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Category: neuroscience – Page 1,249

Scientists Say Neuron Repair is Possible

New research suggests that nerve cells may be able to repair themselves by mobilizing mitochondria by removing a certain protein in cells. This may help combat neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s in the near future.

The Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. We all know that. It causes reactions that generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a source of chemical energy in a cell. A typical animal cell contains 1000 to 2000 mitochondria. Yet, that’s not all we learned in high school biology. Remember that neurons or nerve cells do not have the ability to repair themselves once damaged? Well, these two facts have stirred quite a bit of interest.

Scientists have found out that nerve cell regeneration is possible. Researchers from National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the US restored mitochondrial mobility in a group of mice and observed regeneration of nerve cells.

At Last, Google’s DeepMind AI Can Make Machines Sound Like Humans

Google has announced WaveNet, a speech synthesis program that uses AI and deep learning techniques to generate speech samples better than current technologies. By analyzing samples 16,000 a second, it can generate human-like speech and even its own music compositions.

If you’ve ever been lost in the maze of Youtube videos you may have stumbled on clips of computers reading news articles. You’d recognize that staccato, robotic nature of the voice. We’ve come a long way from “Danger! Will Robinson!,” but it there is yet to be a computer that can seamlessly mimic a human voice.

Now, there’s a new contender, brought to you by the brilliant minds behind DeepMind. Google has announced a new voice synthesis program in WaveNet, powered by deep neural AI.

An AI upgrade for your brain, Elon Musk teases the Neural Lace

Worried that AI’s one day could make us their pets Elon Musk is teasing a new brain-hacking tech

There’s no doubting that Elon Musk is one busy guy. Whether he’s trying to land on Mars with SpaceX, running Tesla, buying SolarCity, investing in the future of AI, building Giga factories or throwing out Hyperloop concepts for fun but it’s increasingly apparent that he’s giving a huge amount of thought to the day when advanced AI’s become the most intelligent form of “life” on the planet.

With the advances that we are already seeing in AI it’s inevitable that one day – sooner rather than later humans will, comparatively speaking, be as intelligent to an AI as pets are to us today. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “Neural Lace”, a nanotechnology based device that you can think of as being a digital upgrade for your brain. Human intelligence combined with the power of AI – a digital layer directly overlaid onto the brains cortex.

Neuroscience: Linking perception to action

Not surprised by these findings.

A UC Santa Barbara researcher studying how the brain uses perception of the environment to guide action has a new understanding of the neural circuits responsible for transforming sensation into movement.

“Mapping perception to a future action seems simple,” UCSB neuroscientist Michael Goard. “We do it all the time when we see a traffic light and use that information to guide our later motor action. However, how these associations are mapped across time in the brain is not well understood.”

In a new paper, published in the journal eLife, Goard and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology make progress in mapping brain activity in mice during simple but fundamental cognitive tasks. Although a mouse’s brain is much smaller than a human’s, remarkable structural similarities exist. The mouse brain is composed of about 75 million nerve cells or neurons, which are wired together in complex networks that unerlie sophisticated behaviors.

Elon Musk is Looking to Kickstart Transhuman Evolution With “Brain Hacking” Tech

Elon Musk has recently hinted that he may be working on a “neural lace,” a mesh of electronics that will allow AI and the brain to work together. This could help human brains keep up with future enhancements in AI.

There’s no doubt that Elon Musk is one busy individual. When not playing on the Tesla factory floor, he may be bringing electric roofs to electric vehicles, or dreaming up the Hyperloop, or toying with the future of AI.

If not any of those, he is apparently busy protecting us from being treated like house pets after the Singularity. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “neural lace.”

“Head-Transplanting” And “Mind-Uploading:” Philosophical Implications And Potential Social Consequences of Two Medico-Scientific Utopias

Written by ROLAND BENEDIKTER, KATJA SIEPMANN, ALEXANDER REYMANN

ABSTRACT. This article discusses the philosophical implications and potential social consequences of two experimental – and at the present moment still widely speculative – topics at the intersection between scientific and medical advances, the human body, the human mind, and the globalized health care sector. Head-Transplanting is a chirurgical endeavor envisaged by the HEAVEN project announced to be practically implemented around 2017 and to be available for routine-use around the mid-2020s by a group of internationally as prominent as disputed transplant surgeons. Mind-Uploading is a procedure currently in the first stages of development to create artificial representations of the human brain and its processes in computers and on the internet.

THINKING Podcast

Biohacking, nootropics, and the notion of optimizing one’s human performance are on a rapid rise. Nootrobox founders Geoffrey Woo and Michael Brandt are some of the foremost thinkers in this space, and they are here to have intellectual conversations that will make you THINK.

Episode 9 features Aubrey de Grey, the Chief Scientist Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. In this episode, Geoff, Michael, and Aubrey discuss the nuances of aging and health and their differing opinions and tactics of how to fully optimize these notions.

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SUBSCRIBE for updates on the latest Nootrobox content! ⚡️.

Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosed with help from Virtual Reality

I cannot wait to see how we can use VR for obtaining additional insights on other central nervous system diseases and disorders such as MS, Dystonia, GBM, etc.

Medical applications for VR continue to spread. Just a few weeks ago I wrote about how Paraplegics can learn to walk again with help from Virtual Reality. Scientists from Tomsk Polytechnic University and the Siberian State Medical University, in Russia, believe that it could be the future of diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Methods to diagnosis many of these conditions is accomplished by visual assessment in most parts of Russia. The brain scanning technology such as a CAT scan or MRI to confirm the diagnosis is only available in a handful of cities. The VR system being developed would be cheap and easy to roll out across the country.

Virtual Reality Balance Test.

We Might Be Getting Closer To “Immortality” Through Medical Nanotechnology

No shock to me.

Diamandis claimed that we are gearing towards a future possible of “interface mind-machine, where in human brain’s consciousness could be uploaded to computer and then transferred to a new body—probably a cultured in the lab. He estimates that it will just take 20–30 years to be realized.

The reality of extended life longevity to almost immortality is actually not too hard to believe these days. After all science and technology never failed to amuse us to make the once impossible possible.

TagsHealth, alternative health, life longevity, Nanotechnology, Medical Science, medical nanotechnology.

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