Lifeboat Foundation

“Neural dust,” thought-powered typing and mini-brains generate academic and corporate interest.

• By Sharon Begley on December 28, 2017

Hundreds of millions of years ago, at a time when back-boned animals were just starting to crawl onto land, one such creature became infected by a virus. It was a retrovirus, capable of smuggling its genes into the DNA of its host. And as sometimes happens, those genes stayed put. They were passed on to the animal’s children and grandchildren. And as these viral genes cascaded through the generations, they changed, transforming from mere stowaways into important parts of their host’s biology.

One such gene is called Arc. It’s active in neurons, and plays a vital role in the brain. A mouse that’s born without Arc can’t learn or form new long-term memories. If it finds some cheese in a maze, it will have completely forgotten the right route the next day. “They can’t seem to respond or adapt to changes in their environment,” says Jason Shepherd from the University of Utah, who has been studying Arc for years. “Arc is really key to transducing the information from those experiences into changes in the brain.”

Every memory leaves its own imprint in the brain, and researchers are starting to work out what one looks like.

J147 is an experimental drug that has been shown to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and it also appears to reverse some aspects of aging. It is also poised to enter human clinical trials in the near future, although how it works has been somewhat of a puzzle.

A new study published in the journal Aging Cell has changed all that, and the results are quite intriguing[1]. Researchers at the Salk Institute have solved the mystery of how J147 works and why it makes old flies, mice, and cells more youthful.

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V 0.1.0 — “Hydrogen”

What are some of the things you don’t think machines are ever going to be able to do? Computers are still very weak when it comes to understanding. They can’t process a textbook and use the knowledge the way humans do. But that’s being worked on. There’s no real problem- solving limit to what can be done. Understanding what does it mean in terms of consciousness or anything like that, I know that the software won’t be in that realm at all. But it will be an incredible problem solver.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke with TIME’s Nancy Gibbs about looking forward and what makes him optimistic about the future.

It’s crazy to think that we still don’t quite understand the mechanism behind one of the most common medical interventions — general anaesthetic.

But researchers in Australia just got a step closer by discovering that one of the most commonly used anaesthetic drugs doesn’t just put us to sleep; it also disrupts communication between brain cells.

The team investigated the drug propofol, a super-popular option for surgeries worldwide. A potent sedative, the drug is thought to put us to sleep through its effect on the GABA neurotransmitter system, the main regulator of our sleep-and-wake cycles in the brain.

Continue reading “Scientists Just Changed Our Understanding of How Anaesthesia Messes With The Brain” »

Intelligent Machines

Intel’s new chips are more brain-like than ever.

The troubled chipmaker is looking to the future of computing.

Continue reading “Intel wants to move beyond today’s architecture, with brain-inspired and quantum chips” »

It is wartime. You and your fellow refugees are hiding from enemy soldiers, when a baby begins to cry. You cover her mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand, her crying will draw the attention of the soldiers, who will kill everyone. If you smother the child, you’ll save yourself and the others.

If you were in that situation, which was dramatized in the final episode of the ’70s and ’80s TV series “M.A.S.H.,” what would you do?

The results of a new UCLA study suggest that scientists could make a good guess based on how the brain responds when people watch someone else experience pain. The study found that those responses predict whether people will be inclined to avoid causing harm to others when facing moral dilemmas.

Continue reading “Mirror neuron activity predicts people’s decision-making in moral dilemmas, study finds” »