Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Although mobile devices were not designed to run compute-heavy AI models, in recent years AI-powered features like face detection, eye tracking, and voice recognition have all been added to smartphones. Much of the compute for such services is done on the cloud, but ideally these applications would be light enough to run directly on devices without an Internet connection.

In this spirit of “smaller is better,” Shanghai-based developer “Linzai” (GitHub user name @Linzaer) recently shared a new lightweight model that enables real-time face detection for smartphones. The “Ultra-Light-Fast-Generic-Face-Detector-1MB” is designed for general-purpose face detection applications in low-power computing devices and is applicable to both Android and iOS phones as well as PCs (CPU and GPU). The project has garnered a whopping 3.3k Stars and over 600 forks on GitHub.

Facial recognition technology is widely applied in security monitoring, surveillance, human-computer interaction, entertainment, etc. Detecting human faces in digital images is the first step in facial recognition, and an ideal face detection model can be evaluated by how quickly and accurately it performs.

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The scene last weekend at the Westgate, a Las Vegas mega resort, was like many others in Sin City. Alongside the one-armed bandits and craps tables, around 1,000 people milled around a mega convention centre. Many would have been close to pensionable age, and came from all corners of the Earth. But all the attendees at the event, RAADfest, were pursuing something out of the ordinary: immortality.

‘Immortalists’ say they have discovered how to slow and perhaps even reverse the ageing process — but is that really a good thing?

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The first person known to die as a result of a fecal transplant is a 73-year-old man who developed a fatal infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria that were in the donor’s stool sample.

News of the man’s death surfaced in June; he was one of two patients in separate clinical trials who became ill after receiving fecal transplants from the same donor, Live Science previously reported.

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Ever since the compass was invented, perhaps about 2,000 years ago, humans have used Earth’s magnetic field to guide them. Many ages later, Sheldon Breiner devised ways to use magnetism to guide him to things that might otherwise never have been found — like sunken ships, a lost city and colossal basalt heads buried underground.

Dr. Breiner, a geophysicist, inventor and serial entrepreneur, started a company called Geometrics in 1969 that built sophisticated magnetometers, which measure magnetic fields. (A compass is probably the most simple example of one.) He then discovered how to use them to detect objects by observing the way the objects affect the magnetic fields that surround them.

Dr. Breiner had started employing rubidium magnetometers to detect seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault when he was studying geophysics at Stanford University. In time he harnessed magnetometers to search for mineral and oil deposits deep underground; find hidden weapons; locate skiers lost in avalanches; and help the government track down sunken submarines and a hydrogen bomb that had fallen into the ocean after a B-52 bomber collided with a refueling jet over Spain in 1966.

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Prime numbers are one of the most basic topics of study in the branch of mathematics called number theory.

Primes are numbers that can only be evenly divided by themselves and 1. For example, 7 is a prime number since I’m left with a remainder or a fractional component if I divide 7 by anything other than itself or 1. 6 is not a prime because I can divide 6 by 2 and get 3.

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Knowing the criteria behind the Big Bang explosion will be key for models scientists use to understand the origin of the universe.

The origin of the universe started with the Big Bang, but how the supernova explosion ignited has long been a mystery — until now.

In a new paper appearing today (November 1, 2019) in Science Magazine, researchers detailed the mechanisms that could cause the explosion, which is key for the models that scientists use to understand the origin of the universe.

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