Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: education – Page 4

Imagine that malignant brain tumors are not the unbridled chaos of unchecked growth we think they are, but they are actually communicating with brain cells in very specific ways. That’s what Stanford neuroscientist Michelle Monje MD, PhD, discovered about certain types of brain cancer (called gliomas), including a deadly childhood form called DIPG. It turns out that these tumors can form connections with the brain’s circuitry (just like brain cells do) in order to fuel their own growth. But it’s not just cancers that start in the brain that are doing this. Monje and Stanford researcher Julien Sage, PhD, discovered that a type of cancer that starts in the lungs also engages in this form of hijacking when it spreads to the brain. This is important because we now have significant insight into the process of tumor growth. And these findings help us better understand how we might be able to treat or stop these cancers altogether. For more information, read “Dangerous infiltrators” in Stanford Medicine magazine: https://stan.md/4gZHRh7

#Cancer #Neuroscience #BrainCancer #Glioma #CancerResearch #StanfordMedicine #TumorGrowth #CancerBreakthrough #MedicalResearch #BrainHealth #Oncology.
Stanford Medicine advances human health through world-class biomedical research, education and patient care. Bringing together the resources of Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford Medicine is committed to training future leaders in biomedicine and translating the latest discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease.

The Stanford Medicine YouTube channel is a curated collection of contributions from our School of Medicine departments, divisions, students, and the community. Our diverse content includes coverage of events, presentations, lectures, and associated stories about the people of Stanford Medicine.

Read more | >

Reasoning about the physical world enables people to successfully interact with and manipulate their environment. In this Review, Hartshorne and Jing bridge findings from education, developmental psychology and cognitive science and discuss how best to reconcile these approaches going forward.

Read more | >

I have always considered myself generally attuned to the nuances of sound and technology, but nothing in my training or experience as an audio engineer had prepared me for the experience that would challenge my understanding of mind-machine interaction, if not reality itself. During my five years of industry experience (in documentary postproduction) working with digital audio workstations, mixing consoles, and media servers, I occasionally noticed fleeting moments of uncanny synchrony between my thoughts and the technology around me — an inexplicable, almost telepathic rapport with the equipment.

One event stood apart from all others: a sudden, unshakable certainty that the entire production company’s server infrastructure was on the verge of catastrophic failure. There were no perceptible signs of this — no sluggishness in the UI or signal output, no glitches registering perceptually or in the manipulations of the hardware — it was just a gut feeling. Trusting this intuition, I meticulously backed up every project I was working on at the time. A couple days later, the crash hit — crippling the workflow of every suite in the company except mine. To a skeptic, this might be dismissed as coincidence or subconscious pattern recognition. But to me, it was phenomenologically undeniable: something beyond conventional cognition had occurred, something that demanded deeper inquiry.

The history of science is punctuated by phenomena that defy our prevailing paradigms. The phenomenon described here — a premonition of an impending media server collapse, acted upon with near-perfect timing — suggests an intimate, perhaps even psychic, relationship between the human mind and the technological milieu. While a materialist skeptic may argue that this experience is the product of unconscious pattern recognition or mere coincidence, such objections introduce unnecessary complexities, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor.

Read more | >

Summary: Concerns over potential negative impacts of AI have dominated headlines, particularly regarding its threat to employment. However, a closer examination reveals AI’s immense potential to revolutionize equal and high quality access to necessities such as education and healthcare, particularly in regions with limited access to resources. From India’s agricultural advancements to Kenya’s educational support, AI initiatives are already transforming lives and addressing societal needs.

The latest technology panic is over artificial intelligence (AI). The media is focused on the negatives of AI, making many assumptions about how AI will doom us all. One concern is that AI tools will replace workers and cause mass unemployment. This is likely overblown—although some jobs will be lost to AI, if history is any guide, new jobs will be created. Furthermore, AI’s ability to replace skilled labor is also one of its greatest potential benefits.

Think of all the regions of the world where children lack access to education, where schoolteachers are scarce and opportunities for adult learning are scant.

Read more | >

This is the prophesied follow-up to my fastpunch through humanism, covering some 20th century reactions to humanist thought. I hypothesize that we’re at something of a standoff between humanism and posthumanism, as our political and educational institutions are struggling to terms with changing technical contexts.

If you like the work there’s more at https://spoti.fi/3f0OIXD and / plasticpills.

Addendum: Sometimes posthumanism is confused with transhumanism, which I had planned to cover in this video but it was getting too long. Transhumanism is often humanistic in that it privileges the same capacities that humanism does–intellect, memory, progress, consciousness–and proposes that our bodies can be technologically or genetically augmented to improve these capacities in new stages of human develepment– uploading our consciousness into the cloud or staving off mortality. Posthumanists, by and large, tend to de-emphasize the supposed value of those ends in the first place, although there is some overlap.

