Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10162

Transhumanists aim to do just that: to transcend the limits of the human body through the use of technology. Swiss photographer Matthieu Gafsou’s new book, H+ (Kehrer Verlag), documents Transhumanism through portraiture, still lifes and documentary photographs of Tranhumanist people, facilities, tools and technology. In photographing surgical procedures, laboratories, conferences and the like, Gafsou employed a hard flash to add a “clinical aspect” to his pictures. “This was important to me because I think [Transhumanism] is quite cold and [it] is about, not necessarily killing death but working on living longer,” he tells PDN. “But we are forgetting the body, we are forgetting the flesh, we are forgetting desire.”

In “H+,” Gafsou uses the visual language of science and technology to explore Transhumanism, the belief that the human body needs to be enhanced, perhaps even overcome.

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A new manufacturing technique uses a process similar to newspaper printing to form smoother and more flexible metals for making ultrafast electronic devices.

The low-cost process, developed by Purdue University researchers, combines tools already used in industry for manufacturing metals on a large scale, but uses the speed and precision of roll-to-roll newspaper printing to remove a couple of fabrication barriers in making electronics faster than they are today.

Cellphones, laptops, tablets, and many other electronics rely on their internal metallic circuits to process information at high speed. Current fabrication techniques tend to make these circuits by getting a thin rain of liquid metal drops to pass through a stencil mask in the shape of a circuit, kind of like spraying graffiti on walls.

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Researchers have shown that it is possible to train artificial neural networks directly on an optical chip. The significant breakthrough demonstrates that an optical circuit can perform a critical function of an electronics-based artificial neural network and could lead to less expensive, faster and more energy efficient ways to perform complex tasks such as speech or image recognition.

“Using an optical chip to perform neural computations more efficiently than is possible with digital computers could allow more complex problems to be solved,” said research team leader Shanhui Fan of Stanford University. “This would enhance the capability of artificial neural networks to perform tasks required for self-driving cars or to formulate an appropriate response to a spoken question, for example. It could also improve our lives in ways we can’t imagine now.”

An artificial neural network is a type of artificial intelligence that uses connected units to process information in a manner similar to the way the brain processes information. Using these networks to perform a complex task, for instance voice recognition, requires the critical step of training the algorithms to categorize inputs, such as different words.

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Scientists made molecules that spin around each other a billion times per second, the fastest mechanical rotation on record. They want to use these spinning molecules to study the very fabric of spacetime.

The two independent teams were studying how light’s energy could make molecules move, and ended up generating incredible spin frequencies. But if the spins are fast enough, it could be a way to measure the friction that particles might feel against spacetime itself.

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Researchers have figured out details about how some specific type of cancers become drug-resistant.

Researchers at the Rockefeller University have clarified the mechanism by which certain types of breast cancer become immune to specific drugs designed to eliminate them. More specifically, they figured out how the loss of the protein 53BP1 due to BRCA1 mutation allows cancers to become insensitive to PARP inhibitors [1].

Study summary

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