Author: GW Alger

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Forget the Great Reset. Embrace the Great Escape.

“The coronavirus pandemic has no parallel in modern history. It is our defining moment.”

Those are the words of Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in COVID-19: The Great Reset, the 2020 book he co-authored with Thierry Malleret.

“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal,” they write in the book’s introduction. “The short response is: never.”

At the latest WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this January, Schwab set the tone for the conference with his glowing introduction of the opening speaker: Xi Jinping, China’s president and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party

“Major economies should see the world as one community… and should coordinate the objectives, intensity, and pace of fiscal and monetary policies,” said Xi in his address to the WEF.

This vision of a united globe with a coordinated economy managed by experts captures Schwab’s vision of the post-COVID world. “We have to redefine the social contract,” said Schwab at a 2020 WEF book launch event for The Great Reset.

These grand proclamations, the ominous book title, and Schwab’s odd personal style have led many people to speculate that the “great reset” is part of a conspiracy of global financial elites and politicians to depopulate the planet so that they can more easily institute one-world government, or even that COVID was engineered to that end.

I don’t buy it. Far-reaching, global conspiracies require levels of coordination and shared purpose likely to be quickly exposed and fall apart, especially in the networked age. Instead of spinning our wheels searching for a secret agenda, take a look at the one right out in the open.

“I think we are moving from short-term to long-term, from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism,” said Schwab at his 2020 book event.

What Xi, the WEF, and people like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) have in common is that they favor so-called stakeholder capitalism, which is a euphemism for making companies answer first to special interests. They want to reorganize corporate boards to include representatives from labor, environmental, and social justice groups. Warren proposed a bill to require 40 percent of large corporate board seats be elected by workers. In China, the state simply owns or controls a majority stake in most of the country’s largest firms.

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Tiny Robots In Your Body? How Nanotechnology Could Save Your Life!

Imagine a world where, if you get sick, doctors inject tiny robots into your body that seek out the source of the problem and cure your illness. While this technology is still in the developmental stages, scientists have been hard at work making machines small enough to be able to do this. They are called nanobots and come from the field of nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is any science, engineering, or technology that is done at the nanoscale, which is from 1 to 100 nanometers. And that is tiny! To put that into perspective, a sheet of paper is about 1 million nanometers thick, a human cell is 10,000 nanometers, a bacterium is 1,000 nanometers, and a DNA molecule is 2.5 nanometers.

Plenty of nanoparticles already exist in everyday things like sunscreen, agriculture, and electronics., But they are also used in medicine, inside your body. They are mainly used as a contrast agent in medical imaging techniques, improving their sensitivity and detection abilities, as well as a vehicle for delivering drugs to specific parts of the body.

But these particles aren’t controlled externally. They get to the desired location in the body with the help of an attached ligand, which is a molecule that binds to a very specific receptor, like one that is located only on tumor cells. To be considered a nanorobot, or nanobot, they must be able to be externally controlled. And this is challenging. Especially when you want to enter the body, which has a whole host of natural defenses against foreign invaders, like mucus and immune cells.

One popular propulsion method being explored is the use of a magnetic field. Since magnetic fields are not influenced by tissues in the body, and are considered safe, many scientists are developing tiny robots that can be controlled inside the body when a magnetic field is applied outside of the body. So far, all of these robots are larger than 100 nanometers, so can’t really be considered a true nanobot, but they are extremely cool.

Like the fish-shaped microbots being developed to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to cancer cells, the slope-climbing millibots being made to medicate the nervous system, and a 400-nanometer surgical robot with propellers that can drill through an eye without harming the tissue.

But the smallest one is a 120-nanometer robot that can transport payloads like medicine, as well as penetrate cell membranes to deliver it, which most nanoparticles struggle to do. The creators hope to use it to treat cancer, remove blood clots, and even repair brain cells.

Other potential applications include collecting internal information about the body, correcting bleeding or oxygenation issues, and for many uses in dentistry. There are still many challenges that need to be overcome and risks that need to be addressed before these technologies will make it into the clinic, but perhaps one day soon these tiny robots could be saving our lives.

So would YOU ever have nanobots swimming around like the magic school bus in your body? Let me know how you feel about this in the comments! Are you for or against it? As always, my name is Blocko, this has been life noggin, don’t forget to keep on thinking!

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Blockchain Explained | What is Blockchain? | Blockchain Technology [Updated 2022]

A blockchain is a list of transactions that anyone can view and verify. It is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger.

Distributed ledger technology: All network participants have access to the distributed ledger and its immutable record of transactions. With this shared ledger, transactions are recorded only once, eliminating the duplication of effort that’s typical of traditional business networks.

Immutable records: No participant can change or tamper with a transaction after it’s been recorded to the shared ledger. If a transaction record includes an error, a new transaction must be added to reverse the error, and both transactions are then visible.

Smart contracts: To speed transactions, a set of rules — called a smart contract — is stored on the blockchain and executed automatically. A smart contract can define conditions for corporate bond transfers, including terms for travel insurance to be paid and much more.

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How AI works in everyday life | Google AI

Ever wonder how AI (artificial intelligence) works? Find out how machines learn to help you with everyday interactions with technology products. T

his is an excerpt from a larger lesson, “Discover AI in Daily Life,” from Applied Digital Skills, Google’s free, online, video-based curriculum.

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What Are DAOs? (And How One DAO Turned $10M into $1B) | Forbes

The leaderless investing collectives known as decentralized autonomous organizations are generating a lot of eyerolls. Thanks to high flexibility and low regulation, they’ll also soon generate a lot of profits.

“This is an incredibly risky move. I don’t know if I agree with this.’’ Erick Calderon, the founder of a company named Art Blocks in a risk-oblivious field, nonfungible tokens, was nonetheless concerned. It was February 2021, and Calderon was one of 59 investors who had banded together to potentially buy a rare set of 150 popular NFTs, CryptoPunks, directly from their producer, Larva Labs.

The group, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Flamingo, had pooled $10 million and met weekly via Zoom (audio-only to protect those wanting anonymity) to figure out what to do with it. The CryptoPunk opportunity, at about four ether ($7,200 at the time) per punk, would eat 10% of that, which is partly why Calderon aired his concerns on the group’s Discord channel.

The tension got thicker when members discovered one of their own—someone going by the pseudonym “Pranksy”—had tried to front-run the deal, opening a back channel with Larva Labs to buy 150 punks for himself. In the end, Flamingo members voted to spring for the punks, which were recently valued at $30 million. As for Pranksy, he left the DAO “by mutual agreement,” telling Forbes he was “somewhat naïve [about] the DAO process.”

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Building Quantum Computers Using 2D Materials

Quantum computing promises to revolutionize how we solve problems. The advantages that come from using quantum mechanics to solve hard problems are colossal. But we are still a long way from demonstrating solving a functionally useful problem. The main reason is that to solve these problems we require a lot of qubits, as for complex problems the quantum algorithms often require error correction. Which dramatically increases the number of qubits required, from tens to thousands, or even more. Thus, we need to find techniques to scale the production of qubits in a compact and reliable manner. In this latest work from a team at MIT, two-dimensional materials were used to construct superconducting qubits.

They use a combination of NbSi2 and hBN to form a Josephson junction and perform tests on the Qubit’s performance compared to traditional fabricated superconducting qubits. They demonstrate that the performance is very similar despite having a significantly smaller size. This is a promising demonstration of fabricating with 2D materials.

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