Lifeboat Foundation

India now generates around 1,160.1 billion units of electricity in financial year 2017, up 4.72% from the previous year. The country is behind only China which produced 6,015 terrawatt hours (TWh. 1 TW = 1,000,000 megawatts) and the US (4,327 TWh), and is ahead of Russia, Japan, Germany, and Canada.

Total electricity production stood at 1,003.52 billion units in India between April 2017 and January 2018. “Multiple drivers (like industrial expansion and rising per capita income) are leading to growth in power demand; this is set to continue in the coming years,” said a report by the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), an arm of the Indian government’s ministry of commerce.

Continue reading “India is now the world’s third-largest electricity producer” »

It seems Mastercard is gradually softening its stance on cryptocurrency, after CEO Ajay Banga downplayed non-government mandated digital currencies as “junk” back in October last year.

In a conversation with Financial Times, Ari Sarkar, Mastercard co-president for the Asia-Pacific region, said the company is open to explore cryptocurrencies created and backed by governments.

“If governments look to create national digital currency we’d be very happy to look at those in a more favourable way [compared with existing cryptocurrencies],” Sarkar told Financial Times.

Continue reading “Mastercard will support cryptocurrencies, if they’re backed by governments” »

On Thursday, Robert O. Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, will announce that he is teaming up with the Center for a New American Security, an influential Washington think tank that specializes in national security, to create a task force of former government officials, academics and representatives from private industry. Their goal is to explore how the federal government should embrace A.I. technology and work better with big tech companies and other organizations.

Older tech companies have long had ties with military and intelligence. But employees at internet outfits like Google are wary of too much cooperation.

You probably scratched your head last year if you read about time crystals, likely 2017’s most esoteric, widely covered popular science story. Even if you understood how they worked, you might not have known what use they could have. Time crystals, systems of atoms that maintain a periodic ticking behavior in the presence of an added electromagnetic pulse, have now piqued the interest of one well-funded government agency: the Department of Defense.

The DoD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced a new program to fund research on these systems. More generally, the new DRINQS program will study exactly what its acronym stands for: “Driven and Nonequilibrium Quantum Systems.” But why?

“The applications could be for atomic clocks, where you have an ensemble of atoms you’re vibrating to extract time information,” Ale Lukaszew, program manager in DARPA’s defense sciences offices, told Gizmodo. “There might be applications related to measuring things with exquisite sensitivity in time and magnetic field domains. Not a lot of these applications are open for discussion.” In other words, time crystal-based military technology is classified.

China has been one of the harshest countries with regard to cryptocurrency regulations and has given its citizens a very short leash. This hard-set attitude has made it difficult for people in the mainland to trade and hold cryptocurrency assets, while some have opted for offshore accounts, many still prefer using the little leeway their government allows.

The Chinese have clamped down on cryptocurrencies so much that they even forced a popular social media platform to shut down and warned its people that accounts related to cryptocurrencies would be watched closely.

Which is why the conversations that happened and the statements that were released at this year’s National People’s Congress comes as a long sought after reprieve to China’s people.

Cai, a delegate to the National People’s Congress in Beijing, said the idea made sense.

As the country rides a wave of investment in automation, Cai is among the first Chinese academics to call for restrictions on robots.

NPC delegate Cai Fang says it won’t be long before machines can do most things better than humans.

Continue reading “Tax the terminator: Chinese adviser calls for levy to stop robots taking over the workplace” »

Satellite operators must get government approval to launch hardware into orbit. The FCC says that Swarm Technologies launched four small satellites in January without authorization.

China is intensifying its push into space, and broadening its astronaut recruiting.

The Chinese government, which plans to increase the number of manned missions in its military-backed space program to around two a year, will soon begin recruiting civilian astronauts, Yang Liwei, deputy director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office, told reporters on the sidelines of a ceremonial parliament session this weekend. That’s a departure from China’s practice of drawing its astronauts from among air force pilots.

Yang—who was China’s first man in space in 2003—said the trainees could include private-sector maintenance engineers, payload specialists, pilots, scientists, and people from universities and other research institutions, according to the Associated Press. More women are also being encouraged to apply. The loosening of restrictions comes amid NASA’s announcement that it has recruited America’s most competitive class of astronauts ever, as well as other initiatives like Canada’s Hunger Games -style search for new astronauts on the internet.

Continue reading “China is recruiting a new wave of astronauts from its civilians” »

Pilots of such programs are underway in Finland and Canada. In rural Kenya, a basic income is managed by nonprofit GiveDirectly. India — with a population of more than 1.3 billion residents — is considering establishing a universal basic income.

Half of Americans want the government to send them weekly checks, regardless of their income or work.