air National Guard.

The cost of the luncheon is $25 with a $5 discount for NIBCC members or members of the military community. Gold Tables, which seat eight, are available for $500. More information on the event is available at http://www.nibcc.org.

Hendrix to speak on state 5G plans

Sean Hendrix, director of emerging technology partnerships for Purdue Research Foundation and managing director for the Indiana 5G Zone, will provide the program for the next local Networking Information Technology Association meeting.

His presentation on The 5th Generation Mobile Network will take place at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 7 at Kettler Hall, Room G46, at Purdue University Fort Wayne, 2101 Coliseum Blvd. E.

5G promises to be transformative from new smartphone uses, automated vehicles, and the Internet of Things to remote healthcare, augmented and virtual reality, industrial automation and more the innovations of the future will be built on 5G, a meeting announcement said.

However, defining what 5G is, developing an understanding of how physical industries will be digitized, and understanding where Indiana fits in the overall picture presents both opportunities and challenges. We will explore these questions in an effort to develop the roadmap forward.

The local NITA has changed its meeting day from the first Thursday of the month to the first Friday.

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Department of Energy to use IU's Big Red 200 supercomputer; Purdue University Fort Wayne offering astronomy concentration - FW Business

An astrophysicist honors citizen scientists in the age of big data – Science News

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The Crowd and the CosmosChris LintottOxford Univ., $24.95

Astrophysicist Chris Lintott had a problem back in themid-2000s. He wanted to know if the chemistry of star formation varies indifferent types of galaxies. But first he needed to sort through images ofhundreds of thousands of galaxies to gather an appropriate sample to study. Thetask would take many months if not longer for one person, and computers at thetime werent up to the challenge. So Lintott and colleagues turned to thepublic for help.

The group launched Galaxy Zoo in 2007. The website asked volunteers to classify galaxies by shape spiral or elliptical. Interest in the project was overwhelming. On the first day, so many people logged on that the server hosting the images crashed. Once the technical difficulties were resolved, more than 70,000 image classifications soon came in every hour. And as Lintott would learn, amateurs were just as good as professionals at categorizing galaxies.

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Galaxy Zoos success helped awaken other scientists to the potential of recruiting citizen scientists online to sift through large volumes of all sorts of data. That led to the birth of the Zooniverse, an online platform that lets anyone participate in real science. Projects on the platform ask volunteers to do everything from digitizing handwritten records from research ships to identifying animals caught on camera to sorting through telescope data to find signs of exoplanets.

In The Crowd and the Cosmos, Lintott, who cofounded the Zooniverse, shares his experiences with citizen science. The book is not a recounting of the history of Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse. Its more of an ode to citizen science. Lintott celebrates the successes, exploring the ways amateurs can contribute to science and how that contribution might change as artificial intelligence catches up with some kinds of human smarts.

By no means was Galaxy Zoo the first citizen scienceproject. As Lintott explains, the roots of citizen science go back to at leastthe 18th century. Even Charles Darwin benefited from observations contributedby a wide network of people. The Crowd and the Cosmos focuses on theimportance of citizen scientists in the age of big data and largely sticks towhat Lintott knows best: astrophysics and astronomy.

The book peruses a range of space topics, offering up-to-date,accessible overviews of exoplanets, supernovas, galaxies and dark energy, themysterious force that is causing the universes expansion to accelerate.Lintott is a knowledgeable and witty guide. His humor helps drive the story andeven pops up in numerous footnotes. After describing how he often ends talkswith the idea that, far into the future, the universe will likely become anearly empty void, a vast sea of space expanding forever into yet morenothingness, he quips: I do like to send an audience home happy.

Just as the universes future may seem bleak, so too mightthe future of some forms of citizen science. When Lintott first enlistedvolunteers to help wade through a deluge of galaxy images, computers wereterrible at tasks that required pattern-recognition skills. But times havechanged. Machine-learning algorithms abilities on visual tasks are improving,and researchers are on the verge of automating many time-intensive, oftentedious jobs. In fact, some Zooniverse projects today ask citizen scientists toclassify data as a way to amass large datasets to help train machine-leaningalgorithms. As artificial intelligence continues to get better, will there comea time when citizen scientists services are no longer needed?

