Lifeboat Foundation

Connecting human brains to computers could provide the biggest single upgrade to human intelligence since our species evolved. Brain-computer interfaces are coming. But are we ready?

Stem cells in the brain can divide and mature into neurons participating in various brain functions, including memory. In a paper scientists have discovered that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid is a key signal for neural stem cell renewal.

The ancient Greek aphorism panta rhei means “everything flows”, a phrase used by philosophers to describe the constant flux and interplay between the past and renewal. A recent paper lends this relationship a whole new meaning: a team of researchers headed by Professor Magdalena Götz and their collaborators from the LMU (Professor Benedikt Grothe, Chair of Neurobiology) and the Henrich-Heine University Düsseldorf have discovered that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid is a key signal for neural stem cell renewal.

“Neural stem cells in the brain can divide and mature into neurons and this process plays important roles in various regions of the brain – including olfactory sense and memory,” explains Magdalena Götz, Head of LMU Department of Physiological Genomics and Director of the Institute for Stem Cell Research at Helmholtz Zentrum München. “These cells are located in what is known as the neurogenic stem cell niche one of which is located at the walls of the lateral ventricles, where they are in contact with circulating cerebrospinal fluid.”

Important new study to track — “The team will start recruiting the first of 1,000 low-income mothers next week…Of that 1,000, roughly half will be randomly selected to receive an unconditional $333 a month, while the others will form a control group that will receive $20. The money, which is completely unconditional, will be loaded onto a pre-paid debit card every month for 40 months, on the date of the child’s birthday. The hypothesis is that this steady stream of payments will make a positive difference in the cognitive and emotional development of the children whose mothers receive it”

___ Does growing up poor harm brain development? (The Economist): “Plenty of evidence suggests that growing up poor, living through these kinds of scrapes, has a detrimental impact on child development. Children from rich families tend to have better language and memory skills than those from poor families. More.

New York, May 16 (IANS) Older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who indulge in exergames — video games that are also a form of exercise — may experience significant improvement in complex thinking and memory skills, according to a study.

By combining virtual reality with a brain-based computer interface, researchers hope to create more immersive, lifelike experiences for gaming and health care applications.

The University of Southern California is developing the means to control and direct radio frequency energy to destroy cancer tumors…

A new technique from the University of Southern California uses radio-frequency waves to burn away tumors as doctor’s monitor the procedure in real-time.

Cancer cells, by definition, are abnormal cells that divide with abandon and have the potential to spread throughout and wreak havoc on your vital organs and tissues. But what if you could tell those same troublesome cells to stop misbehaving? Israeli scientists think they’ve found a way to do just that.

A group of researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, led by Professor Varda Shoshan-Barmatz, PhD, have developed a molecule that prevents cancer cells from growing and turns them into normal, non-cancerous cells. This unique approach is based on siRNA (small interfering ribonucleic acid), a molecule that turns off a protein, VDAC1, that helps get energy to malignant cells. By targeting VDAC1, Shoshan-Barmatz and her team have essentially figured out how to make cancer cells start acting like regular ones.

So far, in vitro and mice models have suggested that this treatment might be effective for lung cancer, triple negative breast cancer, and glioblastoma (the type of brain tumor that John McCain is currently battling). But the applications might be even broader, and similar treatments might be one day used to combat an even wider variety of cancers.

Continue reading “Israeli Scientists Uncover Therapy That Converts Cancer Cells Into Normal Ones” »

Learning new things would be so much easier if we could just download them into our brains, like in The Matrix. Now, biologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have pulled off something similar – at least on a gastropod level – by effectively transferring a memory from a trained snail into the mind of an untrained one. The experiment could eventually lead to new treatments for restoring memory in Alzheimer’s patients or to reduce traumatic memories.

The researchers studied a species of marine snail known as Aplysia. These are commonly used as animal models for neuroscience because the cellular and molecular processes at work are relatively similar to humans, but they have a far more manageable number of neurons – about 20,000, compared to our 100 billion.

Stem cell technology has advanced so much that scientists can grow miniature versions of human brains — called organoids, or mini-brains if you want to be cute about it — in the lab, but medical ethicists are concerned about recent developments in this field involving the growth of these tiny brains in other animals. Those concerns are bound to become more serious after the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience starting November 11 in Washington, D.C., where two teams of scientists plan to present previously unpublished research on the unexpected interaction between human mini-brains and their rat and mouse hosts.

In the new papers, according to STAT, scientists will report that the organoids survived for extended periods of time — two months in one case — and even connected to lab animals’ circulatory and nervous systems, transferring blood and nerve signals between the host animal and the implanted human cells. This is an unprecedented advancement for mini-brain research.

“We are entering totally new ground here,” Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, told STAT. “The science is advancing so rapidly, the ethics can’t keep up.”

Continue reading “Human Mini-Brains Growing Inside Rat Bodies Are Starting to Integrate” »