Immortality Through Mind Uploading and Resurrection

Technology in the last century has flourished exponentially. Previous fantasies are becoming cutting-edge discoveries like global communications, encyclopedic knowledge at the average person’s fingertips, and even medical advances used to improve and extend one’s quality of life and life expectancy. As technology pushes the boundaries of what is possible, ambitious visionaries look to solve the arguably greatest problem known to humanity: death. Transhumanists aiming to use technology to overcome this great human limitation, mortality, present the newest proposed solutions to life’s oldest challenge. One of these solutions, mind uploading, is perhaps the most ambitious, but it is not without its own philosophical hindrances. In contrast, Christian resurrection claims to not only solve the problem of death, it claims to already have a historical model in the person of Jesus Christ

The influence of habitat association on swimming performance in marine teleost fish larvae

Latitude and body size are generally considered key drivers of swimming performance for larval marine fishes, but evidence suggests that evolutionary relationships and habitat may also be important. We used a comparative phylogenetic framework, data synthesis and case study approach to investigate how swimming performance differs among larvae of fish species across latitude. First, we investigated how swimming performance changed with body length, and we found that temperate reef fishes have the greatest increases in swimming performance with length. Secondly, we compared differences in three swimming performance metrics (critical swimming speed, in situ swimming, and endurance) among post-flexion larvae, whilst considering phylogenetic relationships and morphology, and we found that reef fishes have higher swimming capacity than non-reef (pelagic and non-reef demersal) fishes, which is likely due to larger, more robust body sizes. Thirdly, we compared swimming performance of late-stage larvae of tropical fishes with oceanographic data to better understand the ecological relevance of their high-capacity swimming. We found that reef fishes have high swimming performance and grow larger than non-reef fish larvae, which we suggest is due to the pressures to find a specific, patchily distributed habitat upon which to settle. Given the current bias towards studies on percomorph fishes at low latitudes, we highlight that there is a need for more research on temperate reef fish larvae and other percomorph lineages from high latitudes. Overall, our findings provide valuable context to understand how swimming and morphological traits that are important for dispersal and recruitment processes are selected for among teleost fish larvae

K-medoids clustering of hospital admission characteristics to classify severity of influenza virus infection

BACKGROUND: Patients are admitted to the hospital for respiratory illness at different stages of their disease course. It is important to appropriately analyse this heterogeneity in surveillance data to accurately measure disease severity among those hospitalized. The purpose of this study was to determine if unique baseline clusters of influenza patients exist and to examine the association between cluster membership and in-hospital outcomes. METHODS: Patients hospitalized with influenza at two hospitals in Southeast Michigan during the 2017/2018 (n = 242) and 2018/2019 (n = 115) influenza seasons were included. Physiologic and laboratory variables were collected for the first 24 h of the hospital stay. K-medoids clustering was used to determine groups of individuals based on these values. Multivariable linear regression or Firth\u27s logistic regression were used to examine the association between cluster membership and clinical outcomes. RESULTS: Three clusters were selected for 2017/2018, mainly differentiated by blood glucose level. After adjustment, those in C(17)1 had 5.6 times the odds of mechanical ventilator use than those in C(17)2 (95% CI: 1.49, 21.1) and a significantly longer mean hospital length of stay than those in both C(17)2 (mean 1.5 days longer, 95% CI: 0.2, 2.7) and C(17)3 (mean 1.4 days longer, 95% CI: 0.3, 2.5). Similar results were seen between the two clusters selected for 2018/2019. CONCLUSION: In this study of hospitalized influenza patients, we show that distinct clusters with higher disease acuity can be identified and could be targeted for evaluations of vaccine and influenza antiviral effectiveness against disease attenuation. The association of higher disease acuity with glucose level merits evaluation

Computation of resonance frequencies for Maxwell equations in non-smooth domains

Summary. We address the computation by finite elements of the non-zero eigenvalues of the (curl, curl) bilinear form with perfect conductor boundary conditions in a polyhedral cavity. One encounters two main difficulties: (i) The infinite dimensional kernel of this bilinear form (the gradient fields), (ii) The unbounded singularities of the eigen-fields near corners and edges of the cavity. We first list possible variational spaces with their functional properties and provide a short description of the edge and corner singularities. Then we address different formulations using a Galerkin approximation by edge elements or nodal elements. After a presentation of edge elements, we concentrate on the functional issues connected with the use of nodal elements. In the framework of conforming methods, nodal elements are mandatory if one regularizes the bilinear form (curl, curl) in order to get rid of the gradient fields. A plain regularization with the (div,div) bilinear form converges to a wrong solution if the domain has reentrant edges or corners. But remedies do exist. We will present the method of addition of singular functions, and the method of regularization with weight, where the (div,div) bilinear form is modified by the introduction of a weight which can be taken as the distance to reentrant edges or corners