Time is the most valuable thing that we have in our lives, and we never seem to have enough of it. Whether you’re trying to scratch out more time, or just making the most of what you have, there’s no denying that being able to reverse time would be handy.
In April 2016, Waseem Qasim, a professor of cell and gene therapy, was intrigued by a new scientific paper that described a revolutionary way to manipulate DNA: basic gene editing. The articlepublished by David Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, described a version of Crispr gene editing that allowed for more precise changes than ever before.
The forces that are fragmenting supply chains are also creating historic opportunities for innovation and growth, writes Alex Capri.
In the 1995 post-apocalyptic action film “Waterworld” Earth’s polar ice caps have completely melted, and the sea level has risen to over 5 miles, covering nearly all of the land. Astronomers have uncovered a pair of planets that are true “water worlds,” unlike any planet found in our solar system.
Slightly larger than Earth, they don’t have the density of rock. And yet, they are denser than the gas-giant outer planets orbiting our Sun. So, what are they made of? The best answer is that these exoplanets have global oceans at least 500 times deeper than the average depth of Earth’s oceans, which simply are a wet veneer on a rocky ball.
Continue reading “NASA Discovers Pair of Super-Earths With 1,000-Mile-Deep Oceans” »
Longtermism extends this thinking to what impartiality demands in the temporal sense: equal concern for people’s wellbeing wherever they are in time. If we care about the wellbeing of unborn people in the distant future, we can’t outright dismiss potential far-off threats to humanity—especially since there may be truly staggering numbers of future people.
How Should We Think About Future Generations and Risky Ethical Choices?
An explicit focus on the wellbeing of future people unearths difficult questions that tend to get glossed over in traditional discussions of altruism and intergenerational justice.
Do we live in a matrix? Is our universe a metaverse in the next universe up? What is the code of reality? Is this a simulated multiverse? Can we cheat death and live indefinitely long? These are some of the questions we discuss in this recent talk.
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Sometimes, when we criticize transhumanism here on Futurisms, we are accused of being Luddites, of being anti-technology, of being anti-progress. Our colleague Charles Rubin ably responded to such criticisms five years ago in a little post he called “The ‘Anti-Progress’ Slur.”
Over the last two decades, scientists have postulated several theories that has helped to explain how we acquire motor skills, and the decisions we make in order to execute motor skills to navigate our environment. Additionally, the advent of neuroimaging techniques, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have contributed significantly to our understanding of movement by providing possible neural correlates and processes that underpin various types of motor function. However, techniques such as EEG and fMRI are highly susceptible to motion artifacts during recording, which limits the range of movements that can be performed during scanning. This limitation impacts on the translational value of such findings in real-world applications.
To overcome the limitations of traditional neuroimaging paradigms, second generation neuroimaging devices such as portable EEG and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be used to study a broader range of dynamic movements and central changes associated with physical exercise. Both EEG and fNIRS can be applied concurrently with a motor task or exercise to understand its associated central response, while the application of non-invasive brain stimulation can help to establish causality by experimentally-induced facilitation or inhibition of specific neural networks.
In this research topic, we aim to showcase recent advances in the use of neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques to understand motor control processes and central adaptations to exercise across the lifespan and disease conditions. Submissions that are Original Research, Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis, Literature review, Mini-review, Methods, and Perspective articles will be considered. Topics that cover, but not limited to, the following to domains are encouraged:
Brad Sutton, Technical Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center and Abel Bliss Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered this Frontiers in Miniature Brain Machinery lecture January 26, 2022. Jennifer Walters, MBM Trainee and PhD candidate in Neuroscience, provided an introduction. The Q&A portion of this video was cut off due to technical difficulties during the Zoom recording.
For more information on the lecture and Brad Sutton: https://minibrain.beckman.illinois.edu/2021/12/02/brad-sutto…s-lecture/
“In their world, everything is just a blur,” says Healy. The starfish’s temporal perception may be so slow because it is an herbivore – it doesn’t need to strike fast to get a meal. A tasty coral polyp will be in the same place even if it takes the starfish more than a second to find it. A marine predator such as a shark, on the other hand, needs to see faster to catch fish, which are constantly moving.
On average, flying animals detect light changes at a faster rate than land-bound animals, likely because they need to be able to sense changes around them quickly to avoid collisions. “If you fly, you see faster,” says Healy.
Healy’s research found that dragonflies can perceive changes in their environment the fastest, detecting 300 flashes per second – nearly five times faster than humans and 400 times faster than starfish. “It’s almost like bullet time in The Matrix,” says Healy, describing dragonflies’ time perception.
