Lifeboat Foundation

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, has written a new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (Macmillan), which explores how our lives may be impacted by the use of brain-computer interfaces and neural monitoring devices.

Farahany argues that the development and use of neurotech presents a challenge to our current understanding of human rights. Devices designed to measure, record, and influence our mental processes—used by us or on us—may infringe on our rights to mental privacy, freedom of thought, and mental self-determination. She calls this collection of freedoms the right to cognitive liberty. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Farahany recently about the future and present of neurotech and how to weigh its promises—enhanced capabilities, for instance, including bionics and prosthetics and even a third arm —against its potential to interfere with people’s mental sovereignty.

Author, Nita FarahanyMerritt Chesson.

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Eukaryotes generate the energy for survival through cellular respiration in mitochondria by a process known as the oxidative phosphorylation. In this process, nutrients and oxygen are converted into a chemical form of energy: ATP. This is achieved with a proton gradient built up by the electron transport chain inside mitochondria.

Continue reading “Exploring a massive supercomplex in mitochondria comprising all four respiratory complexes” »

A study finds that fruit from the cocklebur plant, an invasive weed, may have anti-aging and anti-inflammatory capabilities and could potentially be used in skin care.

Using NASA’s Chandra spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has performed X-ray observations of the Cigar Galaxy. Results of the observational campaign, presented March 16 on the pre-print repository arXiv, deliver crucial information regarding diffuse emission from this galaxy.

Discovered in 1,774, Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82, or M82) is a starburst galaxy located some 11.73 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a size of about 40,800 light years and is one of the closest starburst galaxies to Earth.

Observations of the Cigar Galaxy have found that it experiences a large-scale galactic wind at various wavelengths, for instance, in hard X-rays above a few keV. This superwind appears to be concentrated in the galaxy’s two high surface brightness regions or clumps, and is fueled by energy released by supernovae within the clumps that occur at a rate of about one every ten years. Previous Chandra studies of this galaxy have detected bright X-ray binaries that dominate the hard X-ray band and revealed that there is residual diffuse emission surrounding the starburst disk.

Chatbots are all the rage right now, and everyone wants a piece of the action. Google has Bard, Microsoft has Bing Chat, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is practically synonymous with AI at this point. But what if you don’t want to rely on a cloud service for your chatbot? We’ve got a ChatGPT-like AI you can download — an Alpaca.

AI can now generate videos simply from your description of what you want to see. It’s like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion for video.

A new study finds that AI tools could more quickly handle at least half of the tasks that auditors, interpreters and writers do now.

Follow our step-by-step video guide for growing cerebral organoids, or brain organoids, from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). We’ll walk you through embryoid body formation, induction, expansion, and organoid maturation.

0:35 — Embryoid Body Formation.
2:57 — Induction.
4:07 — Expansion.
6:42 — Organoid Maturation.

Continue reading “How to Grow Cerebral Organoids from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells” »

Editor’s note: “Quantum Computing Stocks Offer Life-Changing Wealth Potential for Long-Term Investors” was previously published in January 2023. It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.

As a long-term investor during periods of market volatility like we’re seeing today, there’s one thing I always do.