Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience – Page 959

These campaigns could erode the base of the Legal Open Access movement: scientists’ awareness of their options for sharing research. Elbakyan, on the other hand, would be left unaffected. The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have — through the Streisand effect — made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber.

The threat posed by ACS’s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site “a symptom of a serious problem: people who can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don’t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.”

In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”

It wasn’t long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. “I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like ‘Well, that’s… that’s a real problem.’ There’s no literal translation,” Elbakyan tells me in Russian. “It’s basically ‘That’s an ass.’ But it doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It’s more like ‘That’s fucked up. We’re fucked.’”.

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Professor Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist from Lancaster University and Professor Emanuel Bylund, a linguist from Stellenbosch University and Stockholm University, have discovered that people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.

The finding, published in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology: General’, reports the first evidence of cognitive flexibility in people who speak two languages.

Bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and, often, unconsciously — a phenomenon called code-switching.

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So will we ever be able to do this or is this just a pipe dream? Plenty has been written about the future and what we may be able to do one day, but not much attention gets paid to the hurdles we have yet to overcome. Forget all the techno-babble, philosophy, and transhumanism – how close is this brave new world to our present time?

“Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in a bucket.”

Taken from 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, this sentence perfectly sums up the complexity and ambiguity of the human mind and the brain. Despite enormous advances, our ignorance on what lies within our cranium remains vast and sometimes unyielding. Those drops, and their relation to the bucket, are profoundly enigmatic.

We understand how different parts of the brain communicate and often what they specialize in, but what exactly is a “thought” made of? Where, amongst the 86 billion neurons in our brain, do they come from, and where do they go? What, scientifically speaking, is consciousness – is it a single entity or the sum of trillions of permutations? Is it the addition or average of all those firing neurons?

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Summary: Researchers discover what may be the key to stopping uncontrolled inflammation and the damage it causes in a multitude of chronic diseases. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

A discovery by researchers at the University of Queensland (UQ) could be the key to stopping the damage caused by uncontrolled inflammation in a range of chronic diseases including Alzheimer’s and liver disease.

Queensland scientists have uncovered how an inflammation process automatically switches off in healthy cells, and are now investigating ways to stop it when it runs amok. The finding may lead to a way to turn off chronic low-grade inflammation without interfering with the body’s natural defenses against infection.

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This image shows AAV therapy affecting pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus. Credit: Blake Albright, Asokan Lab Gene therapies promise to revolutionize the treatment of many diseases, including neurological diseases such as ALS. But the small viruses that deliver therapeutic genes can have adverse side effects at high doses. UNC School of Medicine researchers have now found a structure on these viruses that makes them better at crossing from the bloodstream into the brain – a key factor for administering gene therapies at lower doses for treating brain and spinal disorders. This structural…

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Maybe it’s because Robert Lepage is touring The Far Side of the Moon to the Adelaide Festival. Or that a new Star Trek is on TV. Or maybe it’s because I feel like the only person alive who really – really – liked Luc Besson’s Valerian, but space, fantasies of the final frontier, and the real voyages that human beings may yet dare to make into it are very much on my mind. This week saw a number of news items concerning our tentative outreach to the stars that, for all their frustrating revelations, might yet prick the aspiration for space missions back into the popular policy consciousness…

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#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.

The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.

It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.

Dublin writer Mark O’Connell spent three years travelling the globe, meeting people who believe that they can actually achieve this by digitising their brains and transcending human flesh to become de facto cyborgs, impervious to…

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