Lifeboat Foundation

Professor Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist from Lancaster University and Professor Emanuel Bylund, a linguist from Stellenbosch University and Stockholm University, have discovered that people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.

The finding, published in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology: General’, reports the first evidence of cognitive flexibility in people who speak two languages.

Bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and, often, unconsciously — a phenomenon called code-switching.

Continue reading “This is why the language you speak can change how you perceive time” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oLamZ1RbTrM

It’s a tight race between the U.S. and China for who will build the next supercomputer, set to be as powerful as the human brain.

The head-banging birds seem healthy, but deposits in their brain could signify damage.

Click on photo to start video.

A sleep expert explains what happens to your body and brain if you don’t get sleep.

So will we ever be able to do this or is this just a pipe dream? Plenty has been written about the future and what we may be able to do one day, but not much attention gets paid to the hurdles we have yet to overcome. Forget all the techno-babble, philosophy, and transhumanism – how close is this brave new world to our present time?

“Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in a bucket.”

Continue reading “Humans Could Soon Become Immortal, But The Cost May Be Horrifying. Would You Do It?” »

Summary: Researchers discover what may be the key to stopping uncontrolled inflammation and the damage it causes in a multitude of chronic diseases. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

A discovery by researchers at the University of Queensland (UQ) could be the key to stopping the damage caused by uncontrolled inflammation in a range of chronic diseases including Alzheimer’s and liver disease.

Queensland scientists have uncovered how an inflammation process automatically switches off in healthy cells, and are now investigating ways to stop it when it runs amok. The finding may lead to a way to turn off chronic low-grade inflammation without interfering with the body’s natural defenses against infection.

Continue reading “Researchers discover off-switch to inflammation machine at the root of our chronic diseases” »

This image shows AAV therapy affecting pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus. Credit: Blake Albright, Asokan Lab Gene therapies promise to revolutionize the treatment of many diseases, including neurological diseases such as ALS. But the small viruses that deliver therapeutic genes can have adverse side effects at high doses. UNC School of Medicine researchers have now found a structure on these viruses that makes them better at crossing from the bloodstream into the brain – a key factor for administering gene therapies at lower doses for treating brain and spinal disorders. This structural…

Maybe it’s because Robert Lepage is touring The Far Side of the Moon to the Adelaide Festival. Or that a new Star Trek is on TV. Or maybe it’s because I feel like the only person alive who really – really – liked Luc Besson’s Valerian, but space, fantasies of the final frontier, and the real voyages that human beings may yet dare to make into it are very much on my mind. This week saw a number of news items concerning our tentative outreach to the stars that, for all their frustrating revelations, might yet prick the aspiration for space missions back into the popular policy consciousness…

#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.

The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.

It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.

Continue reading “It’s transhuman life, but not as we know it” »