A study claiming that psychopaths and others with "Dark Tetrad" personality traits are drawn to crypto has been criticized as "meaningless" for showing very weak correlativity by a psychology expert from the University of Otago. Researchers with backgrounds predominately in marketing and advertising from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) surveyed 566 people on their attitudes toward crypto and correlated the results with four specific personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism. The findings were first shared by The U.S. Sun, and were widely syndicated by the mainstream media, with the New York Post headline screaming “Bitcoin fans are psychopaths …

Scientists can leverage blockchain tools, such as smart contracts and tokens, to improve collaboration in scientific endeavors between different stakeholders. This so-called decentralized science movement, or DeSci for short, combines blockchain and Web3 technologies to improve scientific research. A primary goal of DeSci is wider participation and funding when approaching scientific challenges, as well as democratizing the peer-to-peer review process, which is dominated by a few journals in which it can be costly to appear and combatting censorship. DeSci can also create standards for research storage with the proof of existence technology. Whereas on financial blockchains such as Bitcoin, transactions …

Blockchain use cases continue to grow as the world learns about the benefits that it brings. Apart from bringing financial innovations like the ability to do peer-to-peer transactions, blockchain now makes its way to the health industry. Health specialists created a method to track and store health data using blockchain technology. Rosanne Warmerdam, the CEO of Health Blocks, told Cointelegraph that her team had developed a way for users to generate and store patients’ health data without sacrificing their privacy and security. “We wanted to start with giving users ownership and control over their health data,” said Warmerdam. By building …

Scientists are continuously pursuing ways to lengthen the human lifespan, and blockchain might have been a missing part of the puzzle. The Longevity Science Foundation, a Swiss entity launched by a consortium of biotech founders, clinicians and leading longevity research institutions, aims to spend more than $1 billion over the next 10 years to find tech-based means to achieve a 120-year human lifespan. The foundation seeks to fund research, institutions and projects that use blockchain and other next-gen technologies to find new horizons in four critical areas of the field; namely, therapeutics, personalized medicine, artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive diagnostics. …

Thales, a French multinational company specializing in products and services for aerospace and defense industries, is using blockchain technology for a new management system at its production hub in Spain. According to an official announcement on Nov. 5, Thales is seeking to deploy technologies like blockchain and big data to enable the digital transformation of its defense- and aeronautics-focused production and maintenance center. As part of the initiative, the Paris-based company looks to comply with standards by the NATO and defense authorities by using blockchain to increase traceability of processes at the center. The announcement reads: “To comply with NATO …

There are more than 5,000 diverse cryptocurrencies being traded with a total market cap of nearly $250 billion. As much as 95% of those cryptos are nothing but scams, according to the creator of the world’s first proof-of-work, or PoW, crypto. Emin Gun Sirer, the creator of the first PoW-based crypto, the Karma System, is confident that the vast majority of cryptos do not represent any tech advancement and only exist to grab people’s money. Bitcoin did it first In an April 29 AMA session with Equilibrium EOSDT, Sirer slammed crypto projects like Facebook’s Libra for wanting to compete with …

Blockchain firm Nebula Genomics has announced a collaboration with EMD Serono, the North American biopharmaceutical business of Merck KGaA — the world’s oldest operating pharmaceutical firm. The news was announced in a press release shared with Cointelegraph on June 11. As previously reported, Nebula is a blockchain-powered platform for genome-sequencing data, co-founded in 2017 by renowned geneticist Professor George Church and his Harvard colleagues Dennis Grishin and Kamal Obbad. The platform leverages blockchain technology in a bid to incentivize genomic data generation and sharing, and to lower the costs of genome-sequencing while preserving privacy and individuals’ control over their unique …

Merck, the world’s oldest operating pharmaceutical firm, has won a blockchain patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Cointelegraph auf Deutsch reported Jan. 30 The German multinational has developed a system that uses a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain tech to establish the authenticity of unique physical objects. As Merck reports in a press release Jan. 30: “The new technology uses machine learning to link physical objects to a blockchain through their own unique identifiers or ‘fingerprints‘.” According the firm, the new patent describes a technology that can identify and record any unique feature of …

Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science (Minobrnauki) has introduced a blockchain-enabled platform for tracking natural diamonds, government-backed news agency TASS reports today, Jan. 30. The new Russian diamond tracking technology claims to fully guarantee the authenticity of diamond products across all the supply chain, from extraction and polishing to the final owner. Based on emerging IT technologies and blockchain, the new system intends to prevent market participants from losing their financial assets since the diamond market has both natural and synthetic diamonds, as well as fake stones, TASS reports. According to Minobrnauki, the technology has been developed by Russian startup …

U.S. multinational IT company IBM plans to use blockchain to aid scientific research and provide a record of its results, a new patent application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed Nov. 8. IBM, originally filing the concept in December last year, says it foresees “integrating a blockchain and data collection and analysis for open scientific research.” The application is the latest in a steadily increasing pile of patents sought by the corporation in the blockchain sector, the most recent award coming last week targeted at augmented reality gaming. Now, an altogether more technical offshoot addresses what it …

A lack of diversity of Ethereum (ETH) smart contracts poses a threat to Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, according to research by a group of analysts from Northeastern University and the University of Maryland released on Oct. 31. The paper, entitled “Analyzing Ethereum’s Contract Topology,” claims that most Ethereum smart contracts are “direct- or near-copies of other contracts,” which represents a potential risk if a copied smart contract contains a vulnerable or a buggy code. Partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the study has analyzed Ethereum smart contracts’ bytecodes during its first 5 million blocks, which covers almost a three-year …

In an era of hotly contested debates surrounding data ownership, privacy and monetization, one particular piece of data could be said to be the most personal of all: the human genome. While we are 99.9 percent identical in our genetic makeup across the species, the remaining 0.1 percent contains unique variations in code that are thought to influence our predisposition toward certain diseases and even our temperamental biases — a blueprint for how susceptible we are to everything from heart disease and Alzheimer’s to jealousy, recklessness and anxiety. 2018 offered ample examples of how bad actors can wreak havoc with …