Lifeboat Foundation

It was at this webcast that Musk unveiled the latest version of his company NeuraLink’s latest prototype, the Link VO.9 — a chip that would allow humans to control devices with their brains.

Musk said this could eventually help cure people with conditions like memory loss, hearing loss, paralysis, blindness, brain damage, depression and anxiety.

Viewers of the webcast met Gertrude, a pig that had the chip implanted in her brain two months ago. A graph shown onscreen showed the waves inside Gertrude’s brain, which fired when her brain communicated with her snout while she was eating.

Continue reading “Elon Musk unveils ‘Fitbit in your skull’ brain chip, demonstrates on pig” »

An amazingly well-preserved head of an ancient wolf has been identified. A Russian man named Pavel Efimov was out for a walk last summer when he came across a startling sight. Along the shore of the Tirekhtyakh River in Siberia’s Yakutia, he spotted a huge severed animal head. On closer inspection, it looked like it could be a wolf–with a full head of hair. Its long sharp teeth were intact, making the beast look as if it were still snarling.

The scientists that Efimov carried the head to ran many tests and have just concluded that it was indeed a wolf and estimated the animal was about 40,000 years old. The head alone measured a whopping 16 inches in length. And, yes, the brain was intact.

Continue reading “Snarling Head of Giant 40,000-yr-old Wolf Found with Hair and Brain Intact” »

Summary: Transposable elements team up with evolutionary recent neurons to influence differentiation and physiological function of neurons in brain development.

Source: EPFL

The human genome contains over 4.5 million sequences of DNA called “transposable elements”, these virus-like entities that “jump” around and help regulate gene expression. They do this by binding transcription factors, which are proteins that regulate the rate of transcription of DNA to RNA, influencing gene expression in a broad range of biological events.

This is an excerpt of a conversation between Dr. Daniel Stickler and Brian Rose.
Dr. Stickler is the Medical Director for the Neurohacker Collective, a consultant for Google on epigenetics and AI in healthcare, and a lecturer at Stanford University.
Brian Rose is the founder of London Real, a curator of people worth watching. Its mission is to promote personal transformation through inspiration, self-discovery and empowerment.
CUENTA CON SUBTÍTULOS EN ESPAÑOL
To watch the entire conversation clic here: https://youtu.be/ynbaJ2038K0

45 seconds with Elon Musk during his BCI demonstration. The excerpt counts with subtitles in Spanish.

Excerpt from the demonstration by Elon Musk of the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) in development progress by Neuralink. The event took place on August 28, 2020.

Continue reading “Elon Musk during his BCI demo: ‘The future is gonna be weird’ (S/T en Español)” »

They’re in pigs already, and the company is planning for human testing.

Could speed up healing.

Wound healing in mammalian skin often results in fibrotic scars, and the mechanisms by which original nonfibrotic tissue architecture can be restored are not well understood. Here, Wei et al. have shown that pharmacological activation of the nociceptor TRPA1, which is found on cutaneous sensory neurons, can limit scar formation and promote tissue regeneration. They confirmed the efficacy of TRPA1 activation in three different skin wounding mouse models, and they also observed that localized activation could generate a response at distal wound sites. TRPA1 activation induced IL-23 production by dermal dendritic cells, which activated IL-17–producing γδ T cells and promoted tissue regeneration. These findings provide insight into neuroimmune signaling pathways in the skin that are critical to mammalian tissue regeneration.

Adult mammalian wounds, with rare exception, heal with fibrotic scars that severely disrupt tissue architecture and function. Regenerative medicine seeks methods to avoid scar formation and restore the original tissue structures. We show in three adult mouse models that pharmacologic activation of the nociceptor TRPA1 on cutaneous sensory neurons reduces scar formation and can also promote tissue regeneration. Local activation of TRPA1 induces tissue regeneration on distant untreated areas of injury, demonstrating a systemic effect. Activated TRPA1 stimulates local production of interleukin-23 (IL-23) by dermal dendritic cells, leading to activation of circulating dermal IL-17–producing γδ T cells. Genetic ablation of TRPA1, IL-23, dermal dendritic cells, or γδ T cells prevents TRPA1-mediated tissue regeneration.

Continue reading “Activation of TRPA1 nociceptor promotes systemic adult mammalian skin regeneration” »

In this video, Elon Musk demonstrates a prototype brain–computer interface chip – implanted in a pig – that his company, Neuralink, has been working on. The device could one day be used by humans to augment their abilities.

Founded in 2016, the Neuralink Corporation remained highly secretive about its work until July 2019, when Musk presented his concept at the California Academy of Sciences. It emerged that he planned to create brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) not only for diseased or injured patients, but also healthy individuals who might wish to enhance themselves.

Yesterday, in a livestream event on YouTube, Musk unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized chip in her brain. Simpler and smaller than the original revealed last year, the read/write link device can nevertheless pack 1,024 channels with megabit wireless data rate and all-day battery life. This latest prototype – version 0.9 – has now been approved as an FDA breakthrough device, allowing it to be used in limited human trials under the US federal guidelines for testing medical devices. The chip is removable, Musk explained, as he showed another pig called Dorothy, who no longer had the implant and was healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig.

Summary: Neuroimaging predicts whether a person with OCD will respond to stress-reduction therapy or exposure-based therapy best. Analyzing brain activity may help to provide tailored treatments to individuals suffering from OCD.

Source: Michigan Medicine

New research could improve the odds that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder will receive a therapy that really works for them – something that eludes more than a third of those who currently get OCD treatment.