Unbound: No 124
Blockchain integration firm helps businesses prepare for Web 3.0
by: Brian Hartz | Business Observer
Startup: BlockSpaces
Founders: Gabe Higgins and Rosa Shores
Year founded: 2017
Investors/investment: BlockSpaces, to date, has landed $7.25 million in investment capital. After securing the backing of a few angel investors, Leadout Capital led its first institutional funding round, which attracted support from Mark Pincus, the founder of mobile app company Zynga, known for games such as “Angry Birds,” “Farmville” and “Words With Friends.” Other investors include GTMfund, Tampa-based Druid Ventures and Tony DiBenedetto, one of Tampa’s early tech entrepreneurs — he founded Tribridge and led it for 19 years of incredible growth, selling the firm in 2017 to DXC Technology.
“We feel really lucky,” Co-founder and CEO Rosa Shores says. “We got participation from San Franciso [investors] as well as some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Tampa. I love our story as far as who’s involved in our backing.”
AGRICULTURE EMBRACES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
By Gil Gullickson | Successful Farming
Graybeards may remember the thrill they felt when pencil-laden math calculations moved warp speed ahead into the calculator age.
These days, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to bring the same heat to agriculture that it did to math classes decades ago. Artificial intelligence is a technology that includes several subsets such as machine learning, says Rania Khalaf, Inari chief information and data officer.
“Machine learning enables computers to mathematically predict outcomes or make classifications by finding patterns in large amounts of data,” she says. “It then learns to update these patterns or classifications over time as it sees new data.”.
Governments seek ways to avert quantum's encryption apocalypse
by Sam Sabin, author of Axios Codebook | Axios
The U.S. is barreling toward a quantum computing future, but until it’s here, it's unknown if all the investments and time spent preparing the country’s cybersecurity will pay off.
The big picture: Experts have long feared quantum computing would allow foreign adversaries and hackers to crack the otherwise unbreakable encryption standards that protect most online data — leaving everything from online payment systems to government secrets vulnerable.
- Although a quantum computer isn't expected until 2030, at the earliest, updating current encryption standards will take just as long, creating a high-stakes race filled with unanswerable questions for national security and cybersecurity officials alike.
🌙 NASA - Best Photo from Last Week
Hubble Captures a Swarm of Stars
Looking like a glittering swarm of buzzing bees, the stars of globular cluster NGC 6440 shine brightly in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. The cluster is located some 28,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer.
Globular clusters like NGC 6440 are roughly spherical, tightly packed collections of stars that live on the outskirts of galaxies. They hold hundreds of thousands to millions of stars that average about one light-year apart, but they can be as close together as the size of our solar system.
The data used to create this image came from five different Hubble observing programs, four of which focused on the properties of pulsars. Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation from its magnetic poles. To us, that beam appears as a short burst or pulse as the star rotates. Pulsars spin extremely fast. Astronomers have clocked the fastest pulsar at 716 rotations per second, but a pulsar could theoretically rotate as fast as 1,500 rotations per second before they slowly lose energy or break apart.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, C. Pallanca and F. Ferraro (Universits Di Bologna), and M. van Kerkwijk (University of Toronto); Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
301-286-1940
Last Updated: Nov 30, 2022
Editor: Andrea Gianopoulos
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