Lifeboat Foundation

Harvard bioethics specialist Glenn Cohen considers the complex question of whether humans should mix their genetic material with other animals to create chimeras.

In an epidsode of the dystopian near-future series, Black Mirror, a small, implantable device behind the ear grants the ability to remember, access, and replay every moment of your life in perfect detail, like a movie right before your eyes.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, can’t promise that level of perfect recall—perhaps for the better—but he is working on a memory prosthesis. The device, surgically implanted directly into the brain, mimics the function of a structure called the hippocampus by electrically stimulating the brain in a particular way to form memories—at least in rats and monkeys. And now, he’s testing one that could work in humans.

Berger’s device hinges on a theory about how the hippocampus transforms short-term memories, like where you deposited your keys, into long-term memories—so you can find them later. In his early experiments, he played a tone and then puffed air in a rabbit’s face, causing it to blink. Eventually, just playing the tone would make the rabbit blink, just like Pavlov’s famous salivating dogs. Berger recorded the hippocampus’ activity with electrodes, and as the rabbits learned to associate the tone with the air puff, patterns in those signals changed in a predictable way.

Continue reading “The Neuroscientist Who’s Building a Better Memory for Humans” »

The goal of roboticists has long been to make A.I. as efficient as the human brain, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just brought them one step closer.

In a recent paper, published in the journal Biology, scientists were able to successfully train a neural network to recognize faces at different angles by feeding it a set of different orientations for several face templates. Although this only initially gave the neural network the ability to roughly reach invariance — the ability to process data regardless of form — over time, the network taught itself to achieve full “mirror symmetry. Through mathematical algorithms, the neural network was able to mimic the human brain’s ability to understand objects are the same despite orientation or rotation.

Continue reading “A.I. Can Teach Itself to Recognize Faces Now” »

It is literally a moonshot.

Last fall, the biotech executive Martin Shkreli became widely reviled for hiking the price of a life-saving drug by more than 4,000 percent overnight, to $750 per pill.

Public outrage at Shkreli has apparently reverberated all the way to a high school science lab in Australia, where a group of 11th grade students claim to have proven a point: the drug can be made for much, much cheaper.

The group of 11 high school students, ages 16 and 17, successfully recreated the drug, Daraprim, for a mere $2 a pill, according to scientists from the University of Sydney.

Continue reading “Sydney high school students ‘show up’ Martin Shkreli, recreating price-hiked pill for $2” »

New research at MIT might be a game-changer for Alzheimer’s. But you don’t have to wait to strengthen your brain’s memory system.

University of Sussex physicists have found a new way to create quantum gates – apply voltage to microchips.

The future for hospitals.

The new facility will build tissues like bones and cartilage for surgery patients as a first step toward printers in every operating room.

AI (someday once things are more secured) is going to drastically reduce our cost of government. At least the VA believes AI is going to make them better at treating folks; my guess it’s a mix of cost saving potential via automation and improving diagnosis.

Flow Health and the VA are building a medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train AI to personalize care plans.