A lzheimer’s sufferers could once again remember the faces of loved ones, or find their way back home, after scientists developed a way to boost memories.
In a groundbreaking pilot study, US researchers recorded memories as they were being formed and then later played them back into the brains of 10 patients.
They found that it increased memory performance by up to 37 per cent.
Scientists are increasingly betting their time and effort that the way to control the world is through proteins. Proteins are what makes life animated. They take information encoded in DNA and turn it into intricate three-dimensional structures, many of which act as tiny machines. Proteins work to ferry oxygen through the bloodstream, extract energy from food, fire neurons, and attack invaders. One can think of DNA as working in the service of the proteins, carrying the information on how, when and in what quantities to make them.
Living things make thousands of different proteins, but soon there could be many more, as scientists are starting to learn to design new ones from scratch with specific purposes in mind. Some are looking to design new proteins for drugs and vaccines, while others are seeking cleaner catalysts for the chemical industry and new materials.
David Baker, director for the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, compares protein design to the advent of custom tool-making. At some point, proto-humans went beyond merely finding uses for pieces of wood, rock or bone, and started designing tools to suit specific needs — from screwdrivers to sports cars.
A security company wants to modernize the “backward-looking” and “inherently inefficient” video surveillance industry by offering a blockchain-based system which allows users to react to threats in real time.
Faceter’s decentralized surveillance technology – which it claims is a world first for consumers – “gives brains to cameras” by enabling them to instantly detect faces, objects and analyze video feeds. Although some B2B providers do offer similar features, the company claims they are currently too expensive for smaller firms and the public at large because of the “substantial computing resources” such technology needs.
According to Faceter’s white paper, Blockchain has the potential to make this solution affordable for everyone – as computing power for recognition calculations would be generated by a network of miners.
The US military likes to stay at the forefront of the cutting edge of science — most recently investigating ways they can ‘hack’ the human brain and body to make it die slower, and learn faste r.
But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they’re also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it’s funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory — time crystals.
In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after they were first proposed.
The renowned physicist Dr. Richard Feynman once said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand. Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
An increasingly influential subfield of neuroscience has taken Feynman’s words to heart. To theoretical neuroscientists, the key to understanding how intelligence works is to recreate it inside a computer. Neuron by neuron, these whizzes hope to reconstruct the neural processes that lead to a thought, a memory, or a feeling.
With a digital brain in place, scientists can test out current theories of cognition or explore the parameters that lead to a malfunctioning mind. As philosopher Dr. Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford argues, simulating the human mind is perhaps one of the most promising (if laborious) ways to recreate—and surpass—human-level ingenuity.
Perfect vision is great. But like any advantage it comes with limitations. Those with ease don’t develop the same unique senses and strengths as someone who must overcome obstacles, people like Lana Awad, a neurotech engineer at CTRL-labs in New York, who diagnosed her own degenerative eye disease with a high school science textbook as a teen in Syria and went on to teach at Harvard University.
Though they see themselves as clear leaders, visionaries with all the obvious advantages—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example—can be blind in their way, lacking the context needed to guide if they don’t recognize their counterintuitive limitations. This is problematic for humanity because we’re all relying on them to create the tools that increasingly rule every aspect of our lives. The internet is just the start.
Tools that will meld mind and machine are already a reality. Neurotech is a huge business with applications being developed for gaming, the military, medicine, social media, and much more to come. Neurotech Report projected in 2016 that the $7.6 billion market could reach $12 billion by 2020. Wired magazine called 2017, “a coming-out year for the brain machine interface (BMI).”
Lightweight equipment is not much larger than what a bicyclist would wear.