Lintott doesnt think so. He predicts humans and machineswill keep working side by side, and at least for the foreseeable future,citizen scientists will still be needed to help train machine-learningalgorithms. But he also envisions these volunteers making other importantcontributions. For instance, he argues that when looking through seeminglyendless piles of images or historical records or even graphs of data, theseamateurs are in the best position to notice something rare or unusual; expertstend to be too focused on the task at hand, and computers might not be trainedto identify something out of the ordinary.

That was the case in 2007 when a volunteer in the Netherlands named Hanny van Arkel found a strange blob in an image and implored scientists to investigate. Dubbed Hannys Voorwerp (Dutch for object), the blob is now known to be a large gas cloud still glowing after being hit by a jet of radiation from a nearby galaxys black hole (SN: 12/23/17 & 1/6/18, p. 5). Researchers have learned that such gas clouds can be indicators that a now-quiet galaxy was active not too long ago (SN Online: 4/24/15).

Lintotts enthusiasm for citizen science and his admiration of the talents and tenacity of citizen scientists is inspiring. By the end of the book, I was ready to sign up for some projects in the Zooniverse.

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An astrophysicist honors citizen scientists in the age of big data - Science News

This Is Wild: Astrophysicists Can See Stars Twisting Space and Time – Popular Mechanics

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Dr. V. Venkatraman Krishnan, et al.

A team of astrophysicists from around the world has been following an unusual pair of spinning stars for almost 20 years, and now they say the binary system is persuasive evidence of frame dragging. In a new paper in Science, the researchers say the white dwarf and neutron star that spin extremely fast together form an edge case to demonstrate relativity.

Relativistic frame dragging is an offshoot of Einsteins general theory of relativitythe idea that individual objects in the curvature of spacetime cause changes within that spacetimewhere scientists observe that objects with energy can cause spacetime to bend and bunch in order to absorb the extra energy.

In this case, a special binary system is so forceful and sped up that the effects are more visible to scientists. The system, named PSR J1141-6545, is made of two stars: One is a white dwarf, the size of the Earth but 300,000 times its density; the other is a neutron star which, while only 20 kilometres in diameter, is about 100 billion times the density of the Earth, the press release says.

Something so tiny and extremely dense, especially in a conjoined spin with a second star that itself would be considered quite small and quite dense in any other circumstance, ends up spinning so fast that it bends and wobbles. The tiny neutron star is a pulsar, meaning it emits a steady beam of light that can be tracked as it spins, like when the suns reflection off a metal object points directly in your eyes as you walk past.

Monitoring the frequency of these spinning pulses lets scientists begin to make an overall picture of how the neutron star is orbiting. All pulsars are useful for research into astrophysics because of the way their size and density makes them behave extremely. In this case, the pulsar is locked in a tight and extremely fast orbit, and over the last two decades, scientists have watched this orbit evolve rapidly compared with other objects in space that are larger, slower, and generally operating on a longer scale of time.

All of this means that for the first time, astrophysicists have recorded evidence of the predicted phenomenon of frame dragging. If spacetime is colloquially indeed a fabric, its an elastic one, where spinning objects receive that stored energy back from the fabric of spacetime itself. And objects within spacetime can pass energy back and forth the same way, making it both convenient and attractive, literally, to join into energy-saving pairs like this binary system.

The orbit of the two stars continues to drift and change, like a spinning figure skater who accelerates by pulling in their limbs. Its this change in speed and orientation that let scientists observe the frame dragging, in the form of an observable spin change called the Lense-Thirring effect. This detection is consistent with an evolutionary scenario in which the [white dwarf (WD)] accreted matter from the pulsar, spinning up the WD to a period of <200 seconds, this research team concludes.

Scientists have longed for evidence of frame dragging in the wild, so to speak, because the idea could explain a lot of things we dont understand yet about relativity, gravity itself, and forces that affect everything from celestial objects to subatomic particles. By observing a forceful and extremely fast binary star, these scientists have recorded what they say is the first such evidence, and the first step toward better understanding the universe.

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This Is Wild: Astrophysicists Can See Stars Twisting Space and Time - Popular Mechanics