Lifeboat Foundation

A leading neuroscientist claims that a pong-playing clump of about a million neurons is “sentient”. What does that mean? Why did they teach a lab-grown brain to play pong? To study biological self-organization at the root of life, intelligence, and consciousness. And, according to their website, “to see what happens.”

CORRECTIONS/Clarifications:
- The cells aren’t directly frozen in liquid nitrogen — they are put in vials and stored in liquid nitrogen: https://www.atcc.org/products/pcs-201-010
- The sentience of some invertebrates, like octopuses, is generally agreed upon. Prominent scientists affirmed non-human consciousness in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness: https://philiplow.foundation/consciousness/

Continue reading “Lab-Grown Brain Learns Pong — Is This Biological Neural Network ‘Sentient’?” »

Growing brains can be a tricky process, but growing ones that can make muscles move? That’s an incredible feat. Here’s how scientists did it.

How Close Are We to Farming Human Body Parts? — https://youtu.be/oRHxX9OW9ow.

Continue reading “This Lab-Grown Brain Made a Muscle TWITCH, Here’s How” »

Interesting results from the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft — molecules needed for life were found in samples from the asteroid Ryugu.

The mission will now continue until at least 2031.

Continue reading “RNA component found in asteroid sample” »

Stanford’s Alpaca AI performs similarly to the astonishing ChatGPT on many tasks – but it’s built on an open-source language model and cost less than US$600 to train up. It seems these godlike AIs are already frighteningly cheap and easy to replicate.

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Just a couple of years earlier, in 1963, New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equation for a rotating black hole. This was a “game changer for black holes,” Giorgi noted in a public lecture given at the virtual 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians. Rotating black holes were much more realistic astrophysical objects than the non-spinning black holes that Karl Schwarzschild had solved the equations for.

“Physicists really had believed for decades that the black hole region was an artifact of symmetry that was appearing in the mathematical construction of this object but not in the real world,” Giorgi said in the talk. Kerr’s solution helped establish the existence of black holes.

In a nearly 1,000-page paper, Giorgi and colleagues used a type of “proof by contradiction” to show that Kerr black holes that rotate slowly (meaning they have a small angular momentum relative to their mass) are mathematically stable. The technique entails assuming the opposite of the statement to be proved, then discovering an inconsistency. That shows that the assumption is false. The work is currently undergoing peer review. “It’s a long paper, so it’s going to take some time,” Giorgi says.

What exactly is light—and what is it made of? It’s an age-old question that dates back to antiquity, and one of the most important investigations undertaken by scientists looking to understand the nature of reality.

Researchers at Texas A&M University have developed the first molecular therapeutic for Angelman syndrome to advance into clinical development.

In a new article, published today in Science Translational Medicine, Dr. Scott Dindot, an associate professor and EDGES Fellow in the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences’ (VMBS) Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, and his team share the process through which they developed this novel therapeutic candidate, also known as 4.4.PS.L, or GTX-102. Dindot is also the executive director of molecular genetics at Ultragenyx, which is leading the development of GTX-102.

Angelman syndrome (AS) is a devastating, rare neurogenetic disorder that affects approximately 1 in 15,000 live births per year; the disorder is triggered by a loss of function of the maternal UBE3A gene in the brain, causing developmental delay, absent speech, movement or balance disorder, and seizures.

(CNN) — Startup Relativity Space sent what it’s calling the “world’s first 3D-printed rocket” toward space on Wednesday, vaulting it into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Though, it suffered an engine issue after launch and failed to reach orbit.

Terran 1, a 110-foot-tall (33.5-meter) vehicle designed to haul lightweight satellites into orbital space, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida’s eastern coast at just before 11:30 pm ET. The rocket, powered by super-chilled methane and oxygen, burned a bright blue-green against the night sky.

After the first stage of the rocket — the bottommost portion of the rocket that gives the initial thrust at liftoff — expended its fuel, it detached from the rocket’s upper stage. But the engine meant to propel that portion appeared to ignite only briefly, leaving the rocket without enough power to reach orbit.