Lifeboat Foundation

You may not realise it when your alarm clock forces you into a bleary-eyed stupor first thing in the morning, but there’s actually a complex chemical process going on inside your brain as you wake up. And scientists now think they’ve identified the part of the brain that ends periods of light sleep and brings us into a state of wakefulness.

Researchers from Switzerland focussed their attention on a specific neural circuit located between the brain’s hypothalamus and thalamus. By stimulating this circuit with pulses of light in a group of mice, the academics could prompt rapid awakenings from sleep and then cause prolonged wakefulness.

Why should we be excited about knowing more about how we get yanked out of our regular sleep patterns? The researchers say it could ultimately help those who are trapped in a long-term coma or vegetative state, and on the flip side, could also help those with sleep disorders, or at least give doctors a better idea of why they aren’t sleeping correctly.

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Here are 18 predictions that finally came true in 2015, from an actual working hoverboard to cyborgised brains.

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It’s leading to a different way of thinking about computing.

This year’s Detroit auto show is proving that autonomous driving is no longer a techie’s pipe dream. Even holdout Akio Toyoda has finally joined the parade. The self-driving car is coming.

But behind that development is an even more profound change: artificial intelligence (also known as “deep learning”) has gone mainstream. The autonomous driving craze is just the most visible manifestation of the fact that computers now have the capacity to look, learn and react to complex situations as well or better than humans. It’s leading to a profoundly different way of thinking about computing. Instead of writing millions of lines of code to anticipate every situation, these new applications ingest vast amounts of data, recognize patterns, and “learn” from them, much as the human brain does.

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Imagine: What happens when you’re in 2027 on the job competing with other AI; and there is so much information exposed to you that you’re unable to scan & capture all of it onto your various devices and personal robot. And, the non-intrusive nanobot for brain enhancement is still years away. Do you finally take a few hundred dollars & get the latest chip implant requiring a tricky surgery for your brain or wait for the nanobot? These are questions that folks will have to assess for themselves; and this could actually streamline/ condition society into a singularity culture. https://lnkd.in/bTVAjhb

A mom pushes a stroller down the sidewalk while Skyping. A family of four sits at the dinner table plugged into their cell phones with the TV blaring in the background. You get through two pages in a book before picking up your laptop and scrolling through a bottomless stream of new content.

Information technology has created a hyper-connected, over-stimulated, distracted and alienated world. We’ve been living long enough with internet-connected computers and other mobile devices to have begun to take it for granted.

Continue reading “Why Digital Overload Is Now Central to the Human Condition” »

This is excellent news for Epilepsy.

Epilepsy, a disorder in which nerve cell activity in the brain is disturbed, causing seizures, is the fourth most common neurological problem, following only migraine, stroke and Alzheimer’s. There is no cure for epilepsy, but there are a variety of treatment options. The disease is estimated to affect 2.2 million people in the U.S., with 150,000 people developing the condition each year.

Personalized medicine Scientists at AES discussed how new technologies, such as gene editing using CRISPR-Cas9, and next-generation sequencing, are empowering them to take a new crack at the human genome and find new ways to diagnose and treat epilepsy.

Continue reading “Genomics, Cannabidiols Drive Epilepsy Research” »

Gerd predicts that machines will have the same power of a human brain by 2025.

By the year 2025, machines will have the same power as the human brain and in 2051 they will have the power of the entire global population. Does is sound far-fetched? It is certainly a grand claim, but who better to make these kinds of observations than Gerd Leonhard, Futurist, Keynote Speaker, Author and CEO of The Futures Agency.

This was one of the many observations Mr Leonhard spoke to The Malta Independent about ahead of his Keynote Address for The Economist at their ‘The World in 2016 Gala Dinner’ tonight at the Hilton, St Julian’s; where every year they invite experts and innovators from all over the world to share their ‘predictions’ for the coming year.

Continue reading “Machines ‘will have the power of a human brain by 2025’ — Gerd Leonhard” »

Max Tegmark about his and others’ attempts to formulate a mathematical theory of consciousness. I find this very interesting, though I try to not think about it too much… I wrote some words about this here http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2014/05/consciousness-and-p…ratch.html

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This is an interesting conjecture.

We may be able to keep our gut in check after all. That’s the tantalizing finding from a new study published today that reveals a way that mice—and potentially humans—can control the makeup and behavior of their gut microbiome. Such a prospect upends the popular notion that the complex ecosystem of germs residing in our guts essentially acts as our puppet master, altering brain biochemistry even as it tends to our immune system, wards off infection and helps us break down our supersized burger and fries.

In a series of elaborate experiments researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital discovered that mouse poop is chock full of tiny, noncoding RNAs called microRNAs from their gastrointestinal (GI) tracts and that these biomolecules appear to shape and regulate the microbiome. “We’ve known about how microbes can influence your health for a few years now and in a way we’ve always suspected it’s a two-way process, but never really pinned it down that well,” says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, not involved with the new study. “This [new work] explains quite nicely the two-way interaction between microbes and us, and it shows the relationship going the other way—which is fascinating,” says Spector, author of The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss Is Already in Your Gut.

Continue reading “Does our Microbiome Control Us or Do We Control It?” »

Bioengineers and cognitive scientists have developed the first portable, 64-channel wearable brain activity monitoring system that’s comparable to state-of-the-art equipment found in research laboratories.

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