Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Apr 20
2025

Human Brains Take Longer to Wire Up Than Simian Ones

Human brains make synaptic connections throughout much of childhood, and the brain’s plasticity enables humans to slowly wire them based upon experiences, contrary to how chimpanzees develop. Humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of the same genes, but scientists have been looking for what drives the unique cognitive and social skills of humans.

A new study, which was published today in Genome Research, that examined brain samples from humans, chimpanzees, and macaques, collected from birth up to the end of their life span, has found some key differences between the expression of genes that control the development and function of synapses, which are the connections between neurons through which information flows.

Apr 20
2025

Synchronized Brain Oscillations Crucial for Short-Term Memory

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics are studying how different brain regions cooperate during memory. While testing monkeys with images for visual stimulation, they recorded electrical activity both in a visual area and in the frontal part of the brain. Their research

Apr 20
2025

Researchers Discover New Mnemomic Networks in the Brain

High-precision brain mapping reveals new memory networks, shedding light on evolution and Alzheimer’s disease. The medial temporal lobe (MTL) houses the human memory system. Broadly, it contains the hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex, perirhinal cortex, and entorhinal cortex. One big challen

Apr 20
2025

Researchers Record Detailed Live Images Inside the Brain of a Living Mouse

Using the STED microscopy developed by Stephan Hell, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry recorded the first ever detailed live images inside the brain of a living mouse. By using a technique that keeps closely-positioned elements dark under a special laser beam so that

Apr 20
2025

Stimulating the Entorhinal Cortex of the Brain Boosts Memory

A team of neuroscientists at the School of Medicine at UCLA have demonstrated that they can strengthen memory in human patients by stimulating the entorhinal cortex. While studying patients with electrodes implanted in their brains, the researchers used a video game to test whether deep-brain stimul

Apr 20
2025

Reactivation of the Hippocampus Causes Memory Recall

Lost memories may be a thing of the past as neuroscientists conduct research on mice to test memory recall. By using optogenetics and stimulating the hippocampus, researchers were able to show that memories reside in specific brain cells, which can be activated to recall the entire memory. Our fo

Apr 20
2025

Odor Processing Function of Fly Resembles Mammalian Brain

In an effort to better understand why fruit flies are immediately attracted to our food, a team of scientists developed a device, called Flywalk, to measure the response of insects to odor signals. Researchers discovered males and females of the same species were attracted to different odors and tha

Apr 20
2025

Conscious Perception From a Global Network of Neurons

New research from scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics supports the view that the content of consciousness is not localized in a unique cortical area but, rather, that a global network of neurons from different areas of the brain is responsible for it. Consciousness i

Apr 20
2025

‘Beauty’ particle discovered at world’s largest atom smasher could unlock new physics

Why matter dominates over antimatter in our universe has long been a major cosmic mystery to physicists. A new finding by the world’s largest particle collider has revealed a clue.

Apr 20
2025

Integrating physical units into high-performance AI-driven scientific computing

Existing numerical computing libraries lack native support for physical units, limiting their application in rigorous scientific computing. Here, the authors developed SAIUnit, which integrates physical units, and unit-aware mathematical functions and transformations into numerical computing libraries for artificial intelligence-driven scientific computing.