Lifeboat Foundation

Brad Sutton, Technical Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center and Abel Bliss Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered this Frontiers in Miniature Brain Machinery lecture January 26, 2022. Jennifer Walters, MBM Trainee and PhD candidate in Neuroscience, provided an introduction. The Q&A portion of this video was cut off due to technical difficulties during the Zoom recording.

For more information on the lecture and Brad Sutton: https://minibrain.beckman.illinois.edu/2021/12/02/brad-sutto…s-lecture/

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“In their world, everything is just a blur,” says Healy. The starfish’s temporal perception may be so slow because it is an herbivore – it doesn’t need to strike fast to get a meal. A tasty coral polyp will be in the same place even if it takes the starfish more than a second to find it. A marine predator such as a shark, on the other hand, needs to see faster to catch fish, which are constantly moving.

On average, flying animals detect light changes at a faster rate than land-bound animals, likely because they need to be able to sense changes around them quickly to avoid collisions. “If you fly, you see faster,” says Healy.

Healy’s research found that dragonflies can perceive changes in their environment the fastest, detecting 300 flashes per second – nearly five times faster than humans and 400 times faster than starfish. “It’s almost like bullet time in The Matrix,” says Healy, describing dragonflies’ time perception.

Almost exactly one year ago, the Longevity Science Foundation emerged onto scene, announcing its bold ambition to work towards a goal of distributing upwards of $1 billion over the next ten years towards funding longevity research. Fast forward one year, and the foundation has announced its first calls for research funding applications: aging clocks and psychedelics in longevity and appointed non-profit fundraising expert Lisa Ireland as its president and CEO.

Longevity. Technology: It’s one thing to say you’re going to spend $1 billion on longevity and quite another to actually make it happen. With more than 25 years’ experience in executive leadership and fundraising roles at non-profit organisations including the United Way, Ireland has the kind of background needed to ensure the LSF delivers on its promise. We caught up with Ireland to learn more about her key objectives at the LSF, and her fresh perspective on the longevity field.

Ireland happily admits to having little knowledge of the longevity field before taking on the role at the LSF. Far from seeing it as a weakness, she views her lack of longevity experience as an advantage in a field that needs to expand its appeal beyond those who are already convinced of its importance.

Once genes that influence intelligence are identified, tools like gene editing and IVF could be used to make us smarter.

It’s not clear what, explicitly, human intelligence is or even how it originates. Ethics aside, there’s no way to decide who to save and who to throw away.

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In this lesson, you will learn about a recent discovery of a black hole interacting with a nearby star and shooting a jet of high energy matter and x-rays in the direction of earth. The signal is called a tidal disruption event, and is named AT2022cmc. It was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility and subsequent observations in the x-ray region was done by observatories around the world. MIT and the University of Birmingham published the findings in Nature Astronomy. The object is 8.5 billion light years away, and so is the most distant and brightest gamma ray burst ever detected. It is thought that we are looking at the jet of x-rays head on.

Almost everything we do relies on our sense of touch, from simple household chores to navigating potentially dangerous terrain. Scientists have long been curious about how the touch information we obtain with our hands and other parts of our bodies makes its way to the brain to generate the sensations we feel.

However, key aspects of touch, such as how the spinal cord and brainstem are involved in receiving, processing, and transmitting signals, remain unknown.

Now, two studies from Harvard Medical School researchers provide significant new understandings of how the spinal cord and brainstem contribute to the sense of touch.

A new survey conducted by the Canadian government has found that polar bears in the country’s Western Hudson Bay, are dying at alarming rates. The researchers aerially surveyed the Bay and its nearby town of Churchill also referred to as the ‘Bear capital of the World’ in 2021 and found there were 618 bears only, compared to 842, five years ago when last counted.

The survey added that a significant decline has been noted in the population of adult female bears and cubs between 2011 and 2021.

“The observed declines are consistent with long-standing predictions regarding the demographic effects of climate change on polar bears,” said the researchers.

A scientist shares what he’s learned about living longer, with the help of worms. Scientists are hard at work trying to understand what causes aging and how to help people stay healthy for longer. Biologist Matt Kaeberlein breaks down the science of longevity and tells us how he’s using a robot to test 100,000 aging drugs a year on microscopic worms and a long-term study on the aging of pet dogs. And we’ll leave the lab to visit Willie Mae Avery, the oldest person in Washington D.C., to hear what it’s like to live such a long life.

Portrait of 107-year-old Willie Mae Avery, D.C.‘s oldest living resident.
Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic.

Continue reading “What Science Tells Us About Living Longer | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic” »