Lifeboat Foundation

In my new Newsweek Op-Ed, I tackle a primary issue many people have with trying to stop aging and death via science. Hopefully this philosophical argument will allow more resources & support into the life extension field:

Philosophers often say if humans didn’t die, we’d be bored out of our minds. This idea, called temporal scarcity, argues the finitude of death is what makes life worth living. Transhumanists, whose most urgent goal is to use science to overcome biological death, emphatically disagree.

For decades, the question of temporal scarcity has been debated and analyzed in essays and books. But an original idea transhumanists are putting forth is reinvigorating the debate. It doesn’t discount temporal scarcity in biological humans; it discounts it in what humans will likely become in the future—cyborgs and digitized consciousnesses.

Continue reading “Eliminating Death Doesn’t Mean Life Will Get Boring” »

Summary: Researchers discovered a unique property of psychedelic drugs: their ability to reopen “critical periods” in the brain, times when the brain is highly susceptible to environmental learning signals. These periods, usually associated with skills development like language learning, are reopened by psychedelics for different lengths of time.

This breakthrough in understanding psychedelic drug function may have therapeutic implications for conditions like stroke and deafness. Further, it uncovers novel molecular mechanisms influenced by psychedelics.

Summary: Researchers leveraged a tracking algorithm from video games to study molecules’ behavior within live brain cells.

They adapted the fast and accurate algorithm used to track bullets in combat games for use in super-resolution microscopy. The innovative approach enables scientists to observe how molecules cluster together to perform specific functions in space and time within the brain cells.

The data obtained could shed light on molecular functions’ disruption during aging and disease.

Researchers at Scripps Research have discovered that chronic alcohol consumption can increase sensitivity to pain through two distinct molecular mechanisms: one related to alcohol intake and the other to alcohol withdrawal. This finding, published in the British Journal of Pharmacology, sheds light on the intricate relationship between alcohol and pain.

The researchers sought to better understand the relationship between chronic pain and alcohol use disorder. They wanted to investigate the underlying causes of different types of alcohol-related pain, such as alcoholic neuropathy and allodynia, and how they develop at the spinal cord level. The researchers aimed to examine the role of microglia, immune cells in the central nervous system, in the development of chronic alcohol-induced allodynia and neuropathy.

Alcoholic neuropathy refers to nerve damage caused by long-term excessive alcohol consumption. It is a type of peripheral neuropathy that affects the peripheral nerves, which are responsible for transmitting signals between the brain, spinal cord, and the rest of the body.

New research shows surprising activity levels in dying brains and may help explain the sudden clarity many people with dementia experience near death.

Sam Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host.

His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.

Continue reading “How Does Matter Give Rise To Consciousness?” »

A new research at the intersection of cosmology and neurobiology implies that diverse physical processes lead to similar levels of complexity and self-organization present in structures of scales.

An astrophysicist at the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies and found astounding similarities.

In their paper ‘The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web’ published in Frontiers in Physics, Franco Vazza, astrophysicist at the University of Bologna, and Alberto Feletti, neurosurgeon at the University of Verona, investigated the similarities between two of the most complex systems in existence: the cosmic web of galactic superclusters and the network of neuronal cells in the human brain.

Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in the US at over 600,000 deaths per year. Cancers that form solid tumors such as in the breast, brain, or skin are particularly hard to treat. Surgery is typically the first line of defense for patients fighting solid tumors. But surgery may not remove all cancerous cells, and leftover cells can mutate and spread throughout the body. A more targeted and wholistic treatment could replace the blunt approach of surgery with one that eliminates cancer from the inside using our own cells.

Dennis Discher, Robert D. Bent Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and postdoctoral fellow Larry Dooling provide a new approach in targeted therapies for solid tumor cancers in their study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Their therapy not only eliminates cancerous cells, but teaches the immune system to recognize and kill them in the future.

Scientists find patterns in how disease-related genes switch on in the brain.