Lifeboat Foundation

Stephen Paddock’s brother has speculated, “something went wrong in his head.” David Eagleman asks, what precisely was it? We know little about Paddock but quite a bit about biological factors that can be associated with violent behavior, Eagleman says”

“David Eagleman directs the Center for Science and Law and is an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. He is the writer and presenter of the PBS series, “The Brain with David Eagleman,” and the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.”

‘In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock’s brother Eric speculated, “something went wrong in his head.” But what precisely was it?”

Continue reading “The mystery of Stephen Paddock’s brain” »

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 to Jacques Dubochet (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Joachim Frank (Columbia University, New York, USA) and Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK) “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”.

We may soon have detailed images of life’s complex machineries in atomic resolution. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 is awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, which both simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules. This method has moved biochemistry into a new era.

A picture is a key to understanding. Scientific breakthroughs often build upon the successful visualisation of objects invisible to the human eye. However, biochemical maps have long been filled with blank spaces because the available technology has had difficulty generating images of much of life’s molecular machinery. Cryo-electron microscopy changes all of this. Researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualise processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals.

Continue reading “Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 Awarded for Cryo-Electron Microscopy” »

Leading women’s magazine Marie Claire has a feature story on life extension out this month (approx 1.5 million circulation):

Forget about life after death. More and more, women around the country are seeking another kind of miracle: not dying at all.

What if you could hit the pause button on aging? Live to 120 without feeling a day over 80? More radical still, what if you could cheat death? Would you do it?

Continue reading “Meet the Extensionists: People Who Believe Immortality Is Possible” »

Proponents of biology preprints argue they will accelerate the pace of science—and improve its quality—by publicizing findings long before they reach journals, helping researchers get rapid feedback on their work, and giving a leg up to young researchers who don’t yet have many publications. Some see little difference between posting a preprint and presenting unpublished findings at a meeting, except that the preprint audience can be far larger.

Many biologists remain wary, however. Some worry that competitors will steal their data or ideas, or rush to publish similar work. Others predict that preprint servers will become a time sink, as scientists spend hours trying to sift through an immense mishmash of papers of various quality. And some researchers fear that easy, rapid publication could foster preprint wars—in which the findings in one preprint are quickly attacked in another, sometimes within hours. Such online squabbles could leave the public bewildered and erode trust in scientists.

Biologists are posting unreviewed manuscripts in record numbers. But many are still not sure it’s a good idea.

Continue reading “Are preprints the future of biology? A survival guide for scientists” »

“Aging is a consequence of physics, not biology.” Dr. Aubrey de Grey believes that the aging of any machine with moving parents is fundamentally the same, whether that machine is alive or not. He states that the SENS Foundation doesn’t work on longevity and immortality — it works on health. “The only way we are going to live substantially longer is by staying truly youthful for substantially longer.”

Sept. 21 (UPI) — Scientists have observed, for the first time, a jellyfish in a sleep-like state. It’s the first time an animal without a brain or central nervous system has been observed sleeping.

The findings — detailed this week in the journal Current Biology — could help scientists finally answer the questions: Do all animals sleep?

All vertebrates studied by scientists sleep, but researchers haven’t been able to agree whether or not sleep is ubiquitous, or even common, among invertebrates. Studies have suggested fruit flies and roundworms sleep, but what about more primitive organisms like sponges and jellyfish?

Continue reading “Scientists spot sleeping jellyfish” »

Now, some of the world’s largest tech companies are taking a cue from biology as they respond to these growing demands. They are rethinking the very nature of computers and are building machines that look more like the human brain, where a central brain stem oversees the nervous system and offloads particular tasks — like hearing and seeing — to the surrounding cortex.

New technologies are testing the limits of computer semiconductors. To deal with that, researchers have gone looking for ideas from nature.

Not much is known about Neuralink beyond Musk’s few public comments about the potential of brain-computer interfaces to accelerate human evolution. Musk sees real danger in artificial intelligence — he’s called AI a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization” — and believes that the best way to keep pace with machine intelligence is to upgrade human intelligence.

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told audience members at the World Government Conference in Dubai, proposing a high-bandwidth digital interface that can be interlaced with the brain to transmit data at the speed of thought.

Musk elaborated on the brain-computer interface — also known as a neural lace — in an interview published on the blog Wait But Why. In it, he said that the immense creative capacity of the human brain is constrained by the need to compress our highly complex thoughts into speech or typed text.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Gets $27 Million to Merge Humans and Machines” »

Turns out, organisms may be using quantum mechanics to gain evolutionary advantages.