Lifeboat Foundation

In normal vision, light falls on the retinas inside the eyes, and is immediately transduced into electrochemical signals before being uploaded to the brain through the optic nerves. So you do not see light itself, but the brain’s interpretation of electrochemical signals in the visual parts of the brain. It follows that, if your eyes do not work, but your brain is stimulated just so, your visual neurons will activate (and you will be able to see) just the same as if your eyes were in perfect condition.

Sounds easy, but can we do that? Building on decades of research in visual neuroscience, my lab, in collaboration with Susana Martinez-Conde’s, has now conducted some of the studies that validate this idea, completing some of the most important preliminary steps towards a new kind of visual prosthetic.

Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, has just posted a blog that highlights our approach. He took notice of our work when we first presented it at this year’s meeting for the Principal Investigators of the BRAIN Initiative—the NIH led government funding initiative meant to spur research along on topics like brain implants. The BRAIN Initiative funds several agencies including the NIH, including the National Science Foundation, who kindly funded the grant driving our research thus far.

In China, scoring citizens’ behavior is official government policy. U.S. companies are increasingly doing something similar, outside the law.

[Images: Rawf8/iStock; zhudifeng/iStock].

Stem cell biologist Hiromitsu Nakauchi has been waiting for this moment for more than a decade.

After years of planning, the persistent researcher has at last received approval from a government willing to pursue one of the most controversial scientific studies there is: human-animal embryo experiments.

While many countries around the world have restricted, defunded or outright banned these ethically-fraught practices, Japan has now officially lifted the lid on this proverbial Pandora’s box. Earlier this year, the country made it legal to not only transplant hybrid embryos into surrogate animals, but also to bring them to term.

The Moon is a hot destination right now — especially for NASA, which wants to send people back to the lunar surface, but also for the private space industry. The most ambitious private lunar exploits are still many years off, but already, three companies claim they’ll be putting small robotic landers on the Moon in the next two years, amping up a small space race.

So far, no private entity has landed something successfully on the Moon. Only three government superpowers — the United States, China, and Russia — have ever been able to gently touch down vehicles on the lunar surface, and the Indian government may become the fourth in September. An Israeli nonprofit, SpaceIL, attempted to land the first private spacecraft on the Moon in April, but an early engine shutdown caused the vehicle to crash into the lunar surface instead. That means the door is still open for one of these three companies to make the first private lunar landing.

But to generate the kind of long-term data set necessary for breakthroughs in precision medicine — which uses genomic, physiological and other data to tailor treatments to individuals — All of Us must retain these participants, ideally throughout their lives. That’s where genetic counselling comes in.

A firm hired by the National Institutes of Health will work with participants in a research programme that plans to sequence one million genomes.

Yes he really said this, yet he also said he wanted to use the Amazon for logging and agriculture. Personally I believe people who want to use the Amazon for commercial use are the biggest beneficiaries from such destruction, but I’m no expert.

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has accused environmental groups of setting fires in the Amazon as he tries to deflect growing international criticism of his failure to protect the world’s biggest rainforest.

A surge of fires in several Amazonian states this month followed reports that farmers were feeling emboldened to clear land for crop fields and cattle ranches because the new Brazilian government was keen to open up the region to economic activity.

Continue reading “Jair Bolsonaro claims NGOs behind Amazon forest fire surge – but provides no evidence” »

Supplementing psychotherapy with small doses of MDMA could be an effective strategy to prevent relapses of alcohol addiction in patients, an ongoing small clinical trial suggests. The research is yet another example of how scientists and doctors are finding or rediscovering therapeutic uses for recreational and illicit drugs.

MDMA-assisted therapy is actually an old idea, which enjoyed some popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Though the exact mechanisms are unclear, the synthetic drug’s euphoric effects are thought to amplify the positive patterns of thinking taught by therapy, as well as make people feel less anxious during sessions. Of course, these same mood-boosting attributes made MDMA a popular recreational drug. This popularity led the U.S. government to ban MDMA in 1985, by classifying it as a Schedule 1 drug with no accepted medical use.

You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.

This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

For the last two years, hackers have come to the Voting Village at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas to tear down voting machines and analyze them for vulnerabilities. But this year’s village features a fancy new target: a prototype of a so-called secure voting machine, created through a $10 million project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You know it better as DARPA, the government’s mad science wing.