Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers hope the new app can help bridge the gap between supply and demand for mental health support.

Asking an AI chatbot to give a rundown on Napoleonic wars is fine. But using a chatbot service for a therapy session?

Even ChatGPT suggests going to a traditional mental health practitioner when you pour your heart out to the AI – perhaps because the most important element of therapy is the client-therapist relationship.

Ago when I was a kid in college my friend Eric got me into many things. We played music together and used a Kurzweil Keyboard, and a bunch of weird stuff. We had an ADAT hooked up to the Kurzweil with fiber optic cables. I had Roland keyboards & Drum machines but I loved the Kurzweil. He started teaching me many things because he was really smart. I was studying psychology so he loaned me his DSMIV and books on Industrial Organiza… See more.

A bit long, but a good read. About 20 years ago when I was a kid in college my friend Eric got me into many things. We played music together and used a Kurzweil Keyboard, and a bunch of weird stuff. We had an ADAT hooked up to the Kurzweil with fiber optic cables. I had Roland keyboards & Drum machines but I loved the Kurzweil. He started teaching me many things because he was really smart. I was studying psychology so he loaned me his DSMIV and books on Industrial Organizational Psychology. He then told me about other books like “Society of Mind”(Marvin Minsky), “Age of Intelligent Machine” (Ray Kurzweil), Engines of Creation (K Eric Drexler), of course Richard Feynman, and many more. I dreamed of that technology and kept reading more. In the 2000’s Drexler and Feynman’s visions became a paradign and applications started rolling out, and now nanotechnology is applied to most everything we know. We are now at the second paradigm where we see the visions of Minsky/McCarthy, Kurzweil and others becoming easily available applications. As a Child I watched the Jetsons & Srar Trek and now with flying cars it’s not if, but when. Space travel is already here. All these technologies will transform global societies, but we must all focus on investing more in the advancement of society than the destruction of it. Many of the things we now invision in our minds we may see in 10 years. People think saving your consciousness & longevity is impossible, but I don’t. Some even thought that regenerating tissue and organs is impossible, but we can do that now. Now people keep saying, “This ancient turtle died, this rhino died (I hear that all the time in Kenya), this elephant died, but I say okay it’s not cool, but what can we salvage from it to bring the species back with advances in technology later? Do we use cryogenics? How do we save the genetic material? Technology can be used in so many ways. Every Day Lifeboat posts feats many do not know. If more people on earth had such a focus, as opposed to dumbed down entertainment like The Kardashians for instance, we would be living in a much better world with more people proposing more ideas and collaborations. I always say we are moving in the wrong way in the evolutionary process, and it is a bit telling that some phones are smarter than many people. I you add ChatGPT. We have so much advanced technology and science, yet we can’t even fight cancer. It took decades for people to learn the importance of diet in HIV treatment. However, Ray Kurzweil has for decades talked about the importance of diet for longevity. Just the other day it was published that processed foods affect cognitive function. Before that it was released processed foods cause cancer. We must change, and go in the right way of evolution to the Singularity another paradigm shift and cooperarion, instead of backwards to a barbaric age of conflict and greed. Always share your knowledge and I thank all who do share in this group. More should share as well, and Lifeboat should use more platforms to reach more people.

Evidence that non-invasive sensory stimulation of 40 Hz gamma frequency brain rhythms can reduce Alzheimer’s disease pathology and symptoms, already shown with light and sound by multiple research groups in mice and humans, now extends to tactile stimulation. A new study by MIT scientists shows that Alzheimer’s model mice exposed to 40 Hz vibration an hour a day for several weeks showed improved brain health and motor function compared to untreated controls.

The MIT group is not the first to show that gamma frequency tactile stimulation can affect brain activity and improve motor function, but they are the first to show that the stimulation can also reduce levels of the hallmark Alzheimer’s protein phosphorylated tau, keep neurons from dying or losing their synapse circuit connections, and reduce neural DNA damage.

“This work demonstrates a third sensory modality that we can use to increase gamma power in the brain,” said Li-Huei Tsai, corresponding author of the study, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Aging Brain Initiative at MIT, and Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS).

Year 2015 face_with_colon_three

The genetically modified super-smart mice also proved to suffer less from anxiety, the scientists found.

For all that science has decoded the human genome, we don’t actually know what most of our DNA does, or even what a great many of our genes do. One way to elucidate what a gene does is to change it (mutate it) and see what happens.

Continue reading “Scientists create super-intelligent mice, discover they’re also very laid-back” »

This may sound like a science fiction scenario, but some physicists have proposed that this could be the case. In this article, we will explore the idea that our universe may be inside of a black hole, and what implications this would have for our understanding of cosmology and physics.

