Lifeboat Foundation

Using DNA evidence, scientists have shown that brain clot samples from people who have had ischemic stroke often contain mouth bacteria.

IBM’s biologically motivated machine learning accelerates brain research.

If you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, be mindful of what you eat, the state’s Department of Health states in an advisory published last week. Officials are ramping up efforts to warn tourists about rat lungworm disease, an illness caused by a parasite that can infest human brains. The advisory follows an alert from the CDC that confirmed three new rat lungworm cases all linked to Hawaii.

Two studies are shedding light on the links between the gut, the brain, and autism. The research reveals how gut problems can be triggered by the same gene mutations associated with autism, and a study shows how a fecal transplant from humans with autism can promote autism-like behaviors in mice.

More often than not, we fall into the trap of trying to predict and anticipate the future, forgetting that the future is up to us to envision and create. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

But how, exactly, do we create a “good” future? What does such a future look like to begin with?

In Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution, Tom Lombardo analytically deconstructs how we can flourish in the flow of evolution and create a prosperous future for humanity. Scientifically informed, the books taps into themes that are constructive and profound, from both eastern and western philosophies.

Continue reading “Purposeful Evolution: Creating an Ethical, Prosperous Future” »

Tiny selenium particles could have a therapeutic effect on ischemic brain strokes by promoting the recovery of brain damage. Pharmacologists, including Alireza Mashaghi from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research discovered that selenium nanoparticles inhibit molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the loss of brain cells after a stroke. The results were published in Nature Scientific Reports in April.

Nanoparticles against strokes

An ischemic stroke happens when a supplying blood vessel to the brain is narrowed or obstructed. As a result, the brain gets too little blood. “This lack of blood can lead to brain tissue damage due to cellular toxicity, inflammation and cell death,” Mashaghi explains. “This will, in turn, lead to brain dysfunction and neurological complaints such as numbness, vision problems, dizziness and severed headache.” Ischemic stroke accounts for 87% of all strokes and is a significant cause of death. “So far, no neuroprotective agents have been shown to produce any measurable improvement in health in cerebral stroke cases. Our results now demonstrated that selenium nanoparticles inhibit molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the loss of brain cells after a stroke.”

Continue reading “Nanoparticles can aid in stroke therapy” »

My name is Sarah Lim and I am the US Transhumanist Party’s Singaporean ambassador. I have been repeatedly trying to reach you over the course of the last few months, but I understand that you are a very busy man who’s doing a lot of great things and propelling the Singularity forward.

Like you and Andres Gomez Emilsson, I’m in the very small minority of transhumanists with an avid interest in non-local consciousness and psi research.

I’ve watched your video, “Wild-Ass Sh*t: Consciousness and Psi from a Euryphysics Perspective” four times in a row, to date. I’ve read up extensively on the PEAR Lab experiments, and I’m a friend of Jim Matlock’s as well. I’ve also read and re-read “Physicists Rediscover Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields … and my Morphic Pilot Wave …” five times, to date.

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Ben Goertzel” »

https://paper.li/e-1437691924

Everything is backwards now, like out there is the real world and this is the dream. (James Cameron’s Avatar, 2009)

Over recent years, considerable scholarly attention and mass media speculation has been paid to the emergence of the figure of the posthuman – a vision of augmented human that has undergone radical transformation as a result of new biotechnological and informatic technologies. This posthumanity lives simultaneously in the world of the virtual and the biological, cast concurrently as the future of a biomedically enhanced humanity and a figuration for overcoming the identity politics of the past. Some are arguing that we will eventually leave the human ‘as we know it’ behind, in a techno-modified, cognitively enhanced evolution, while in critical theory, the posthuman is being lauded as an ontology through which the boundary structures of the EuroWestern legacy of humanism can be dismantled.

Continue reading “I See You: the posthuman subject and spaces of virtuality – Rebecca Bishop” »

Practice results in better learning. Consider learning a musical instrument, for example: the more one practices, the better one will be able to learn to play. The same holds true for cognition and visual perception: with practice, a person can learn to see better—and this is the case for both healthy adults and patients who experience vision loss because of a traumatic brain injury or stroke.

The problem with learning, however, is that it often takes a lot of training. Finding the time can be especially difficult for patients with brain injuries who may, for instance, need to re-train their brains to learn to process visual cues.