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thinkahol *

EPFL spinoff turns thousands of 2D photos into 3D images | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    Researchers in EPFL's Computer Vision Laboratory developed a computer-based modeling service that generates a 3D image from up to thousands of 2D shots, with all the processing done in the cloud. Since April, the EPFL startup Pix4D has been offering the modeling service with a fourth dimension: time. Now, individuals and small businesses looking for fast, cheap, large-scale 3D models can get them without investing in heavy processing, the company states. With Pix4D, users upload a series of photos of an object, and within 30 minutes they have a 3D image. The software defines "points of interest" from among the photos, or common points of high-contrast pixels. Next, the program pastes the images together seamlessly by matching up the points of interest. Much in the same way our two eyes work together to calculate depth, the software computes the distance and angle between two or more photos and lays the image over the model appropriately, creating a highly accurate 3D model that avoids the time intensive, "point by point" wireframe method. With Pix4D's 3D models, you can navigate in all directions as well as change the date on a timeline to see what a place looked like at different times of the year. The company is collaborating with several drone makers (including another EPFL startup,senseFly) to market their software as a package with senseFly's micro aerial vehicles, or autonomous drones. Pix4D's time element avoids waiting for Google to update its satellite data or for an expensive plane to fly by and take high-resolution photos. Farmers, for example, can now send relatively inexpensive flying drones into the air to take pictures as often as they like, allowing them to survey the evolution of their crops over large distances and long periods of time. And since the calculations are done on a cloud server, the client doesn't need a powerful computer of his or her own.
thinkahol *

Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks and the End of U.S. 'Diplomacy' - Truthdig - 0 views

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    WikiLeaks is again publishing a trove of documents, in this case classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The whistle-blower website will gradually be releasing more than 250,000 of these documents in the coming months so that they can be analyzed and gain the attention they deserve. The cables are internal, written communications among U.S. embassies around the world and also to the U.S. State Department. WikiLeaks described the leak as "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain [giving] an unprecedented insight into U.S. government foreign activities."
Todd Suomela

Boltzmann's Anthropic Brain | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

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    Out of the background thermal equilibrium, a fluctuation randomly appears that collects some degrees of freedom into the form of a conscious brain, with just enough sensory apparatus to look around and say "Hey! I exist!", before dissolving back into
Todd Suomela

The Technium: Many Species, One Mind - 0 views

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    Do we remain one species, or diverge into many? Do we remain of many minds, or merge into one?
thinkahol *

'World Wide Mind' - Total Connectedness, and Its Consequences - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Imagine, Michael Chorost proposes, that four police officers on a drug raid are connected mentally in a way that allows them to sense what their colleagues are seeing and feeling. Tony Vittorio, the captain, is in the center room of the three-room drug den. He can sense that his partner Wilson, in the room on his left, is not feeling danger or arousal and thus has encountered no one. But suddenly Vittorio feels a distant thump on his chest. Sarsen, in the room on the right, has been hit with something, possibly a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer. Vittorio glimpses a flickering image of a metallic barrel pointed at Sarsen, who is projecting overwhelming shock and alarm. By deducing how far Sarsen might have gone into the room and where the gunman is likely to be standing, Vittorio fires shots into the wall that will, at the very least, distract the gunman and allow Sarsen to shoot back. Sarsen is saved; the gunman is dead. That scene, from his new book, "World Wide Mind," is an example of what Mr. Chorost sees as "the coming integration of humanity, machines, and the Internet." The prediction is conceptually feasible, he tells us, something that technology does not yet permit but that breaks no known physical laws.
thinkahol *

Software tricks people into thinking it is human - tech - 06 September 2011 - New Scien... - 0 views

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    Cleverbot tricked 59 per cent of people that they were talking to another human - suggesting it has passed the Turing test
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
thinkahol *

Erasing signs of aging in human cells now a reality - 1 views

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    ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) - Scientists have recently succeeded in rejuvenating cells from elderly donors (aged over 100). These old cells were reprogrammed in vitro to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and to rejuvenated and human embryonic stem cells (hESC): cells of all types can again be differentiated after this genuine "rejuvenation" therapy. The results represent significant progress for research into iPSC cells and a further step forwards for regenerative medicine.
Infogreen Global

Bugs from space to increase the electrical output of the fuel cells Bugs from space to ... - 0 views

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    Microbial Fuel Cells, which work in a similar way to a battery, use bacteria to convert organic compounds directly into electricity by a process known as bio-catalytic oxidation.
thinkahol *

YouTube - Controlling the Brain with Light (Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University) - 0 views

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    Free Download - StanfordUniversity - January 22, 2009 - Karl Deisseroth is pioneering bold new treatments for depression and other psychiatric diseases. By sending pulses of light into the brain, Deisseroth can control neural activity with remarkable precision. In this short talk, Deisseroth gives an thoughtful and awe-inspiring overview of his Stanford University lab's groundbreaking research in "optogenetics".
thinkahol *

Stephen Hawking's Warning: Abandon Earth-Or Face Extinction | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    Our only chance of long term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space, Stephen Hawking said in an interview
thinkahol *

New self-assembling photovoltaic technology repairs itself - 0 views

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    ScienceDaily (Sep. 6, 2010) - Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.
thinkahol *

U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    With insurgents attacking American fuel supply convoys into Afghanistan, the military is pushing renewable energy sources like solar power.
thinkahol *

Researchers create self-assembling nanodevices that move and change shape on demand | K... - 0 views

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    Harvard researchers have created nanodevices made of DNA that self-assemble and can be programmed to move and change shape on demand. The nanodevice structure is based on the principle of tensegrity: its strength and stability results from the way it distributes and balances the counteracting forces of tension and compression. This new technology could lead to nanoscale medical devices and drug delivery systems, such as virus mimics that introduce drugs directly into diseased cells. Or it could one day be used to reprogram human stem cells to regenerate different kinds of injured organs and tissue.
thinkahol *

Can This Black Box See Into the Future? - Science News - redOrbit - 0 views

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    Deep in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.   At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment.
thinkahol *

Berkeley Lab scientists open electrical link to living cells | KurzweilAI - 0 views

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    Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have designed an electrical link to living cells engineered to shuttle electrons across a cell's membrane to an external acceptor along a well-defined path. This direct channel could yield cells that can read and respond to electronic signals, electronics capable of self-replication and repair, or efficiently transfer sunlight into electricity.
Todd Suomela

Forbes.com - Magazine Article - 0 views

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    Our new online intimacies create a world in which it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self, itself. "I am on my cell … online … instant messaging … on the Web"--these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, wired into society t
thinkahol *

YouTube - Organ Printing - 0 views

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    The "ink" in the bioprinting process employed by Organovo is composed of spheres packed with tens of thousands of human cells. These spheres are assembled or "printed" on sheets of organic biopaper. By precisely placing the cells with the bioprinter, and providing them with the proper natural developmental cues, they do exactly what they do in nature: they self assemble into fully formed, functional tissue.
Infogreen Global

Light touch transforms material into a superconductor - 0 views

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    Superconductivity describes the phenomenon where an electric current is able to travel through a material without any resistance - the material is a perfect electrical conductor without any energy loss.
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