A method for turning male cells into egg cells in mice could one day be used to help men in a same-sex couple have children who are genetically related to them both.

By Michael Le Page

Brave new world let’s create happiness for everyone by putting microelectrode arrays in our brains but be careful not to create a situation like death by ecstacy by Larry Niven.

In the brain, pleasure is generated by a handful of brain regions called, “hedonic hotspots.” If you were to stimulate these regions directly, you would likely feel pleasurable sensations. However, not all of the hedonic hotspots are the same–some generate the raw sensations of pleasure whereas others are responsible for consciously interpreting and elaborating on the raw pleasure produced by the other hotspots. In this video, in addition to exploring the neuroscience of pleasure, we’ll see how understanding pleasure, happiness, meaning, and purpose can help us live better lives.

Follow @senseofmindshow for more neuroscience explainers.
Follow on Social Media: https://linktr.ee/senseofmind.

-
Chapters.
00:00 Hedonic hotspots: the brain’s pleasure generators.
00:56 The evolution of pleasure.
01:46 How the brain generates pleasure.
03:07 The subcortical (‘core’) pleasure network.
04:08 The cortical (‘higher’) pleasure network.
05:09 The orbitofrontal cortex’ role and the abstract to concrete pleasure gradient.
08:13 How to be happier by understanding the neuroscience of pleasure.
11:40 Summary.

-
Main source for this video is the work of Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach:
Berridge, K. C., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2016). From Pleasure to Happiness. In L. F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of Emotions (4th ed., pp. 133–143). essay, Guilford Press.

Other Sources:
Lieberman, D. Z., & Long, M. E. (2018). The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity–and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race. BenBella Books.
Schultz, W. (2022). Dopamine reward prediction error coding. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.
Nguyen, D., Naffziger, E. E., & Berridge, K. C. (2021). Positive affect: nature and brain bases of liking and wanting. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 39, 72–78.
Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.
Nguyen, D., Naffziger, E. E., & Berridge, K. C. (2021). Positive affect: nature and brain bases of liking and wanting. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 39, 72–78.

Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com:

Pillow Fort by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

John Danaher, Senior Lecturer in Law at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway:

“Understanding Techno-Moral Revolutions”

Talk held on August 24, 2021 for Colloquium of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin.

It is common to use ethical norms and standards to critically evaluate and regulate the development and use of emerging technologies like AI and Robotics. Indeed, the past few years has seen something of an explosion of interest in the ethical scrutiny of technology. What this emerging field of machine ethics tends to overlook, however, is the potential to use the development of novel technologies to critically evaluate our existing ethical norms and standards. History teaches us that social morality (the set of moral beliefs and practices shared within a given society) changes over time. Technology has sometimes played a crucial role in facilitating these historical moral revolutions. How will it do so in the future? Can we provide any meaningful answers to this question? This talk will argue that we can and will outline several tools for thinking about the mechanics of technologically-mediated moral revolutions.

About the Speaker:

John Danaher is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. He is the author of Automation and Utopia (Harvard 2019), co-author of A Citizen’s Guide to AI (MIT Press 2021) and the coeditor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press 2017). His research focuses on the ethics and law of emerging technologies. He has published papers on the risks of advanced AI, the meaning of life and the future of work, the ethics of human enhancement, the intersection of law and neuroscience, the utility of brain-based lie detection, and the philosophy of religion. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Aeon, and The Philosophers’ Magazine.

“Although the skull has an affinity with an Asian population, among individuals of such ancestry, there are a large number of structural differences, which are circumvented by closing the eyelids.”

Found buried in the fetal position at Toca dos Coqueiros in 1997 in Serra da Capivara National Park, Zuzu lived in modern-day Brazil nearly 9,600 years ago. Zuzu’s face has been wondered about by archeologists for years. Moreover, there were some controversies about Zuzu’s sex. We could finally see Zuzu’s face thanks to a new facial approximation.

Moacir Elias Santos et al.

“Trying to recover the appearance that an individual had in life thousands of years ago is a way to bring them to the present day, bringing them closer to the public,” first author Moacir Elias Santos, an archaeologist with the Ciro Flamarion Cardoso Archaeology Museum in Brazil, told Live Science.

UK-based Hex wanted to visit friends in the U.S. but was barred from entering due to her virtual work.

Molecular detective work is zeroing in on the origins of sexual reproduction. The protein tools for cell mergers seem to have long predated sex — so what were they doing?

Cells with XX or XY chromosomes provide researchers with a new tool to study how differences in sex chromosomes can influence health and development.

A sex startup says it’s created a VR-enabled masturbation pod for companies that want to make their employees very uncomfortable, very quickly.

Stripchat, a porn site, announced in a blog post that it’s developed something it’s dubbed a “Wank Pod” to give company employees a place to engage in a little office onanism. The company even installed one in their own workplace, and plans a commercial roll out in the future.

“Each ‘Wank Pod’ is planned to come fully equipped with masturbatory accessories, including a 4K LED screen to watch VR cams boosted by Dreamcam’s technology, an Oculus Quest VR headset, lotion, tissues, and more,” the startup wrote in the announcement.

A “sex peptide” transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating interferes with the female’s biological clock, reducing her chances of mating again.

It will provide a better understanding of how drugs affect men and women differently.

Scientists created male and female cells with the same genetic code from the same person for the first time. This unique set of cells could provide researchers with valuable insights into how sex chromosomes affect various diseases and their role in early development.

CDC/Dr. Laine.

The sex chromosome.