Lifeboat Foundation

In order to understand what another person thinks and how he or she will behave, people must adopt someone else’s perspective. This ability is referred to as “theory of mind.” Until recently, researchers were at odds concerning the age at which children are able to do such perspective-taking. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS), University College London, and the Social Neuroscience Lab Berlin shed new light on this question in a study now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the study, four-year-olds seem to be able to understand what others think. The study reports that this unique ability emerges around four years of age because of the maturation of a specific brain network that enables this. Younger children are capable of predicting others’ behavior based on what they think, but the study shows that this prediction of behavior relies on a different brain network. The brain seems to have two separate systems to take another person’s perspective, and these mature at different rates.

The researchers investigated these relations in a sample of three- to four-year-old children with the help of a video clips that show a cat chasing a mouse. The cat watches the mouse hiding in one of two boxes. While the cat is away, the mouse sneaks over to the other box, unnoticed by the cat. Thus, when the cat returns, it should still believe that the mouse is in the first location.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany has confirmed more than 1,100 cases of the new coronavirus but — so far — just two deaths, far fewer than other European countries with a similar number of reported infections.

Experts said Monday that rapid testing as the outbreak unfolded meant Germany has probably diagnosed a much larger proportion of those who have been infected, including younger patients who are less likely to develop serious complications.

That’s given authorities more chance of containing the virus, and more time to prepare for it.

The two tech titans funded an effort to bring metagenomic sequencing and software to poor countries. Now, it’s helping trace the spread of the new coronavirus.

From Consumer Reports, what you need to know about the newer blood thinners, including how to take these meds safely and effectively.

This episode #20 of my “Pessimistic guide to Anti-Aging Research” titled “Healthspan First, Lifespan –Distant Second”.

When we are dreaming of physical immortality, we really mean not one but two very different immortalities: the one for our body, and quite another for our spirit. The body permits essentially any kind of interventions, modifications, replacements or even transformations for the sake of staying healthy and young indefinitely. In contrast, the spirit absolutely demands the preservation of our unique personalities and memories and, therefore, does not make allowances for treatments that violate this condition.

Giacomo Grasselli — a senior Italian government health official who is coordinating the network of intensive care units in Lombardy — explains the “critical” situation in Italy, brought about by the Covid-19 outbreak (Subscribe: https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe)

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Continue reading “Coronavirus ‘worse than a bomb’ on Italy, says doctor coordinating response” »

The Earth, solar system, the entire Milky Way and the few thousand galaxies closest to us move in a vast “bubble” that is 250 million light years in diameter, where the average density of matter is half as high as for the rest of the universe. This is the hypothesis advanced by a theoretical physicist from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) to solve a conundrum that has been splitting the scientific community for a decade: At what speed is the universe expanding? Until now, at least two independent calculation methods have arrived at two values that are different by about 10% with a deviation that is statistically irreconcilable. This new approach, which is set out in the journal Physics Letters B, erases this divergence without making use of any “new physics.”

The universe has been expanding since the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago—a proposition first made by the Belgian canon and physicist Georges Lemaître (1894−1966), and first demonstrated by Edwin Hubble (1889−1953). The American astronomer discovered in 1929 that every galaxy is pulling away from us, and that the most distant galaxies are moving the most quickly. This suggests that there was a time in the past when all the galaxies were located at the same spot, a time that can only correspond to the Big Bang. This research gave rise to the Hubble-Lemaître law, including the Hubble constant (H0), which denotes the universe’s rate of expansion. The best H0 estimates currently lie around 70 (km/s)/Mpc (meaning that the universe is expanding 70 kilometers a second more quickly every 3.26 million light years). The problem is that there are two conflicting methods of calculation.

Coronavirus Spread Spurs Debate Over Which Health Workers Need To Be Quarantined : Shots — Health News Should “potential exposure” by a health worker to someone with coronavirus be enough to send that worker home for two weeks of self-quarantine? Health systems have begun debating relative risks.

This month, an international team put all of those ingredients together, turning theory into reality.

The three labs, scattered across Padova, Italy, Zurich, Switzerland, and Southampton, England, collaborated to create a fully self-controlled, hybrid artificial-biological neural network that communicated using biological principles, but over the internet.

The three-neuron network, linked through artificial synapses that emulate the real thing, was able to reproduce a classic neuroscience experiment that’s considered the basis of learning and memory in the brain. In other words, artificial neuron and synapse “chips” have progressed to the point where they can actually use a biological neuron intermediary to form a circuit that, at least partially, behaves like the real thing.