Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 14

This AI superintelligence can help replace the need for tons of research hurdles such as time constraints finding items of knowledge to make what would take weeks or years into seconds of time.

Science is bottlenecked by data. The 38 million papers on PubMed, 500,000+ clinical trials, and thousands of specialized tools have created an information bottleneck that even the most brilliant scientists can’t navigate. At FutureHouse, our mission is to solve this problem by building an AI Scientist. Today, we are taking a significant step forward by releasing the first publicly available superintelligent scientific agents accessible to researchers everywhere, with benchmarked superhuman literature search & synthesis capabilities.

Crow is a general-purpose agent that can search the literature and provide concise, scholarly answers to questions, and is perfect for use via API.

Falcon is specialized for deep literature reviews. It can search and synthesize more scientific literature than any other agent we are aware of, and also has access to several specialized scientific databases, like OpenTargets.

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University of North Carolina-led researchers have used brain connectivity charts built from functional MRI data as a tool for tracking early childhood brain development.

Charts mapped the maturation of brain networks from birth to age six and identified key transitions in how regions of the brain interact. Deviations from these developmental patterns were significantly associated with differences in early cognitive ability, involving primary, default, control, and attention networks.

Early childhood marks a critical period in brain growth, during which undergo rapid, variable changes that shape . While physical growth charts are well-established tools for monitoring parameters such as height and weight, comparable standards for assessing the development of brain function, with timing that differs across children, remain elusive.

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Recent Extinction Rebellion protests saw key sites across London shut down in an attempt to force the government to declare an ‘eco-emergency.’

Our dissatisfaction with breakdown on a global, individual and societal level pushes many of us into activism. Increased numbers of people report suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’, and a recent study showed only 29% of American millennials currently believe that the country is heading in the right direction.

But can decay be completely reversed by human effort?

In this podcast, Tom Cozens speaks with Dr Mark Hocknull, who points out that decay finds its cause in deeper laws governing the physical universe. According to the principle of entropy, breakdown and decay are inescapable aspects of the natural world. The second law of thermodynamics states that decay and disorder are inescapable, and will always increase over time, despite human effort to reverse the process.

In the face of a world inescapably programmed towards breakdown, should we fight back or give up?

Owl in space at https://owlinspace.com

Continue reading “Entropy: The Universal Disorder | A conversation with Dr Mark Hocknull” | >

What is time? Speaking time travel, black holes and the remits of science. In this podcast conversation, we speak with Professor David Wilkinson — physicist and author of popular science books on Stephen Hawking to explore the question: can we ever fully understand time through science, or does it open up more mystery?

Owl in space at https://owlinspace.com

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Due to the prevalence of chronic pain worldwide, there is an urgent need to improve pain management strategies. While opioid drugs have long been used to treat chronic pain, their use is severely limited by adverse effects and abuse liability. Neurostimulation techniques have emerged as a promising option for chronic pain that is refractory to other treatments. While different neurostimulation strategies have been applied to many neural structures implicated in pain processing, there is variability in efficacy between patients, underscoring the need to optimize neurostimulation techniques for use in pain management. This optimization requires a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurostimulation-induced pain relief. Here, we discuss the most commonly used neurostimulation techniques for treating chronic pain. We present evidence that neurostimulation-induced analgesia is in part driven by the release of endogenous opioids and that this endogenous opioid release is a common endpoint between different methods of neurostimulation. Finally, we introduce technological and clinical innovations that are being explored to optimize neurostimulation techniques for the treatment of pain, including multidisciplinary efforts between neuroscience research and clinical treatment that may refine the efficacy of neurostimulation based on its underlying mechanisms.

Over 20% of people worldwide suffer from chronic pain disorders (Goldberg and McGee, 2011). In response to an unmet need for effective pain management, opioid drugs have been widely adopted. Opioid drugs harness the body’s endogenous opioid receptors, which are dispersed throughout the central and peripheral nervous system to modulate pain perception. While prescription opioids often provide effective pain relief, they have undesirable and potentially dangerous side effects including abuse liability and respiratory depression. Their contribution to the ongoing opioid epidemic and the enormous negative impact of chronic pain underscore the need for safe and effective pain therapies (Manchikanti et al., 2012). Neurostimulation therapies are potential alternatives for managing medically refractory pain. However, these therapies are hampered by inconsistent pain relief across patients and diminishing analgesic effects over time (Kumar K. et al., 1998).

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