Lifeboat Foundation

Neuralink, the Elon Musk-founded company developing implantable chips that can read brain waves, has raised an additional $43 million in venture capital, according to a filing with the SEC.

The filing published this week shows the company increased its previous tranche, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, from $280 million to $323 million in early August. Thirty-two investors participated, according to the filing.

Neuralink hasn’t disclosed its valuation recently. But in June, Reuters reported that the company was valued at about $5 billion after privately-executed stock trades.

5th BigBrain Workshop 2021
22 September 2021 — Applications.
Chair: Kathleen Rockland.

The Unique Cytoarchitecture and Wiring of The Default Mode Network.
Casey Paquola.

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An amazing graph theoretic analysis of the C. elegans neuropeptide connectome!

Neuromodulation by peptides is essential for brain function. By comprehensively mapping neuropeptide signaling in the nematode C. elegans, Ripoll-Sánchez et al. define a dense wireless network whose organization differs in important ways from wired brain circuits. This network is a prototype for understanding neuropeptide signaling networks in larger brains.

A study revealed that one-third of cardiac arrest survivors experienced consciousness, with EEG showing brain activity despite heart stoppage. This groundbreaking finding challenges current understandings of brain function during cardiac emergencies.

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My name is Artem, I’m a computational neuroscience student and researcher. In this video we discuss engrams – fundamental units of memory in the brain. We explore what engrams are, how memory is allocated, where it is stored, and how different memories become linked with each other.

Continue reading “Building Blocks of Memory in the Brain” »

Chansom Pantip/iStock.

Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists revealed that the fusiform face area, a vital region for face processing in sighted people, plays an important role in helping blind people recognize faces.

Cleveland Clinic researchers analyzed genes and brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s and found that differences in brain immunometabolism – the interactions between the immune system and the ways cells create energy – may contribute to women’s increased risk for the disease and its severity.

The findings, published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, offer important insight into developing sex-specific treatment and prevention options for Alzheimer’s disease, the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States.

“Our immune systems depend on communication between different cell types in our bodies, which are fueled by energy created from unique metabolic processes,” said Justin Lathia, Ph.D., vice chair of the Department of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences and co-author on the paper. “As sex influences both the immune system and metabolic process, our study aimed to identify how all of these individual factors influence one another to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.”

Contrary to popular belief, the brain does not have the capability to rewire itself to compensate for loss of sight, amputations, or stroke-related damage, according to scientists from the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.

In a recent paper published in eLife, Professors Tamar Makin (Cambridge) and John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins) argue that the notion that the brain, in response to injury or deficit, can reorganize itself and repurpose particular regions for new functions, is fundamentally flawed – despite being commonly cited in scientific textbooks. Instead, they argue that what is occurring is merely the brain being trained to utilize already existing, but latent, abilities.

Link : https://trib.al/DwqJQ8E

Researchers in Texas have developed a method to keep a brain alive and functioning for several hours without being connected to the body — a truly weird scientific experiment that recalls the head in jars bit in the iconic cartoon “Futurama.”

A team led by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas took two pigs and severed connections between their heads and bodies, instead hooking the brains up to a device they call the extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC), which they detailed in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The machine keeps blood pumping through the brain, mimicking the natural flow when it’s connected to the rest of the body.

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