Lifeboat Foundation

Google is secretly working with the world’s leading neuroscientists on mapping the entire Human Brain. Neuroscientists at have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made. Google has helped them by funding their goal to create the most detailed map yet of the connections within the human brain. It reveals a staggering amount of detail, including patterns of connections between neurons, as well as what may be a new kind of neuron.

The applications in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces or understanding medical conditions are staggering. But it’s doubtful that this will just help companies such as Neuralink develop advanced future brain computer interfaces and will likely lead to Google doing evil things by understanding people’s way of thinking and delivering ads to them.
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Continue reading “How Google is Reading Your Thoughts — Scientists Mapping the Human Brain” »

Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t see the global chip shortage coming to an end anytime soon. The head of the largest chip maker by market cap, Huang is fresh off his virtual keynote at Nvidia’s GTC conference where he announced advances in the company’s metaverse and AI efforts.

But Nvidia still makes the bulk of its revenue, about 47% in Q2, from the sale of its gaming cards. And those continue to be in short supply due to the pandemic-induced chip crisis.

“I think that through the next year, demand is going to far exceed supply. We don’t have any magic bullets in navigating the supply chain,” Huang told Yahoo Finance Live on Wednesday.

For example, scientists recently treated a patient’s severe depression with a neural implant that zaps her brain 300 times per day and, she says, has allowed her to spontaneously laugh and feel joy for the first time in years. Of course, the treatment requires an electrode implanted deep into the brain, which currently reserves it for the most extreme medical cases — but as brain interface tech inexorably becomes more advanced and widely available, there’s no reason such a device couldn’t become a consumer gadget as well.

At the research’s current rate of trajectory, experts told Futurism, the tech could conceivably hit the market in just a few years. But what we don’t know is what it will mean for us, psychologically as individuals and sociologically as a society, when we can experience genuine pleasure from the push of a button. And all those questions become even more complex, of course, when applied to the messy world of sex.

“A big question that remains unanswered is whether sextech will ultimately become a complement to our sex lives or a substitute,” Kinsey Institute research fellow Justin Lehmiller, an expert on sex and psychology, told Futurism.

Incredible new videos show stem cells escaping from hair follicles, which could provide insight on a new, potentially reversible mechanism of hair loss.

Stem cells contribute to tissue regeneration, and they are thought to play an important role in age-related decline — so much so that stem cell exhaustion is one of the hallmarks of aging. These stem cells reside in “compartments” in various tissues. In the hair, the stem cell compartment, known as the bulge, is adjacent to the hair follicle.

Continue reading “Hair Loss Reversal? Stem Cell Escape Identified!” »

The creation of nanoscale computers for use in precision health care has long been a dream of many scientists and health care providers. Now, for the first time, researchers at Penn State have produced a nanocomputing agent that can control the function of a particular protein that is involved in cell movement and cancer metastasis. The research paves the way for the construction of complex nanoscale computers for the prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

Nikolay Dokholyan, G. Thomas Passananti Professor, Penn State College of Medicine, and his colleagues — including Yashavantha Vishweshwaraiah, postdoctoral scholar in pharmacology, Penn State — created a transistor-like ‘logic gate,’ which is a type of computational operation in which multiple inputs control an output.

“Our logic gate is just the beginning of what you could call cellular computing,” he said, “but it is a major milestone because it demonstrates the ability to embed conditional operations in a protein and control its function, said Dokholyan. ” It will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of human biology and disease and introduces possibilities for the development of precision therapeutics.”

The new feature is part of Google’s Business Messages, a conversational messaging service that allows organizations to connect with people via Google Search, Google Maps, or their own business channels. For instance, Albertsons used Business Messages to share information with customers about vaccine administration. Suppose someone searched on Google for Safeway (an Albertson’s company). In that case, they could use the “message” button on Google Search to receive information like vaccine availability and how to book an appointment.

The new Bot-in-a-Box feature lets businesses launch a chatbot with an existing customer FAQ document, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document, to keep the service simple. The feature uses Google’s Dialogflow technology to create chatbots that can automatically understand and respond to customer questions without writing any code.

A team of researchers from Tri Alpha Energy Inc. and Google has developed an algorithm that can be used to speed up experiments conducted with plasma. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes how they plan to use the algorithm in nuclear fusion research.

As research into harnessing nuclear fusion has progressed, scientists have found that some of its characteristics are too complex to be solved in a reasonable amount of time using current technology. So they have increasingly turned to computers to help. More specifically, they want to adjust certain parameters in a device created to achieve fusion in a reasonable way. Such a device, most in the field agree, must involve the creation of a certain type of plasma that is not too hot or too cold, is stable, and has a certain desired density.

Finding the right parameters that meet these conditions has involved an incredible amount of trial and error. In this new effort, the researchers sought to reduce the workload by using a computer to reduce some of the needed trials. To that end, they have created what they call the “optometrist’s algorithm.” In its most basic sense, it works like an optometrist attempting to measure the visual ability of a patient by showing them images and asking if they are better or worse than other images. The idea is to use the crunching power of a computer with the intelligence of a human being—the computer generates the options and the human tells it whether a given option is better or worse.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of new COVID-19 cases and thousands of new deaths are still being reported worldwide, creating a need for drugs that can combat the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2.

Now, new research led by investigators at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital points to a well-known and widely available drug called disulfiram (marketed as Antabuse) as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

In the retrospective study, published Oct. 28 in PLOS ONE, patients taking disulfiram for alcoholism were less likely to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, and those who did get infected were less likely to die from COVID-19 than those not taking the drug.

Continue reading “Alcoholism treatment drug shows potential with COVID-19” »

This month, the UW team upped their game.

Tapping into both AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold, they tweaked the programs to predict which proteins are likely to tag-team and sketched up the resulting complexes into a 3D models.

Using AI, the team predicted hundreds of complexes—many of which are entirely new—that regulate DNA repair, govern the cell’s digestive system, and perform other critical biological functions. These under-the-hood insights could impact the next generation of DNA editors and spur new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders or anti-aging therapies.