Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9,565

When participating in a video call or conference, it is often hard to maintain direct eye contact with other participants, as this requires looking into the camera rather than at the screen. Although most people use video calling services on a regular basis, so far, there has been no widespread solution to this problem.

A team of researchers at Intel has recently developed an correction model that could help to overcome this nuisance by restoring eye contact in live video chats irrespective of where a device’s camera and display are situated. Unlike previously proposed approaches, this model automatically centers a person’s gaze without the need for inputs specifying the redirection angle or the camera/display/user geometry.

“The main objective of our project is to improve the quality of video conferencing experiences by making it easier to maintain eye contact,” Leo Isikdogan, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “It is hard to maintain eye contact during a because it is not natural to look into the camera during a call. People look at the other person’s image on their display, or sometimes they even look at their own preview image, but not into the camera. With this new eye contact correction feature, users will be able to have a natural face-to-face conversation.”

Read more | >

While it remains to be seen if these fermented proteins can be produced economically, their introduction into the marketplace could cause significant disruption to the dairy industry. The disruption would be due in part to switching some processed products away from conventional dairy proteins.

There would be additional disruption because of the change in relative demand for protein and other milk components. We would likely end up with more significant surpluses of proteins from both conventional dairy and synthetic production.

Read more | >

For the latest tale of the unexpected from medical emergency rooms, we bring you the case of a 66-year-old man who turned up at the hospital complaining of a cough and chest pains.

Soon enough, doctors realised the patient’s internal organs were all on the wrong side of his body: his heart was on the right, liver on the left, and so on.

This condition actually has a name, situs inversus totalis, and it’s not as life-changing as you might think at first. In fact, before we had modern medical scanning tools, it’s thought most people who had this lived their lives without ever getting diagnosed.

Read more | >

When people come to visit the Nordic island of Sommarøy, they must leave their sense of time at the door.

Some choose to do this quite literally, and so, the bridge that connects this small fishing village to the mainland is sprinkled not with lover’s padlocks as you would expect in any other location, but rather, with discarded watches.

Here in West Tromsø, north of the Arctic Circle, time in the traditional sense holds little meaning. During winter months, the Sun does not rise, and for 69 days of summer, it never sets.

Read more | >

If you want to control a robot with your mind — and really, who doesn’t? — you currently have two options.

You can get a brain implant, in which case your control over the robot will be smooth and continuous. Or you can skip the risky, expensive surgery in favor of a device that senses your brainwaves from outside your skull — but your control over the bot will be jerky and not nearly as precise.

Now, a team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is narrowing the gap between those two options, creating the first noninvasive mind-controlled robot arm that exhibits the kind of smooth, continuous motion previously reserved only for systems involving brain implants — putting us one step closer to a future in which we can all use our minds to control the tech around us.

Read more | >

With the ability to use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even play tricks on humans just for funsies, octopuses are fiercely smart. But their intelligence is quite weirdly built, since the eight-armed cephalopods have evolved differently from pretty much every other type of organism on Earth.

Rather than a centralised nervous system such as vertebrates have, two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are spread throughout its body, distributed between its arms. And now scientists have determined that those neurons can make decisions without input from the brain.

“One of the big picture questions we have is just how a distributed nervous system would work, especially when it’s trying to do something complicated, like move through fluid and find food on a complex ocean floor,” said neuroscientist David Gire of the University of Washington.

Read more | >

Biometrics is defined as the measurement of life signs. One of the main aims of current security research is to acquire biometric data of sufficient detail and reliability for verification or identification of individuals.

A newly developed electric-field sensing technology with unprecedented sensitivity and noise immunity can passively acquire physiological signals in an electrically noisy environment.

Robert Prance

Read more | >

In this paper, we characterize and discriminate between normal and cancer cells from three different tissue types, liver, lung, and breast, using capacitance–voltage-based extracted set of parameters. Cells from each type of cancer cell line were suspended in a liquid media either individually or as mixtures with their normal counterparts. Empirically, normal cells were observed to exhibit higher dielectric constants when compared to cancer cells from the same tissue. Moreover, adding cancer cells to normal cells was observed to increase the capacitance of normal cells, and the extent of this increase varied with the type of tissue tested with the lung cells causing the greatest change. This shows that the cancer cells of different cell origin possess their own signature electrical parameters, especially when compared with their normal counterparts, and that cancer cell seems to affect normal cells in a different manner, depending upon the tissue type. It was also noticed that the cells (both cancer and normal) exhibited a higher dielectric value as per the following order (from least to most): breast, lung, and liver. The changes in electrical parameters from normal to cancer state were explained not only by the modification of its physiological and biochemical properties but also by the morphological changes. This approach paves the way for exploring unique electrical signatures of normal and their corresponding cancer cells to enable their detection and discrimination.

Read more | >