Lifeboat Foundation

Improved, innovative strategies are needed for the prevention and promotion of recovery from mental illness as these disorders leading cause of disability worldwide. This article will review the evidence linking dietary pattern to brain-based illnesses and provide an overview of the mechanisms that underlie the association between brain health and the food we eat. Considerations for dietary intervention will be discussed including encouraging a shift towards a traditional or whole foods dietary pattern.

Robert, a 43-year-old married man who presents with irritability and a low mood for two months. He has a history of attention deficit disorder, first diagnosed two years ago, and is currently treated with Vyvanse 70 mg. While his focus and work function are improved, he reports low appetite, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping. He notes that he tends to be quite irritable during mealtimes to the extent that his wife has asked him to stay at work past dinnertime to “stay out of the way.” He feels guilty and, concerned about not connecting emotionally to his young children ages 1 and 3. Further history and medical workup reveal no substance use, no active medical issues, and blood work reveals no abnormalities.

The evidence is growing: food choice is strongly implicated in mental health risk. In cases like Robert’s, a food history is a vital piece of data, both in assessing low appetite as a possible medication side effect, or as a symptom of depression. Furthermore, a food history is imperative to understand whether targeted dietary recommendations could assist in his recovery.

Continue reading “Food, Mood, and Brain Health: Implications for the Modern Clinician” »

Almost 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for an “immediate pause” to the development of more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The interesting thing is that these aren’t Luddites with an inherent dislike of technology. Names on the petition include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio.

Others speaking out about the dangers include Geoffrey Hinton, widely credited as “the godfather of AI.” In a recent interview with the BBC to mark his retirement from Google at the age of 75, he warned that “we need to worry” about the speed at which AI is becoming smarter.

Continue reading “Should We Stop Developing AI For The Good Of Humanity?” »

I have important news on the 6th anniversary of the death of my father, Steven Gyurko. The award winning feature documentary on my life IMMORTALITY OR BUST has just had its international release! You can watch it for free on Plex TV anywhere in the world. The film features my US presidential campaign fighting for life extension and driving the Immortality Bus as my father is dying. Congrats to director Daniel Sollinger!

Immortality or Bust follows Zoltan Istvan’s Transhumanist Party presidential campaign.

When two helium-4 (⁴He) nuclei smash together, they form a beryllium-8 nucleus. A third ⁴ He striking this nucleus may result in an excited form of carbon-12 (¹² C), with the ⁴ He particles arranging in a neat cluster. Clustering of neutrons and protons during high-energy collisions is known to determine the stability of the collision products. But how clustering affects the dynamics and reaction outcomes of high-energy collisions remains an open question. Now Catalin Frosin of the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues report experimental data that detail how reaction products form during this kind of collision [1]. The results support models that suggest increased collision energy can drive clustering activity and result in emission of lighter, more energetic particles.

The experiments entail bombarding ¹² C targets with pulsed beams of sulfur-32 and neon-20. Frosin and his colleagues characterized the resulting fragments using FAZIA, a detector designed to probe charged particles around the Fermi energy. Meanwhile, the team ran simulations, with and without cluster correlations, to predict the nucleon interactions and the decays of unstable products. Models with clustering produced particles that are more energetic—in agreement with the experimental data. The researchers attributed this effect to energy and momentum conservation in the nucleon–nucleon and nucleon–cluster collisions during the early, dynamic phase of the interaction.

The findings demonstrate FAZIA’s capability to extract precise information about the properties of nuclear fragments. The researchers say that similar experiments performed elsewhere looked only at carbon+carbon reactions. Extending them to heavier reactants provides a wider arena for interpreting fragmentation mechanisms.

By looking for tiny bumps in sea level caused by the gravity of subsurface mountains, researchers have roughly doubled the number of known seamounts.

A team of engineers and materials scientists affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., has developed a new way to depolymerize plastics using electrified spatiotemporal heating. In their paper, published in the journal Nature, the group describes the new process and its efficiency. Nature has also published a Research Briefing in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team.

Over the past several years, plastic pollution has become a major concern, both for the environment and for the health of plants and animals, including humans, and scientists are seeking ways to recycle it. Most of the techniques developed thus far involve using chemicals to depolymerize plastics. These efforts are still extremely inefficient, however, with yields between 10% and 25%. In this new effort, the team has found a way to use pulsed electricity to boost the yield to approximately 36%.

The approach involved designing a new kind of reactor with a porous carbon felt bilayer and a pulsed electric heater at the top. In their reactor, plastic bits are melted as they are fed in to the upper chamber and flow as a mass into a lower chamber, where the material is pushed through the felt filter. The plastic then begins to decompose as the temperature rises. As the molecules that make up the plastic become smaller, their volatility grows until they are expelled from the reactor as a gas, which allows more liquid to be drawn in. Using electricity to heat the plastic allows for oscillating the temperature, allowing simpler depolymerization reactions to take precedence over side reactions, which need additional heating to depolymerize.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk said in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that he wants to develop his own chatbot called TruthGPT, which will be “a maximum truth-seeking AI” — whatever that means.

The Twitter owner said that he wants to create a third option to OpenAI and Google with an aim to “create more good than harm.”

“I’m going to start something which you call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk said during the Fox & Friends show.

As if robot dogs weren’t creepy enough, at least one is now equipped with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can speak aloud.

Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine and University of Szeged in Hungary, a new study in mice and rats found that restoring certain signals in a brain region that processes smells countered depression.

Publishing in the journal Neuron online May 9, the study results revolve around nerve cells (neurons), which “fire”—or emit electrical signals —to transmit information. Researchers in recent years discovered that effective communication between brain regions requires groups of neurons to synchronize their activity patterns in repetitive periods (oscillations) of joint silence followed by joint activity.

One such rhythm, called “gamma,” repeats about 30 times or more in a second, and is an important timing pattern for the encoding of complex information, potentially including emotions.