Lifeboat Foundation

Plants do have sentience they just need less to survive. Just look at the sci fi character groot. They may not seem like they are sentient but they show it in different ways because they are plants, not humans. Essentially they even give off radiation aswell their biology is so advanced that even today there are still mysteries unsolved. Many energy-sensitive people can feel their energy they emit and can intuitively know their needs. Even native Americans have even learned that they are superorganisms on earth and have found ways to bring their rain through a series of metaphysical triggers. The native Americans advanced wetware and spirit binds to the plants then allows for even a psychic link talking to the plant even on their level. The earth itself is said to be a superorganism. A lot of times on plant can be a psychic link between their vast universe of understanding but it takes plant intuitive people. Many legends have risen from plants being sentient even in modern-day. In my opinion, plants are just as complex as human beings because they require less energy to function. There is a comic in the series poison ivy that even made plant children in humanoid beings. I think this is a definite possibility just it is advanced wetware. But as we learn more about the quantum mechanical realm we will discover that plants may be more advanced than even our own biology. That why often we need to respect nature because it is actually sentient and we evolve with it. Someday we really could be tree people just it would take a long time to eventually make real. But it is a very real possibility.

For the first time plants have been recorded making sounds when stressed. The sounds differed when they were injured or thirsty, a finding that could help farmers.

On 13 December, Amazon Prime will air the fourth season of The Expanse, a hardboiled space drama renowned for its working-class characters and real-world space physics. Showrunner Naren Shankar is part of the reason the science checks out. The veteran writer and producer for programs such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, and the police procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has a doctorate in applied physics and electrical engineering.

Shankar chatted with about why he feels it’s important to have a realistic sci-fi show, and how television work is like the scientific peer-review process.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The much anticipated pickup truck from Tesla can tow 14,000 pounds, and the base model is priced under $40,000. How does it look? Triangular.

In mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, the investigational drug candidates known as CMS121 and J147 improve memory and slow the degeneration of brain cells. Now, Salk researchers have shown how these compounds can also slow aging in healthy older mice, blocking the damage to brain cells that normally occurs during aging and restoring the levels of specific molecules to those seen in younger brains.

The research, published last month in the journal eLife, suggests that the drug candidates may be useful for treating a broader array of conditions and points out a new pathway that links normal aging to Alzheimer’s disease.

“This study further validated these two compounds not only as Alzheimer’s drug candidates but also as potentially more widely useful for their anti-aging effects,” says Pamela Maher, a senior staff scientist at Salk and a co-corresponding author of the new paper.

Summary: Researchers reveal the right homologue of the Broca’s area plays a major role in the processing of music.

Source: Max Planck Institute.

Vincent Cheung, along with Angela Friederici, has been investigating non-local dependencies in music and trying to determine how the human brain processes them. In language and music, dependencies are conceptual threads that bind two things together. Non-local dependencies bind non-adjacent items. For example, in pop music, the second instance of a verse, following a chorus, would have a non-local dependency with the first instance of the verse. Experientially, it is clear to us that we are hearing a sequence that we have heard before. According to Cheung, composers use such devices to build up our expectations and elicit strong emotional responses to the music. But how does the brain recognize these patterns and what does this have to do with Paul Broca?

Using a targeted gene epigenome editing approach in the developing mouse brain, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers reversed one gene mutation that leads to the genetic disorder WAGR syndrome, which causes intellectual disability and obesity in people. This specific editing was unique in that it changed the epigenome—how the genes are regulated—without changing the actual genetic code of the gene being regulated.

The researchers found that this gene, C11orf46, is an important regulator during brain development. Specifically, it turns on and off the direction-sensing proteins that help guide the long fibers growing out of newly formed neurons responsible for sending electrical messages, helping them form into a bundle, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Failure to properly form this bundled structure, known as the corpus callosum, can lead to conditions such as intellectual disability, autism or other brain developmental disorders.

“Although this work is early, these findings suggest that we may be able to develop future epigenome editing therapies that could help reshape the neural connections in the brain, and perhaps prevent developmental disorders of the brain from occurring,” says Atsushi Kamiya, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Yoshua Bengio is known as one of the “three musketeers” of deep learning, the type of artificial intelligence (AI) that dominates the field today.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is credited with making key breakthroughs in the use of neural networks — and just as importantly, with persevering with the work through the long cold AI winter of the late 1980s and the 1990s, when most people thought that neural networks were a dead end.

He was rewarded for his perseverance in 2018, when he and his fellow musketeers (Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun) won the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.

No one has ever seen an active asteroid up close like this.

“Among Bennu’s many surprises, the particle ejections sparked our curiosity, and we’ve spent the last several months investigating this mystery,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. “This is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge of how asteroids behave.”

The researchers are trying to figure out what is causing these “ejection events.”

Continue reading “NASA Baffled: Asteroid Bennu Keeps Spitting Out Small Rocks” »

A ketone-supplemented diet may protect neurons from death during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to research in mice recently published in JNeurosci.

Early in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, the brain becomes over excited, potentially through the loss of inhibitory, or GABAergic, interneurons that keep other neurons from signaling too much. Because interneurons require more energy compared to other neurons, they may be more susceptible to dying when they encounter the Alzheimer’s disease protein amyloid beta. Amyloid beta has been shown to damage mitochondria — the metabolic engine for cells — by interfering with SIRT3, a protein that preserves mitochondrial functions and protects neurons.

Cheng et al. genetically reduced levels of SIRT3 in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Mice with low levels of SIRT3 experienced a much higher mortality rate, more violent seizures, and increased interneuron death compared to the mice from the standard Alzheimer’s disease model and control mice. However, the mice with reduced levels of SIRT3 experienced fewer seizures and were less likely to die when they ate a diet rich in ketones, a specific type of fatty acid. The diet also increased levels of SIRT3 in the mice.