Harvard bioethics specialist Glenn Cohen considers the complex question of whether humans should mix their genetic material with other animals to create chimeras.
Read more
In an epidsode of the dystopian near-future series, Black Mirror, a small, implantable device behind the ear grants the ability to remember, access, and replay every moment of your life in perfect detail, like a movie right before your eyes.
Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, can’t promise that level of perfect recall—perhaps for the better—but he is working on a memory prosthesis. The device, surgically implanted directly into the brain, mimics the function of a structure called the hippocampus by electrically stimulating the brain in a particular way to form memories—at least in rats and monkeys. And now, he’s testing one that could work in humans.
Berger’s device hinges on a theory about how the hippocampus transforms short-term memories, like where you deposited your keys, into long-term memories—so you can find them later. In his early experiments, he played a tone and then puffed air in a rabbit’s face, causing it to blink. Eventually, just playing the tone would make the rabbit blink, just like Pavlov’s famous salivating dogs. Berger recorded the hippocampus’ activity with electrodes, and as the rabbits learned to associate the tone with the air puff, patterns in those signals changed in a predictable way.
Read more
The goal of roboticists has long been to make A.I. as efficient as the human brain, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just brought them one step closer.
In a recent paper, published in the journal Biology, scientists were able to successfully train a neural network to recognize faces at different angles by feeding it a set of different orientations for several face templates. Although this only initially gave the neural network the ability to roughly reach invariance — the ability to process data regardless of form — over time, the network taught itself to achieve full “mirror symmetry. Through mathematical algorithms, the neural network was able to mimic the human brain’s ability to understand objects are the same despite orientation or rotation.
Read more
Last fall, the biotech executive Martin Shkreli became widely reviled for hiking the price of a life-saving drug by more than 4,000 percent overnight, to $750 per pill.
Public outrage at Shkreli has apparently reverberated all the way to a high school science lab in Australia, where a group of 11th grade students claim to have proven a point: the drug can be made for much, much cheaper.
The group of 11 high school students, ages 16 and 17, successfully recreated the drug, Daraprim, for a mere $2 a pill, according to scientists from the University of Sydney.
Read more
AI (someday once things are more secured) is going to drastically reduce our cost of government. At least the VA believes AI is going to make them better at treating folks; my guess it’s a mix of cost saving potential via automation and improving diagnosis.
Flow Health and the VA are building a medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train AI to personalize care plans.
Read more
This has been worked on since WWII using various methods that never fully worked out. However, our technology has advance; so it could be within reach this time.
An expert from Rutgers University Newark explores the proper role of neuroscience in defense and war efforts, and how technologies designed with this science can be misused to harm people.
Read more