Lifeboat Foundation

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.

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.

Continue reading “This New Mind-Controlled Robot Arm Works Without a Brain Implant” »

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.

Continue reading “Octopus Arms Are Capable of Making Decisions Without Input From Their Brains” »

Vital-Radio can use vital sign information to enhance our health-awareness, answering questions like “Do my breathing and heart rates reflect a healthy lifestyle?”, “Does my child breathe normally during sleep?” or “Does my elderly parent experience irregular heartbeats?”

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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

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.

Mm 🤔🤔

Why are the biggest and most influential tech companies making deals with oil companies that exacerbate one of the biggest threats to human civilisation?

Though it may not have the sting of death and taxes, presbyopia is another of life’s guarantees. This vision defect plagues most of us starting about age 45, as the lenses in our eyes lose the elasticity needed to focus on nearby objects. For some people reading glasses suffice to overcome the difficulty, but for many people the only fix, short of surgery, is to wear progressive lenses.

“More than a billion people have presbyopia and we’ve created a pair of autofocal lenses that might one day correct their vision far more effectively than traditional glasses,” said Stanford electrical engineer Gordon Wetzstein. For now, the prototype looks like virtual reality goggles but the team hopes to streamline later versions.

Wetzstein’s prototype glasses—dubbed autofocals—are intended to solve the main problem with today’s progressive lenses: These traditional glasses require the wearer to align their head to focus properly. Imagine driving a car and looking in a side mirror to change lanes. With progressive lenses, there’s little or no peripheral focus. The driver must switch from looking at the road ahead through the top of the glasses, then turn almost 90 degrees to see the nearby mirror through the lower part of the lens.