Lifeboat Foundation

The new research is the most accurate yet at predicting internal words:

Caltech’s researchers have developed a brain-machine interface capable of decoding internal speech, potentially transforming internal speech.

In good news for future animation figureheads, there might be a new way to revive frozen brains without damaging them. Scientists in China have developed a new chemical concoction that lets brain tissue function again after being frozen.

Freezing is effective at keeping organic material from decomposing, but it still causes damage. As the water inside turns to ice, the crystals tear apart the cells. That’s why frozen meat or fruit goes a bit mushy after it’s defrosted – but a bigger problem is that it also happens with organs or tissues chilled for transplant or research.

For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells.

In 1998, a paper linking childhood vaccines with autism was published in the journal, The Lancet, only to be retracted in 2010 when the science was debunked.

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I met Prof. Ed Boyden at last year’s Global Future 2045 conference in New York. There I was highly impressed with Boyden’s impressive work in neuroscience in general and optogenetics in particular, as well as the profound implications it would have on our ability to understand and manipulate the brain. And so I knew instantly I must bring him for an interview.

Disgust is one of the six basic human emotions, along with happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise. Disgust typically arises when a person perceives a sensory stimulus or situation as revolting, off-putting, or unpleasant in other ways.

Scientists just published the most detailed map of a cubic millimeter of the human brain. Smaller than a grain of rice, the mapped section of brain includes over 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses.

The project, a collaboration between Harvard and Google, is looking to accelerate connectomics—the study of how neurons are wired together—over a much larger scale.

Our brains are like a jungle.

When Descartes said “I think therefore I am” he probably didn’t know that he was answering a security question. Using behavioral or physical characteristics to identify people, biometrics, has gotten a big boost in the EU. The Orwellian sounding HUMABIO (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behavioral Analysis) is a well funded research project that seeks to combine sensor technology with the latest in biometrics to find reliable and non-obtrusive ways to identify people quickly. One of their proposed methods: scanning your brain stem. That’s right, in addition to reading your retinas, looking at your finger prints, and monitoring your voice, the security systems of the future may be scanning your brain.

How could they actually read your brain? What kind of patterns would they use to authenticate your identity? Yeah, that haven’t quite figured that out yet. HUMABIO is still definitely in the “pre-commercial” and “proof of concept” phase. They do have a nice ethics manual to read, and they’ve actually written some “stories” that illustrate the uses of their various works in progress, but they haven’t produced a fieldable instrument yet. In fact, this aspect of the STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project) would hardly be remarkable if we didn’t know more about the available technology from other sources.

Blood test detects stroke quickly:

The Testing for Identification of Markers of Stroke trial shows the accuracy of a new blood test for identifying stroke.

A team of scientists has developed a new test by combining blood-based biomarkers with a clinical score. The main goal was to identify patients experiencing large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke.

Continue reading “New rapid blood test can detect stroke in 6 hours, save lives” »

A substantial proportion of people with a traumatic brain injury who had their life support withdrawn may have survived and at least partially recovered, a study suggests.

Traumatic brain injuries can occur due to a forceful blow, a jolt to the head or an object entering the brain, such as a bullet…

After comparing people with brain injuries whose life support was continued with those who had it turned off, scientists calculated that around 40 per cent in the latter group may have made some recovery.

Continue reading “Some brain injury patients would recover if life support weren’t ended” »