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes are formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. The resulting singularity is a point of infinite density and zero volume, where the laws of physics break down.

Scientists discover possible connection between human brain and cosmos on a quantum scale.

When London-based student Lewis Hornby noticed that his dementia-afflicted grandmother was having trouble staying hydrated, he came up with Jelly Drops, bite-sized pods of edible water made with gelling agents and electrolytes.

As sponges and ctenophores are such disparate animals¹³, the nature of the first diverging animal lineage has implications for the evolution of fundamental animal characteristics. Adult sponges are generally sessile filter-feeding organisms with body plans organized into reticulated water-filtration channels, structures built out of silica or calcium carbonate, and specialized cell types and tissues used for feeding, reproduction and self-defence, but they lack neuronal and muscle cells¹⁵. By contrast, ctenophores are gelatinous marine predators that move using eight longitudinal ‘comb rows’ of ciliary bundles^16,17; they are superficially similar but unrelated to cnidarian medusae^13,18 and possess multiple nerve nets¹⁹. Thus, whereas the sponge-sister scenario suggests a single origin of neurons on the ctenophore–parahoxozoan stem, the ctenophore-sister scenario implies either that either ancestral metazoan neurons were lost in the sponge lineage, or that there was convergent evolution of neurons in the ctenophore and parahoxozoan lineages^3,6. Similar considerations apply to other metazoan cell types¹⁸, gene regulatory networks, animal development^13,18 and other uniquely metazoan features.

Despite its importance for understanding animal evolution, the relative branching order of sponges, ctenophores and other animals has proven to be difficult to resolve². The fossil record is largely silent on this issue as verified Precambrian sponge fossils are extremely rare²⁰ and putative fossils of the soft-bodied ctenophores are difficult to interpret²¹. Morphological characters of living groups (for example, choanocytes of sponges) are not sufficient to resolve the question because true homology is difficult to assign, and such characters are easily lost or can arise convergently^13,22. The ctenophore-sister hypothesis is supported by a pair of gene duplications shared by sponges, bilaterians, placozoans and cnidarians but not ctenophores²³. Although sophisticated methods for sequence-based phylogenomics have been developed and applied to increasingly large molecular datasets, there is still considerable debate about the relative position of sponges and ctenophores as results are sensitive to how sequence evolution is modelled¹¹, which taxa or sites are included^24,25, and the effects of long-branch artifacts and nucleotide compositional variation²⁶. New approaches are needed.

We reasoned that patterns of synteny, classically defined as chromosomal gene linkage without regard to gene order²⁷, could provide a powerful tool for resolving the ctenophore-sister versus sponge-sister debate. Chromosomal patterns of gene linkage evolve slowly in many lineages^12,28,29,30, probably because it is improbable for interchromosomal translocations to be fixed in populations with large effective population sizes^28,31,32. Notably, some changes in synteny are effectively irreversible. For example, when two distinct ancestral synteny groups are combined onto a single chromosome by translocation, and subsequent intrachromosomal rearrangements mix these two groups of genes, it is very unlikely that the ancestral separated pattern will be restored by further rearrangement and fission, in the same sense that spontaneous reduction in entropy is improbable¹². Such rare and irreversible changes are particularly useful for resolving challenging phylogenetic questions as they give rise to shared derived features that unambiguously unite all descendant lineages^33,34,35. Deeply conserved syntenies observed between animals and their closest unicellular relatives¹² suggest that outgroup comparisons could be used to infer ancestral metazoan states and polarize changes within animals to address the sponge-sister versus ctenophore-sister debate. Yet, chromosome-scale genome sequences of the unicellular or colonial eukaryotic outgroups closest to animals (choanoflagellates, filastereans and ichthyosporeans) have not been reported.

The Tracy lab focuses on the KIBRA protein.

Like the lymphatic system in the body, the glymphatic system in the brain clears metabolic waste and distributes nutrients and other important compounds. Impairments in this system may contribute to brain diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases and stroke.

A team of researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found a non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical method to influence glymphatic transport using focused ultrasound, opening the opportunity to use the method to further study brain diseases and brain function. Results of the work are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 15.

Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering in McKelvey Engineering and of neurological surgery in the School of Medicine, and her team, including Dezhuang (Summer) Ye, a postdoctoral research associate, and Si (Stacie) Chen, a former postdoctoral research associate, found the first direct evidence that focused ultrasound, combined with circulating microbubbles—a technique they call FUSMB—could mechanically enhance glymphatic transport in the mouse brain.