Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 1645

Imagine performing a sweep around an object with your smartphone and getting a realistic, fully editable 3D model that you can view from any angle. This is fast becoming reality, thanks to advances in AI.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada have unveiled new AI technology for doing exactly this. Soon, rather than merely taking 2D photos, everyday consumers will be able to take 3D captures of real-life objects and edit their shapes and appearance as they wish, just as easily as they would with regular 2D photos today.

In a new paper appearing on the arXiv preprint server and presented at the 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, researchers demonstrated a new technique called Proximity Attention Point Rendering (PAPR) that can turn a set of 2D photos of an object into a cloud of 3D points that represents the object’s shape and appearance.

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But what explains this phenomenon? Psychologists have proposed a number of explanations, but I’d argue the key to understanding Tony’s experience lies in a different interpretation of time itself.

When life flashes before our eyes

The experience of life flashing before one’s eyes has been reported for well over a century. In 1,892, a Swiss geologist named Albert Heim fell from a precipice while mountain climbing. In his account of the fall, he wrote is was “as if on a distant stage, my whole past life [was] playing itself out in numerous scenes”

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In a recent study published in eBioMedicine, researchers evaluated proteomic signatures in blood plasma and cervicovaginal fluid for endometrial cancer detection.

Study: Detection of endometrial cancer in cervico-vaginal fluid and blood plasma: leveraging proteomics and machine learning for biomarker discovery. Image Credit: mi_viri/Shutterstock.com.

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A brain tumor is the growth of abnormal cells in the brain or the area near it including nerves, pituitary gland, pineal gland, and membranes that cover the surface of the brain. Sometimes it can happen in the brain tissue as well. Brain tumours can be cancerous (malignant) or it can be non-cancerous (benign). However, both of them can be potentially life-threatening.

On the other hand, movement disorders refer to a cluster of neurological conditions that can either cause increased movements or decreased movements. For the unversed, brain tumours that are specifically affecting the brainstem, can sometimes cause various movement disorders.

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The development of Transhumanism / Extropianism in the final two decades of the 20th century also set in motion the creation of digital cash, including the breakthrough killer app: Bitcoin.

The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wanted to denationalize money. David Chaum, an innovator in the field of cryptography and electronic cash, wanted to shield it from surveillance. Their goals were not the same, but they each inspired the same man.

Max O’Connor grew up in the British city of Bristol in the 1960s and ’70s. Telling his life story to Wired in 1994, he explained how he had always dreamed of a future where humanity expanded its potential in science-fictional ways, a world where people would possess X-ray vision, carry disintegrator guns, or walk straight through walls.

By his teenage years, O’Connor had acquired an interest in the occult. He thought the key to realizing superhuman potential could perhaps be found in the same domain as astral projection, dowsing rods, and reincarnation. But he began to realize there was no compelling evidence that any of these mystical practices actually worked. Human progress, he soon decided, was best served not by the supernatural but by science and logic.

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