Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Summary: New research reveals the heart has its own complex nervous system, or “mini-brain,” capable of regulating the heartbeat independently of the brain. Conducted on zebrafish, the study identified specialized neurons within the heart, including some with pacemaker properties, challenging traditional views of heartbeat control.

This discovery provides new insights into heart diseases and potential treatments for conditions like arrhythmias. Researchers aim to explore how this cardiac nervous system interacts with the brain during stress, exercise, or disease to identify novel therapeutic targets.

Read more | >

There’s a window of time in our lives we’ve all passed through yet still know so little about: early gestation. Researchers have found a pair of genetic deletions associated with schizophrenia that likely occur in that formative period.

The discovery comes from a team of researchers led by Harvard Medical School clinician-scientist Eduardo Maury, who combed through genetic data from blood samples of nearly 25,000 people with or without schizophrenia.

While the two genetic alterations need further validation, the findings strengthen an emerging idea that the seeds of schizophrenia aren’t always inherited, yet still may be acquired long before someone meets the world.

Read more | >

In recent years, a growing number of scientific studies have backed an alarming hypothesis: Alzheimer’s disease isn’t just a disease, it’s an infection.

While the exact mechanisms of this infection are something researchers are still trying to isolate, numerous studies suggest the deadly spread of Alzheimer’s goes way beyond what we used to think.

One such study, published in 2019, suggested what could be one of the most definitive leads yet for a bacterial culprit behind Alzheimer’s, and it comes from a somewhat unexpected quarter: gum disease.

Read more | >

The news: A paralyzed man has walked again thanks to a brain-controlled exoskeleton suit. Within the safety of a lab setting, he was also able to control the suit’s arms and hands, using two sensors on his brain. The patient was a man from Lyon named Thibault, who fell 40 feet (12 meters) from a balcony four years ago, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down.

How it worked: Thibault had surgery to place two implants, each containing 64 electrodes, on the parts of the brain that control movement. Software then translated the brain waves read by these implants into instructions for movement. The development of the exoskeleton, by Clinatec and the University of Grenoble, is described in a paper in The Lancet this week.

Read more | >

An Android malware app called SpyLend has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Google Play, where it masqueraded as a financial tool but became a predatory loan app for those in India.

The app falls under a group of malicious Android applications called “SpyLoan,” which pretend to be legitimate financial tools or loan services but instead steal data from devices for use in predatory lending.

These apps lure users with promises of quick and easy loans, often requiring little documentation and offering attractive terms. However, upon installation, they request excessive permissions, allowing the apps to steal personal data such as contacts, call logs, SMS messages, photos, and device location.

Read more | >

Google continues its rollout of gradually disabling uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2-based extensions in the Chrome web browser as part of its efforts to push users to Manifest V3-based extensions.

For those unaware, Manifest V3 is Chrome’s latest extension specification and is designed to limit extension access to user network requests, block developers from utilizing remote content, and improve overall performance.

While Manifest V3 is supposed to benefit end users, it comes at the cost of functionality, as it imposes stricter limitations on browser extensions, particularly ad blockers and privacy-focused tools.

Read more | >

The Carboncopies Foundation is starting The Brain Emulation Challenge.

With the availability of high throughput electron microscopy (EM), expansion microscopy (ExM), Calcium and voltage imaging, co-registered combinations of these techniques and further advancements, high resolution data sets that span multiple brain regions or entire small animal brains such as the fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster may now offer inroads to expansive neuronal circuit analysis. Results of such analysis represent a paradigm change in the conduct of neuroscience.

So far, almost all investigations in neuroscience have relied on correlational studies, in which a modicum of insight gleaned from observational data leads to the formulation of mechanistic hypotheses, corresponding computational modeling, and predictions made using those models, so that experimental testing of the predictions offers support or modification of hypotheses. These are indirect methods for the study of a black box system of highly complex internal structure, methods that have received published critique as being unlikely to lead to a full understanding of brain function (Jonas and Kording, 2017).

Large scale, high resolution reconstruction of brain circuitry may instead lead to mechanistic explanations and predictions of cognitive function with meaningful descriptions of representations and their transformation along the full trajectory of stages in neural processing. Insights that come from circuit reconstructions of this kind, a reverse engineering of cognitive processes, will lead to valuable advances in neuroprosthetic medicine, understanding of the causes and effects of neurodegenerative disease, possible implementations of similar processes in artificial intelligence, and in-silico emulations of brain function, known as whole-brain emulation (WBE).

Read more | >