During the press conference for the release of the Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk referred to each Model S owners as “expert trainers” – meaning that each driver will train the autonomous features of the system to feed the collective network intelligence of the fleet by simply driving the electric vehicle on Autopilot.
He said that the system should improve everyday, but that improvements might only become noticeable every week or so by adding up. Just a few weeks after the release, Model S owners are already taking to the Tesla Motors Club forum to describe how the Autopilot is improving…
Adam Alonzi has made another excellent film about the power of gene therapy.
Narrated and produced by Adam Alonzi. Music arranged by Leslee Frost. Sponsored by BioViva Sciences Inc.
Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder. It is the leading cause of dementia. Typically the condition affects short-term memory, but as it advances it can result in disorientation, mood disorders, language difficulties and behavioral issues. Over time, body functions are lost, leading to death.
Current treatment options are extremely limited and the outlook is poor for sufferers with the average life expectancy being 3–9 years from diagnosis. According to RAND Corp, the average annual cost of care for someone with Alzheimer’s disease is $41,689 to $56,290.
BioViva’s Therapy — Telomerase AAV gene therapy.
We are exploring therapies with the gene that creates telomerase to rejuvenate the microglia cells that support the Neurons with the aim of combating Alzheimer’s disease and restoring healthy function to the brain once more. There is mounting evidence to indicate this gene plays an active role in protection from Tau Pathology and various experiments have encouraged us to pursue this therapy with the goal of eliminating the suffering this disease brings.
That was the year she learned to control a Nexus tablet with her brain waves, and literally took her life quality from 1980s DOS to modern era Android OS.
A brunette lady in her early 50s, patient T6 suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which causes progressive motor neuron damage. Mostly paralyzed from the neck down, T6 retains her sharp wit, love for red lipstick and miraculous green thumb. What she didn’t have, until recently, was the ability to communicate with the outside world.
Liz Parrish isn’t your average CEO. A passionate advocate for change, her. company BioViva is leading the fight for healthy longevity with pioneering. gene therapies targeting Alzheimer’s, sarcopenia and even aging itself. Parrish dreams big, but she’s a woman of action. She’s even demonstrated. her commitment by testing cutting-edge therapies on herself. Could her. efforts change how we think about aging? Is gene therapy the future or are. we moving too fast? We caught up with the woman herself to find out more.
Consciousness — the internal dialogue that seems to govern one’s thoughts and actions — is far less powerful than people believe, serving as a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control, according to a new theory proposed by an SF State researcher.
Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella.
Haptics is a growing field that aims to allow our bodies to control and ultimately ‘feel’ our virtual identity. Instead of using the theorized mechanism of a neural computer link, haptic tech attaches sensors and stimuli to our body. A report by research firm Markets and Markets thinks haptic technology, which could soon include something like a glove that let’s you move a hand in cyberspace, will be worth 30 billion by 2020.
Haptic technology, also known as kinesthetic communication, sounds like something out of science fiction. But products, like the vibrating cell phone, have been out for decades. And there’s more advanced systems on the way. That’s partly because of another hyped field: virtual reality. With pioneering virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift poised for release next year, the question becomes: How to make this experience even more immersive.
The tech is based on our sense of touch, a sensation that philosopher John Locke believed to be the most undeniable of all human senses. We believe something is real by touching it, a philosophy that haptic technology follows.
A representation of a stable sequential working memory; different information items or memory patterns are shown in different colors. (credit: Image adopted from Rabinovich, M.I. et al. (2014))
Try to remember a phone number. You’re now using “sequential memory,” in which your mind processes a sequence of numbers, events, or ideas. It underlies how people think, perceive, and interact as social beings. To understand how sequential memory works, researchers have built mathematical models that mimic this process.
Cognitive modes
Taking this a step further, Mikhail Rabinovich, a physicist and neurocognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and a group of researchers have now mathematically modeled how the mind switches among different ways of thinking about a sequence of objects, events, or ideas that are based on the activity of “cognitive modes.”
Treating the brain isn’t like the rest of the body. Your blood-brain barrier shields it; filtering the blood to ensure nothing untoward makes it through. This protection is normally a good thing, but it becomes a problem if you want to deliver therapeutic drugs through it. This method could be a solution.
Smuggling therapeutics
Many diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease are extremely difficult to treat. Only very specific molecules can make it through the brain’s secure barrier, and most drugs don’t make the cut. This poses a challenge when you want to treat disease inside the brain, and so efforts have been focused on finding a way to overcome this. New research has now demonstrated a way of treating Parkinson’s disease with a surgical treatment that opens up a small route to bypass the barrier; essentially a smuggling hatch into your brain.
But it may offer advantages over these systems, which are often confused by changes to an environment. And researchers hope that the work will not only allow a more efficient way for robots to navigate but also provide neuroscientists a better understanding of place cells, grid cells and cognitive maps.
Remember that paralyzed guy from Southern California who managed to walk on his own accord thanks to a revolutionary technique that bridged the gap in his severed spinal column with a wireless Bluetooth link? A team of doctors at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University have reportedly accomplished the same feat with a patient’s arms.
The team described its initial findings at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago on Tuesday. The system works much like that of the earlier team at UC Irvine: a brain-control interface (BCI) reads the patient’s brain waves emanating from his motor cortex, converts them into actionable electrical signals and wirelessly transmits them to an actuator “sewn into” the patient’s arm. This actuator is comprised of 16 filament wires that generate electrical impulses, which cause various muscle groups to contract when stimulated. The patient thinks about moving his arm and it does so — well, sorta.
