Lifeboat Foundation

Think we’re far off from The Matrix? Gabe Newell says you should think again.

In a rare interview with IGN ahead of next week’s release of Half-Life: Alyx, Newell reasoned that more advanced forms of VR might not be too far out. “We’re way closer to The Matrix than people realize,” he stated. “It’s not going to be ‘The Matrix’, The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain-computer interface world is going to be. But it’s going to have a huge impact on the kinds of experiences that we can create for people.”

Multiple lines of evidence show that the anti-aging and cognition-enhancing protein Klotho fosters neuronal survival, increases the anti-oxidative stress defense, and promotes remyelination of demyelinated axons. Thus, upregulation of the Klotho gene can potentially alleviate the symptoms and/or prevent the progression of age-associated neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Here we used a CRISPR-dCas9 complex to investigate single-guide RNA (sgRNA) targeting the Klotho promoter region for efficient transcriptional activation of the Klotho gene. We tested the sgRNAs within the — 1 to — 300 bp of the Klotho promoter region and identified two sgRNAs that can effectively enhance Klotho gene transcription. We examined the transcriptional activation of the Klotho gene using three different systems: a Firefly luciferase (FLuc) and NanoLuc luciferase (NLuc) coincidence reporter system, a NLuc knock-in in Klotho 3’-UTR using CRISPR genomic editing, and two human cell lines: neuronal SY5Y cells and kidney HK-2 cells that express Klotho endogenously. The two sgRNAs enhanced Klotho expression at both the gene and protein levels. Our results show the feasibility of gene therapy for targeting Klotho using CRISPR technology. Enhancing Klotho levels has a therapeutic potential for increasing cognition and treating age-associated neurodegenerative, demyelinating and other diseases, such as chronic kidney disease and cancer.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Cancer; Chronic kidney disease; Multiple sclerosis; Myelin; Neuroprotection.

https://paper.li/e-1437691924

What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these questions have highlighted the desirability and necessity of imagining ourselves as animals, plants, and even objects, others argue that such acts of the imagination are fundamentally flawed. The human, Lynn Festa argues in Fiction without Humanity, is really all we get access to.

The 21st century has seen the rise of what are often lumped together as a variety of “posthumanist” critical approaches: thing theory and “new materialism” (see Bill Brown’s Other Things and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter), animal studies (see Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am and Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet), and even a burgeoning plant studies (see Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life). Each of these approaches has asked us to broaden the range of what Miguel Tamen calls “interpretable objects” well beyond the human; to consider what forms of signification, consciousness, or meaning might belong to animals, plants, and objects.¹

Continue reading “The Posthuman Enlightenment” »

In addition to working with the World Health Organization to end smallpox, Larry Brilliant has fought flu, polio, and blindness. He says we will, eventually, get back to normal. But that’s not going to occur until three important things happen first. LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.

Circa 2019

Memory loss is usually seen as an inevitable part of ageing. But new research suggests that magnetic pulse stimulation can help older brains recover a little of their youthful vitality.

Intel Corp. is releasing an experimental research system for neuromorphic computing, a cutting-edge method that simulates the way human brains work to perform computations faster, using significantly less energy.

The system, called Pohoiki Springs, will be made available this month over the cloud to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community, which includes academic researchers, government labs and about a dozen companies such as Accenture PLC and Airbus SE.

Others, including International Business Machines Corp., are also researching the technique.

Brian tumors and the coronavirus.

We hope this information will help address some of our community’s concerns about the coronavirus (COVID-19).

Have you ever gotten a whiff of a certain smell that brought you back to childhood? Or maybe a scent that reminded you of a past love affair?

A paper published in Learning and Memory reveals the power scents have to trigger memories of past experiences, as well as the possibility for odor to be used in treating memory-related disorders.

“If odor could be used to elicit the rich recollection of a memory — even of a traumatic experience — we could take advantage of that [therapeutically],” said Boston University neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, assistant professor of psychology and brain sciences and senior author of the study, in a statement.

A theory of how #AI & #brain recognize things. https://bit.ly/2Qnq3RC “In this article, we proposed a hypothesis that we call Switch Hypothesis for explaining how an ANN as well as a real neural network carry out its functions…” #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #NeuralNetworks

Neuroscience and psychology today has advanced significantly. With the use of neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), human beings have gradually revealed the secrets behind how our brains perceive, recognize and memorize things. However, if you’d like to have a detailed, neuronal-level elucidation on how brains realize its functions, you should be very disappointed because no one is currently capable of doing so. In other words, although our cerebrums are no longer a pitch-black box, it’s still at least a “gray” box, with a lot of enigmas yet to be explained.