Lifeboat Foundation

Who would have thought that roaches, that’s right, C-O-C-K-R-O-A-C-H-E–S, could actually do something good for humanity? Well, it seems that they are helping out quite a lot.

Bar-Ilan University scientists, together with the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, designed injectable nanobots, and they are testing them on these little critters. Remarkably, the technology controls the release of drugs that are needed for the brain using the brain itself. That’s right, using only brain power!

And down the road, this extra mind boost could be a lifesaver for many. The work was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Continue reading “Scientists Made Nanorobots That Can Release Drugs in The Body Using Mind-Control” »

Biologists at Caltech have developed a new system for visualizing connections between individual cells in fly brains. The finding may ultimately lead to “wiring diagrams” of fly and other animal brains, which would help researchers understand how neurons are connected.

“To understand how the brain works we need to know how neurons are wired to each other,” says Carlos Lois, research professor in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech and principal investigator of the new research, which appears in the November issue of the journal Development. “This is similar to understanding how a computer works by looking at how transistors are connected.”

Animals are made up of different types of specialized cells. In order for an animal to function, the cells have to be able to communicate with each other. For example, neurons directly communicate with muscle cells so that an animal can move. In diseases such as cancer, this communication process can go awry: when tumors metastasize, they no longer “listen” to neighboring cells that tell them not to grow. Instead, the cancer cells grow uncontrollably and migrate to other parts of the body.

Continue reading “The wiring of fly brains—mapping cell-to-cell connections” »

A new theory explains how fragile quantum states may be able to exist for hours or even days in our warm, wet brain. Experiments should soon test the idea.

In the future, circuits and systems modelled on human brains could end up in everything from supercomputers to everyday smartphones.

From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It’s usually a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now. This is one of those articles. It was originally published October 25th, 2015. We hope you enjoy it!

Ibandplus.com

Rattling around inside a hard drive doesn’t sound like an awful lot of fun — but then, neither does death.

Both eventualities are rather difficult to imagine, but we’ll all have to give them some thought sooner rather than later. Neuroscientist and neuroengineer Randal Koene thinks it’s only going to be another 10 years before we replace parts of the brain with prosthetics.

From there, it’s just a matter of replacing each region systematically, to end up with someone whose brain is immortal and electronic. Could the last person to die have already been born?

Continue reading “Would You Like to Be Uploaded to a Computer When You Die?” »

I argued in my 2015 paper “Why it matters that you realize you’re in a Computer Simulation” that if our universe is indeed a computer simulation, then that particular discovery should be commonplace among the intelligent lifeforms throughout the universe. The simple calculus of it all being (a) if intelligence is in part equivalent to detecting the environment (b) the environment is a computer simulation © eventually nearly all intelligent lifeforms should discover that their environment is a computer simulation. I called this the Savvy Inevitability. In simple terms, if we’re really in a Matrix, we’re supposed to eventually figure that out.

Silicon Valley, tech culture, and most nerds the world over are familiar with the real world version of the question are we living in a Matrix? The paper that’s likely most frequently cited is Nick Bostrom’s Are you living in a Computer Simulation? Whether or not everyone agrees about certain simulation ideas, everyone does seem to have an opinion about them.

Recently, the Internet heated up over Elon Musk’s comments at a Vox event on hot tub musings of the simulation hypothesis. Even Bank of America published an analysis of the simulation hypothesis, and, according to Tad Friend in an October 10, 2016 article published in New Yorker, “two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

In Brief:

• Now with just under $800 million in funding, Florida startup Magic Leap has applied for a patent for its VR/AR headsets, bringing them one step closer to market.
• From healthcare to the military, VR/AR is being applied to industries far beyond its humble roots in gaming.

Florida-based startup Magic Leap has been getting considerable attention thanks in no small part to the awesome-looking augmented reality video demos it has released. Apart from these videos and the info we could glean from some interviews and Twitter posts, however, we haven’t yet been given a complete explanation of what the company has in store for consumers. What we do know is that it promises an AR experience unlike any other by delivering “neurologically true visual perception.” In short, the brain won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and virtual reality when you are using Magic Leap’s device.

Continue reading “Get Ready for Magic Leap: New Patent Brings VR Device One Step Closer to Reality” »