Lifeboat Foundation

The US military likes to stay at the forefront of the cutting edge of science — most recently investigating ways they can ‘hack’ the human brain and body to make it die slower, and learn faste r.

But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they’re also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it’s funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory — time crystals.

In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after they were first proposed.

Continue reading “DARPA Is Researching Time Crystals, And Their Reasons Are ‘Classified’” »

Research in flies shows that using temperature-sensitive proteins to control neurons could give us greater insight into how the brain works—and what’s going wrong when it doesn’t.

The renowned physicist Dr. Richard Feynman once said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand. Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”

An increasingly influential subfield of neuroscience has taken Feynman’s words to heart. To theoretical neuroscientists, the key to understanding how intelligence works is to recreate it inside a computer. Neuron by neuron, these whizzes hope to reconstruct the neural processes that lead to a thought, a memory, or a feeling.

With a digital brain in place, scientists can test out current theories of cognition or explore the parameters that lead to a malfunctioning mind. As philosopher Dr. Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford argues, simulating the human mind is perhaps one of the most promising (if laborious) ways to recreate—and surpass—human-level ingenuity.

Continue reading “Powerful New Algorithm Is a Big Step Towards Whole-Brain Simulation” »

Perfect vision is great. But like any advantage it comes with limitations. Those with ease don’t develop the same unique senses and strengths as someone who must overcome obstacles, people like Lana Awad, a neurotech engineer at CTRL-labs in New York, who diagnosed her own degenerative eye disease with a high school science textbook as a teen in Syria and went on to teach at Harvard University.

Though they see themselves as clear leaders, visionaries with all the obvious advantages—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example—can be blind in their way, lacking the context needed to guide if they don’t recognize their counterintuitive limitations. This is problematic for humanity because we’re all relying on them to create the tools that increasingly rule every aspect of our lives. The internet is just the start.

Tools that will meld mind and machine are already a reality. Neurotech is a huge business with applications being developed for gaming, the military, medicine, social media, and much more to come. Neurotech Report projected in 2016 that the $7.6 billion market could reach $12 billion by 2020. Wired magazine called 2017, “a coming-out year for the brain machine interface (BMI).”

Continue reading “Lana Awad is engineering the neuro-tech that will transform humanity” »

According toDr Eric Leuthardt, a brain surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, neural prosthetics will become mainstream in the coming decades (stock image).

Lightweight equipment is not much larger than what a bicyclist would wear.

• By Megan Thielking, STAT on March 22, 2018

Amazing.

Continue reading “New algorithm will allow for simulating neural connections of entire brain on future exascale supercomputers” »

Take your probiotics seriously. Even a headache pill may weaken your gut bacteria, a condition linked to obisity, depression, alzheimer’s, and dementia.

A drug to slow the spread of dementia could be available in three years and a ‘vaccine’ that prevents the disease within a decade, experts say.

• It is now a matter of ‘when not if’ a cure will be found for Alzheimer’s
• Last year dementia became Great Britain’s number one cause of death
• Existing drugs for Alzheimer’s only treat the symptoms, not causes

By Colin Fernandez for the Daily Mail

Continue reading “A drug to slow spread of dementia could be available in three years” »