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Category: neuroscience – Page 1005

One of the latest inventions out of Tel Aviv University can patch up broken hearts. We’re talking about the real organs here, especially those damaged by myocardial infarction or heart attack. A team from the Israeli university created a “cyborg heart patch” that combines both living tissue and electronic components to replace the damaged parts of the organ. “It’s very science fiction, but it’s already here,” says one of its creators, Prof. Tal Dvir. “[W]e expect it to move cardiac research forward in a big way.” The patch can contract and expand like real heart tissue can, but it can do much, much more than that.

The electronic components allow doctors to remotely monitor their patients’ condition from afar. A physician could log into a computer and see if the implant is working as intended. If he senses that something’s amiss, he could release drugs to, say, regulate inflammation or fix the lack of oxygen. That sounds dangerous to us, since computers can be hacked. But the researchers are aiming to develop the patch further so it can regulate itself with no human intervention.

Dvir warns that the “practical realization of the technology may take some time.” For now, those suffering from cardiovascular diseases will have to rely on current treatment methods. The team is still in the midst of refining their cyborg heart patch. Plus, they’re looking at how to create bionic brain and spinal cord tissues using what they’ve learned so far to treat neurological conditions.

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While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn.

“Within the next 30 years,” promises Dmitry Itskov, “I am going to make sure that we can all live forever.”

It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. “I’m 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started it,” he says.

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Futurist Ray Kurzweil talks with StarTalk Radio’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the expansion of the human brain that he predicts will happen in the 2030’s.

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Allen Institute working with Baylor on reconstructing neuronal connections.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has awarded an $18.7 million contract to the Allen Institute for Brain Science, as part of a larger project with Baylor College of Medicine and Princeton University, to create the largest ever roadmap to understand how the function of networks in the brain’s cortex relates to the underlying connections of its individual neurons.

The project is part of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, which seeks to revolutionize machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the brain.

“This effort will be the first time that we can physically look at more than a thousand connections between neurons in a single cortical network and understand how those connections might allow the network to perform functions, like process visual information or store memories,” says R. Clay Reid, Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Principal Investigator on the project.

Continue reading “IARPA awards .7 million contract to Allen Institute to reconstruct neuronal connections” | >

The preview image below thanks Robert Bradbury(no not Ray Bradbury) who is no longer with us but you can find his work concerning Matrioshka Brains and he has a great life extension lecture on youtube.

The author greatly appreciates and thanks Robert J. Bradbury for doing the painstaking and often tedious original html coding job for 25 of these papers, among the many linked papers cited on this page.

Last updated on 6 July 2013.

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The realities of VR.

NEW YORK, March 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Horizon Media, the largest and fastest growing privately held media services agency in the world, announced today its most recent research on consumer interest in virtual reality devices. The research was fielded in Finger on the Pulse, the agency’s proprietary online research community comprised of 3,000 people reflective of the U.S. population, and with the social media expertise of Horizon’s Distillery social intelligence team. The research shows that despite extensive media coverage of Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard and other virtual reality devices, fully two thirds of consumers are unaware of the technology.

Virtual reality – often referred to as “VR” – has been readily embraced by the mainstream media as the shiny, new, technological advancement. Marketers are also understandably excited about the possibilities unleashed by VR technology. But while there is interest among consumers, the survey findings suggest that companies would be well served to walk before they run when incorporating virtual reality activations into marketing plans, at least until the technology reaches greater awareness and scale.

Consumers are open to a VR enhanced future, but believe it will take several more years to get there. Unaided awareness of the major devices is fairly low at just 33%. However, more than a third (36%) say they are interested in owning some sort of virtual reality device. In addition Horizon’s Distillery social intelligence team found that 9% of online discussion around the topic is related to positive purchase interest. In fact, compared to the Apple Watch before its release, VR got much more love from Finger on the Pulse panelists. Twice as many consumers consider VR “an exciting new innovation to own” (82% for VR vs. 44% for Apple Watch), and twice as many say “everyone is going to wish they owned one” (55% for VR vs. 24% for Apple Watch). A strong majority of consumers (81%) also believe that five years from now, anywhere from a quarter to half of the population will own a VR device.

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