Lifeboat Foundation

“We don’t yet understand the mechanisms involved — it could be an increased inflammatory response, direct brain modulation by the parasite, or even reverse causation where aggressive individuals tend to have more cats or eat more undercooked meat”.

The study looked at 358 adults, and found that chronic latent infection with T. gondii is associated with intermittent explosive disorder and increased aggression. Antibodies were collected between 1991 and 2008.

University of Chicago researchers say a parasite commonly spread from cats to humans may play a role in impulsive aggression. Approximately 16 percent of those in a “other psychiatric conditions” organisation had a infection, though reported identical exam scores in charge to a healthy group.

Continue reading “A Brain Parasite Might Be Causing Road Rage” »

Scientists and researchers at HRL Laboratories have created a brain stimulation device that can teach users how to fly a plane like an expert.

New research shows that teleportation doesn’t break our brains. In fact, our brains are able to keep up and can even register how fast the teleportation process occurs and how far one travels when they are transported.

Even though we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of teleportation technology, we already have a pretty good idea about how the brain handles the experience of being “beamed” from one place to another. Or at least, we think that we do.

New research indicates that, rather than becoming a confused and sputtering morass as a result of the experience, our brains are able to keep up and can even register how fast the teleportation process occurs and how far one travels when they are transported.

Stunning and beautifully heartfelt documentary of a young woman, stripped of her most cherished abilities, fighting hard to reclaim her life in the face of the indifferent cruelty that defines the natural world.

“A stroke stripped her of the skills she needs to function. This documentary captures the strange new world she inhabits, teeming with color and sound. Only on Netflix March 18th.”

Imagine mastering instruments, learning to tango and becoming fluent in French — in months, weeks, even days. No, it’s not science fiction: A new program by the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aims to tweak your nervous system to make you learn better and faster.

The goal of the new DARPA program, called Targeted Neuroplasticity Training, is to stimulate your peripheral nervous system, the network of nerves on the outside of your brain and spinal cord, to facilitate the development of cognitive skills. If it works, TNT could become a faster and cheaper way to train people on foreign languages, intelligence analysis, cryptography and more.

Neurons still remain the most powerful piece of computation machinery on the face of the planet. More to the point, nobody throws up their hands in despair when a screwdriver removes a flathead screw better than their fingernail can, and yet the parallel is an apt one. The circuitry of the human brain has not been honed by evolution to be especially good at playing the game of Go, any more than evolution has fine-tuned our fingernails for removing screws.

Which is not to say there is no room for surprise in today’s world of rapidly advancing technological achievement. What is more impressive, however, is when computers exhibit greater skill than humans at tasks evolution has been perfecting for millions of years like exercising a sense of smell. And yet such advancements are taking place right beneath our noses, metaphorically speaking.

Continue reading “Neurons on a chip let drones smell bombs over a kilometer away” »

Stem cells hold great potential!

Aims: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) have recently attracted interest as a potential basis for a cell based therapy of AD. We investigated the putative immune-modulatory effects in…

Consciousness is one of the most mysterious phenomena we know of. But evidence is emerging that it might just be a very special kind of information processing.

“He is not here; He has risen,” — Matthew 28:6

As billions of Christians around the world are getting ready to celebrate the Easter festival and holiday, we take pause to appreciate the awe inspiring phenomena of resurrection.

In religious and mythological contexts, in both Western and Eastern societies, well known and less common names appear, such as Attis, Dionysus, Ganesha, Krishna, Lemminkainen, Odin, Osiris, Persephone, Quetzalcoatl, and Tammuz, all of whom were reborn again in the spark of the divine.

Continue reading “Resurrection and Biotechnology” »