Lifeboat Foundation

As long as people have been alive, they’ve wanted to stay alive. For centuries, explorers have searched for the fountain of youth. And today, scientists are hard at work researching technology that can extend the human lifespan, stop or reverse aging; and even preserve a terminally ill person indefinitely, until a cure for their disease is discovered. But what if — instead of preserving our *bodies* — we could preserve our *consciousness*; by uploading it to a powerful computer. This is called *mind uploading*. And one startup has developed a procedure to do exactly this. It’s scientifically sound, there’s a waiting list to participate, and the procedure — is one hundred percent fatal. Let’s find out why.〰
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You’ve probably heard of CRISPR, the revolutionary technology that allows us to edit the DNA in living organisms. Biochemist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Jennifer Doudna earned the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in this field — and now she’s here to tell us about its next world-changing advancement. She explains how her team at the Innovative Genomics Institute is pioneering a brand new field of science — precision microbiome editing — that uses CRISPR in an effort to solve seemingly insurmountable problems like asthma, Alzheimer’s and climate change.
This ambitious idea is part of the Audacious Project, TED’s initiative to inspire and fund global change.

If you love watching TED Talks like this one, become a TED Member to support our mission of spreading ideas: https://ted.com/membership.

Continue reading “CRISPR’s Next Advance Is Bigger Than You Think” »

How are synapses formed, those points of contact that allow the transmission of information from one neuron to the other? Working with an international team, researchers from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) have now uncovered a crucial mechanism and elucidated the identity of the axonal transport vesicles that generates synapses. The findings provide an important basis for promoting the regeneration of nerve cells and counteracting the aging process in the future. The results have just been published in the journal Science.

Whether in the brain or in the muscles, wherever there are nerve cells, there are synapses. These contact points between neurons form the basis for the transmission of excitation, i.e. communication between neurons. As in any communication process, there is a sender and a receiver: Nerve cell processes called axons generate and transmit electrical signals thereby acting as signal senders. Synapses are points of contact between axonal nerve terminals (the pre-synapse) and post-synaptic neurons. At these synapses, the electrical impulse is converted into chemical messengers that are received and sensed by the post-synapses of the neighboring neuron. The messengers are released from special membrane sacs called synaptic vesicles.

Year 2020 face_with_colon_three

Ah, Memories! They can be some of our best assets or our most painful tormentors. Good memories give us a sensation of warmth and hope for better times, but bad memories can cause serious trauma.

In this study we aimed to detect epigenetic and genetic loci associated with PTSD in a homogeneous cohort of traumatized police officers. Both a genome-wide and hypothesis-driven replication approach did not result in DMPs between PTSD patients and trauma-exposed controls. GSE analysis on the top 100 DMPs showed, however, a plausible association of the dopaminergic neurogenesis pathway with PTSD. Furthermore, we observed one DMR located at the PAX8 gene suggesting consistent hypermethylation in PTSD patients. Genetic analyses yielded three CpG-SNPs significantly associated with PTSD. Of these, one CpG-SNP, located at the CACNA1C locus, was also significantly associated with PTSD in an independent replication sample of trauma-exposed children. Notably, this result shows that the Illumina 450K array is not restricted to epigenetic surveys but can provide informative genetic data as well.

Although our sample was small, it was highly homogenous as all participants were former or current police officers, and cases and controls were matched for sex, age, education, and years of police service. All participants reported multiple prior traumatic events, without significant group differences in reported types of traumatic experiences. PTSD patients fulfilled current diagnostic criteria for PTSD, while our trauma-exposed controls had minimal PTSD symptoms and did not report lifetime PTSD or other trauma-related psychiatric disorders. Thus our controls were apparently resilient to adverse mental health outcome of trauma. This study design, including extreme phenotypes following similar trauma load, was considered to favor detection of PTSD-associated loci, as also suggested by others [22]. Nevertheless, our genome-wide survey clearly remains limited in statistical power.

A novel type of deep brain stimulation known as responsive deep brain stimulation helped improve symptoms in a woman with severe OCD, according to a new study.

Music for pain relief and anxiety. I think somewhere else I read it helps heal brain injuries.

Further, subject-preferred music appears to induce a superior effect in relieving pain. This can be approached by allowing participants to select the most pleasant music from a prespecified list of songs or listen to their favorite music during the study. Nevertheless, the richness of emotions, meanings, and associations involved when listening to favorite music is poorly understood, especially regarding pain relief.

About the study

Continue reading “Study finds pleasurable music and ‘chills’ predict music-induced hypoalgesia” »

“To our knowledge, ours is the first study to achieve communication by someone who has no remaining voluntary movement.” — Jonas Zimmermann, a Wyss Center neuroscientist. Watch it here: https://www.freethink.com/health/locked-in-syndrome Freethink.

A man with total locked-in syndrome has used a brain-computer interface to spell out sentences with his mind.

Human decision-making has been the focus of countless neuroscience studies, which try to identify the neural circuits and brain regions that support different types of decisions. Some of these research efforts focus on the choices humans make while gambling and taking risks, yet the neural underpinnings of these choices have not yet been fully elucidated.

Researchers at University of Louisville carried out a study aimed at better understanding the patterns in neural network communication associated with ‘bad’ decisions made while gambling. Their paper, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, shows that different types of ‘bad’ decisions made while gambling, namely avoidant and approach decisions, are associated with distinct neural communication patterns.

“Our recent work follows a line of research that examines how humans approach rewarding and punishing situations in the environment,” Brendan Depue and Siraj Lyons, the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress.