Lifeboat Foundation

My new story for Vice Motherboard exploring the human journey into eventually becoming a machine: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-i-advocate-for-becoming-a-machine And also if you haven’t donated to the Immortality Bus Indiegogo campaign, there are only a few hours left to do so: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/immortality-bus-with-pres…406#/story

Biology is simply not the best system out there for our species’ evolution. It’s frail, terminal, and needs to be upgraded. In fact, even machines may be upgraded in the future too, and rendered as junk as our intelligences figure out ways to become beings of pure organized energy. “Onward” is the classic transhumanist mantra.

No matter what happens, to move forward in the transhumanist age, we need to let go of our egos and our shallow sense of identity; in short, we need to get over ourselves. The permanence of our species lies in our ability to reason, think, and remember who we are and where we’ve been. The rest is just an impermanent shell that changes—and it has already been changing for tens of millions of years in the form of sentient evolution.

Continue reading “Why I Advocate for Becoming a Machine” »

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) website reports that two of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) recipients have developed nanoscale electronic switches with reprogrammable features, similar to those at play in inter-neuron communication in the brain, which could find uses in next-generation reconfigurable electronic devices and brain-inspired computing.

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https://youtube.com/watch?a&feature=youtu.be&v=TFErQ3XM__c

An interview on transhumanism done by London Real:

Zoltan Istvan — Transhumanist — PART 1/2. FREE FULL EPISODE: http://londonreal.tv/zoltan-istvan This week’s guest on London Real is Zoltan Istvan, US Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party. Istvan’s stated aim is to “change the conversation” on transhumanism.

Transhumanism could be described as the use of technology to enhance human capabilities, both mental and physical.

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan — Transhumanist — PART 1/2” »

Eating a group of specific foods — known as the MIND diet — may slow cognitive decline among aging adults, even when the person is not at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers at Rush University Medical Center.

This finding supplements a previous study by the research team, reported by KurzweiliAI in March, that found that the MIND diet may reduce a person’s risk in developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers’ new study shows that older adults who followed the MIND diet more rigorously showed an equivalent of being 7.5 years younger cognitively than those who followed the diet least. Results of the study were recently published online in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.

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The neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage is trying to change that and make neuroscience more accessible to all.

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Of the roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world, not one commonality has been found connecting them all together — until now.

Researchers at MIT have found what they’re calling a “language universal,” which focuses on sentence structure as a link among languages.

Edward Gibson, a professor of cognitive sciences at MIT and an author of the study, joined HuffPost Live on Friday to discuss his findings.

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As the brain ages, it becomes less efficient at recycling and eliminating build up of waste; ‘removal vans’ fail to do the rounds, and accumulation starts to overtake removal.

“We found that people in their 30s typically take about four hours to clear half the amyloid beta 42 from the brain,” says Randall J. Bateman. “In this new study, we show that at over 80 years old, it takes more than 10 hours.”

Research has uncovered that a protein called amyloid beta 42 (a natural byproduct of neural activity), is normally removed effectively in youth but the rate of clearance was found to slow progressively with age. Accumulation of amyloid beta 42 can lead to aggregation and consequent plaque formation and a slowdown in removal was tied to symptoms of dysfunction including memory loss and personality change. The study found that the brain disposes of this protein through a number of channels, and more work could uncover ways of boosting waste mangement in ailing brains, thus avoiding this toxic accumulation.

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The brain’s glymphatic pathway clears harmful wastes, especially during sleep. This lateral position could prove to be the best position for the brain-waste clearance process (credit: Stony Brook University)

Sleeping in the lateral, or side position, as compared to sleeping on one’s back or stomach, may more effectively remove brain waste, and could reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases, according to researchers at Stony Brook University.

Stony Brook University researchers discovered this in experiments with rodents by using dynamic contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to image the brain’s glymphatic pathway, a complex system that clears wastes and other harmful chemical solutes from the brain. They also used kinetic modeling to quantify the CSF-ISF exchange rates in anesthetized rodents’ brains in lateral, prone, and supine positions.

Continue reading “Sleeping on your side may clear waste from your brain most effectively” »

The K supercomputer in Japan. The human brain is arguably the most complex structure in the Universe. To unlock its secrets, scientists all over the world are mapping and simulating parts of the human brain. The latest breakthrough comes from Japan where scientists using the K supercomputer, the fourth most powerful in world, accurately mapped one second’s worth of brain activity. It took the computer 40 minutes to undertake this task, for one percent of the brain activity!

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