Thanks for watching!

Sources Used:
Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (https://amzn.to/37GFyw7) and Human, All Too Human (https://amzn.to/2OQsdbQ)
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (https://amzn.to/33l4AgP)
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time (https://amzn.to/2qQoJOF)
Donna Haraway (https://amzn.to/2pPVxqy)

Timecode:

Continue reading “Posthumanism Explained — Nietzsche, Deleuze, Stiegler, Haraway” | >

Super Humanity — This documentary examines breakthroughs in neuroscience and technology. Imagine a future where the human brain and artificial intelligence connect.

Super Humanity (2019)
Director: Ruth Chao.
Writers: Ruth Chao, Paula Cons, Alphonse de la Puente.
Genre: Documentary, Sci-Fi.
Country: Portugal, Spain.
Language: English.
Release Date: December 27, 2019 (Spain)

Also Known As (AKA):
(original title) O Futuro da Mente.
El futuro de la mente.
Netherlands O Futuro da Mente.
Poland O Futuro da Mente.
Portugal O Futuro da Mente.
South Korea O Futuro da Mente.
Spain El futuro de la mente.
United States Mind Forward.

SUPPORT US!
✘ Membership — https://bit.ly/3q5XPBh.

MORE DOCS!
► Gold: https://bit.ly/2IRZ0OA
► World Economy: https://bit.ly/36QlhEM
► All Playlists: https://bit.ly/3lOiCll.

#finance #documentaries #economy.

Continue reading “Super Humanity | Transhumanism | Documentary” | >

In today’s AI news, Alibaba Group plans to invest more than $52 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years, in a bid to seize more opportunities in the artificial-intelligence era. The spending of at least 380 billion yuan, equivalent to $52.41 billion, will surpass the company’s AI and cloud computing investment over the past decade, Alibaba said in a post Monday on its news site.

And, at the Global Developer Conference, an AI community event hosted in Shanghai over the weekend, open-source developers from around China congregated in a show of exuberance over the possibilities of AI since DeepSeek’s resource-efficient models captured the world’s imagination. Use cases on display included everything from robotics to virtual reality glasses.

Then, John Werner poses the question, what if you could just run to the supply room, and Xerox an entire firm? What would that look like? Well, it might be expensive. But probably not as expensive as humans. John says, Dwarkesh Patel gives us an idea in a new collaborative essay Jan. 31 talking about the potential for all-AI companies. Suggesting that “everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AI will have” …

And, agents capable of handling shopping-related tasks, optimizing supply chains, and creating personalized customer experiences are already here. Retail, in particular e-commerce, has been the poster child for agentic AI and is a sector where there is a lot of hype but also some very compelling use cases. So, let’s explore what’s happening in this space and what we can expect to see in the future.

In videos, during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the chairman, founder and chief educational technology scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, Derek Haoyang Li, discusses with Forbes’ Randall Lane, the research, technology and success behind the Shanghai company’s innovative adaptive education models.

Meanwhile, as AI chatbots become more personal and proactive, the line between tool and companion is beginning to blur, with some users even professing love for their digital aides, says business consultant Amaryllis Liampoti. She presents three foundational principles for how brands can harness AI to build deeper emotional connections with consumers while prioritizing well-being, transparency and autonomy —

In other advances, Professor Danfei Xu and the Robot Learning and Reasoning Lab (RL2) present EgoMimic is a full-stack framework that scales robot manipulation through egocentric-view human demonstrations via Meta’s Project Aria glasses at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Learn more about the Aria Research Kit at projectaria.com.

T need AGI or even the latest and greatest models; they need products that augment their existing workflows … + Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — like, comment, and subscribe for more AI news! Thank you for supporting my partners and I — it’s how I keep Neural News free.

Continue reading “Introducing Project Aria, from Meta” | >

This approach is not only faster and more energy-efficient but also delivers precise control over the material’s optical properties.

Light-Powered Quantum Dot Tuning

Researchers at north carolina state university.

Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, North Carolina State University (also referred to as NCSU, NC State, or just State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. NC State offers a wide range of academic programs and disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, business, and education. It is known for its strong programs in engineering, science, and technology and is a leader in research and innovation. It forms one of the corners of the Research Triangle together with Duke University in Durham and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Read more | >

It’s barely been two years since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released for public use, inviting anyone on the internet to collaborate with an artificial mind on anything from poetry to school assignments to letters to their landlord.

Today, the famous large language model (LLM) is just one of several leading programs that appear convincingly human in their responses to basic queries.

That uncanny resemblance may extend further than intended, with researchers from Israel now finding LLMs suffer a form of cognitive decline that increases with age just as we do.

Read more | >