Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine having telepathic conversations with loved ones, instantaneously accessing superhuman computational power, playing back memories and dreams, or immersing yourself and every sense you possess into a virtual entertainment experience. In the distant future, if brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are successful at reading and writing information to the brain, and if humans adapt to the technology, we could experience some pretty amazing scenarios. But, there are many outstanding questions for how we could ensure a bright future: Who will own the data generated by our brains? Will brain data be bought and sold by data brokers like other personal information today? Will people be forced to use certain BCIs that surveil their brain activity (for example, to make sure you’re paying attention at work and school)? Will BCIs put peoples’ brains at risk of being hacked? As with all new technology, more of these philosophical questions will need to be investigated and answered before there is widespread adoption and use of BCIs in the future.

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Who owns that data?

What influences mental health, academic achievement, and cognitive growth? A recent review published in De Gruyter’s Reviews in the Neurosciences indicates that poverty and low socioeconomic status (SES) are significant contributing factors. While previous research has explored the individual impacts of poverty on the brain and behavior, this review introduces the first integrated framework. It synthesizes evidence from various studies to directly connect brain alterations caused by low SES with behavioral, pathological, and developmental outcomes.

SES refers to the social standing of an individual or family, and involves factors such as wealth, occupation, educational attainment, and living conditions. As well as affecting day-to-day life, perhaps surprisingly SES can also have far-reaching consequences for our brains that begin in childhood and persist into adulthood.

So, how can poverty and low SES change the brain? The review examines the negative effects of poor nutrition, chronic stress, and environmental hazards (such as pollution and inadequate housing conditions), which are more likely to affect low-SES families. These factors can impair the brain development of children, which in turn can influence their language skills, educational attainment, and risk of psychiatric illness.

Like many good ideas in science, it started with a walk in the woods. During a stroll through the Berlin Botanic Garden in 2019, HHMI Janelia Research Campus Group Leader Jan Funke and some of his scientific colleagues started chatting about a familiar topic: How to get more information out of insect connectomes.

The Ned2 6-axis robot is an easy-to-handle cobot. It is designed for education, research and development. Automate tasks.

A Virginia 14-year-old won $25,000 and earned the title of America’s Top Young Scientist this past fall for developing an affordable soap that can treat skin cancer. Heman Bekele plans to refine his invention over the next five years and create a nonprofit to distribute it in low-income communities.

The ninth grader spent four months competing against nine other finalists in 3M and Discovery Education’s Young Scientist Challenge, which encourages kids to “think creatively and apply the power of STEM to discover real-world solutions.” He was paired with a mentor, who helped him turn his idea into a prototype. It works by delivering cancer-fighting agents to the skin by way of lipid nanoparticles.

Bekele told NPR that he’s “always been really passionate about science and how things work,” and his experience growing up in Ethiopia inspired him to develop his soap.

Using new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered methane emission on a brown dwarf, an unexpected finding for such a cold and isolated world. Published in the journal Nature, the findings suggest that this brown dwarf might generate aurorae similar to those seen on our own planet as well as on Jupiter and Saturn.

More massive than planets but lighter than stars, brown dwarfs are ubiquitous in our solar neighborhood, with thousands identified. Last year, Jackie Faherty, a senior research scientist and senior education manager at the American Museum of Natural History, led a team of researchers who were awarded time on JWST to investigate 12 brown dwarfs.

Among those was CWISEP J193518.59–154620.3 (or W1935 for short)—a cold brown dwarf 47 light years away that was co-discovered by Backyard Worlds: Planet9, citizen science volunteer Dan Caselden and the NASA CatWISE team. W1935 is a cold brown dwarf with a surface temperature of about 400° Fahrenheit. The mass for W1935 isn’t well known but it likely ranges between six-to 35-times the mass of Jupiter.

Study explores an ancient lineage of marine invertebrates, including soft corals, pushes back the previous oldest dated example of trait by nearly 300 million years.

According to a new study by scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, bioluminescence originated in animals at least 540 million years ago among a group of marine invertebrates known as octocorals.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, push back the previous record for the luminous trait’s oldest dated emergence in animals by nearly 300 million years, and could one day help scientists decode why the ability to produce light evolved in the first place.

THE END OF ACADEMIA?

The pandemic and industrial action has caused massive upheaval in the education system in recent years, and many students feel short-changed.

Have you ever looked back on a moment and wondered if you made the right choice? Professor Robert Sapolsky has, but he believes that there was no actual choice at that moment. Professor Sapolsky has staked out an extreme stance in the field: we are nothing more than the sum of our biology, over which we had no control, and its interactions with the environment, over which we also had no control. Explore what it looks like to reject the notion of free will and how doing so can be liberating rather than paralyzing and despairing.

About the Speaker.
Professor Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor and a professor of biology, of neurology, and of neurosurgery. Over the past thirty years, he has divided his time between the lab, where he studies how stress hormones can damage the brain, and in East Africa, where he studies the impact of chronic stress on the health of baboons.

Continue reading “Determined: Life without Free Will with Robert Sapolsky” »