Connecting human brain to the Web

In this edition of the Worldwide Wrap, Google's Ray Kurzweil sees humans becoming hybrids, and Netflix is introducing trailers.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, believes humans will become hybrids who can connect their brain directly to the Internet by 2030.

The outspoken futurist made the claims at the Exponential Finance conference in New York. He said the brain will connect via nanobots, tiny robots made from DNA strands, and be able to harness cloud computing servers to augment our intelligence.
Via: Daily Mail

Netflix intros trailers

Netflix users are getting uppity over the video streaming service experimenting with advertisements that run before and after shows. But as the company's CEO Reed Hastings points out, these "ads" are, in fact, what were known in the good old days of cinemas as "trailers".

"No advertising coming onto Netflix. Period," he wrote on his Facebook page. "Just adding relevant cool trailers for other Netflix content you are likely to love."
Via: Wired

Over the last decade, Facebook's list of features and capabilities has piled pretty high. Now the company is stripping that away in a new app designed for customers with low-end phones and poor cellular connections.

The new app, called Facebook Lite, weighs in at less than 1MB, about an eighth the size of Taylor Swift's hit song "Shake it Off". It also uses other tricks like downloading photos at lower quality to help ensure the app is as speedy as possible.
Via: CNET

Chinese search engine giant Baidu recently made headlines when its supercomputer reportedly beat out challengers from both Google and Microsoft on the ImageNet image recognition test.

However, the company has had to back down from those claims and issue an apology after details emerged suggesting its success resulted from a scheme to cheat the testing system.
Via: Engadget

The tracking of social media's most damning digital evidence of media gaffes, the deleted tweet, just suffered a major setback as Politwoops has been cut off by Twitter.

Politwoops, which bills itself as "the only comprehensive collection of deleted tweets by US politicians that offers a window into what they hoped you didn't see," no longer has access to Twitter's application program interface, effectively crippling its ability to automatically track and then expose deleted tweets.
Via: Mashable

Data that reveals the changes occurring in remote oceans surrounding Antarctica has been made available to the public for the first time - and all of it has been recorded by an army of sensor-wearing seals.

Since 2004, biologists from the Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole consortium have been gathering detailed information from some of the iciest and most remote oceans on the planet, many of which are almost impossible for humans alone to monitor.
Via: Wired