Lifeboat Foundation

Not ideal!

In January, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk announced that his brain-computer interface startup Neuralink had successfully implanted a wireless brain chip into a human subject for the first time.

Over the next couple of months, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh was shown moving a cursor with his mind, playing Civilization VI and even a fast-paced round of Mario Kart.

Continue reading “Neuralink Admits That Implant’s Threads Have Retracted From First Patient’s Brain, Possibly Due to Air in Skull” »

Tumors that move to the brain are difficult to treat because of the brain-blood barrier that separates the brain from the rest of the body.

Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have developed a nanoparticle that could one day be used to treat brain metastases.

Reconstruction of 1 mm3 of human brain (at 1.4 petabytes of EM data) published by @stardazed0 (@GoogleAI) & Lichtman lab.

Paper: https://science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858

Blog:

Continue reading “Ten years of neuroscience at Google yields maps of human brain” »

Explore the tiny ‘pizza slice’ down to the neuron.

Summary: Preschool children actively influence their own development to align with their genetic dispositions. By examining how toddlers interact with their environment, including activities like reading and puzzles, researchers found that children’s preferences impact how they engage in cognitive stimulation at home.

This active involvement helps shape their brain development alongside environmental factors. The findings emphasize the dynamic interplay between genetics and environment in early childhood, challenging the traditional views of passive developmental processes.

Neuralink’s first human patient has become so adept at using the company’s brain implant that he can now beat other players at video games.

On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s company provided a progress update on Noland Arbaugh, who received a brain implant in January that lets him remotely control the cursor on a laptop.

In March, Neuralink revealed that Arbaugh was using the implant to play games including Chess, Civilization VI, and Mario Kart. In Wednesday’s update, the company reported that Arbaugh’s use of the implant has only improved over time.

Does free will exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice sit down with astrophysicist Charles Liu sit down to discuss the existence of free will and whether physics allows for choice in our lives.

We explore cause and effect: how does uncertainty and chaos in the universe factor into free will? How important is the illusion of free will to society? What does a society that acknowledges a lack of free will look like?

Continue reading “Two Astrophysicists Debate Free Will” »

A powerful new idea about how the laws of physics work could bring breakthroughs on everything from quantum gravity to consciousness, says researcher Chiara Marletto

By Chiara Marletto

To keep our bodies properly oriented, our brains perform impressive feats of calculation that track our stumbling meat sack through a mental map of our surrounds.

While a lot of research has focussed on the mapping, little has managed to determine how our neurological wiring monitors our direction within it.

A team of researchers from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany has identified signature brain activity that describes a kind of ‘neural compass’ in the hope of understanding how we find our way through the world.