Lifeboat Foundation

Many of us have seen microscopic images of neurons in the brain — each neuron appearing as a glowing cell in a vast sea of blackness. This image is misleading: Neurons don’t exist in isolation. In the human brain, some 86 billion neurons form 100 trillion connections to each other — numbers that, ironically, are far too large for the human brain to fathom.

Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Harvard Medical School associate professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital, is working in a new field of neuroscience called connectomics, which aims to comprehensively map connections between neurons in the brain.

Last year, Verve Therapeutics started the first human trial of a CRISPR treatment that could benefit most people—a signal that gene editing may be ready to go mainstream.

I still like Helion… but not for a power plant. Instead, this is an interesting route to a fusion drive.

This is also a very good channel. It is worth watching his other fusion videos first.

Continue reading “The problems with Helion Energy — a response to Real Engineering” »

The University of Singapore has invented a VR Glove that allows you to feel objects in the metaverse! The technology includes pressurized fingertips and restricted motion that mimics the real-life sensation of picking up objects. The goal is to assist medical professionals to practice in Virtual Reality (but we can see how these would make for some pretty incredible immersive gameplay). Production will begin over the next few years.

The VR glove is an important advancement in wearable tech, as it is a fully untethered haptic system. With this super fast feedback loop, the glove encounters the metaverse in what is essentially real-time. So, that means minimal to no lag for users. Additionally, the gloves are lighter and more affordable than the gloves that are currently on the market. This makes The National University of Singapore’s HaptGlove all the more impressive as a piece of wearable tech.

The glove was developed by The National University of Singapore for use with trainees at the National University Health System. Specifically, users will be able to use the technology to grasp surgical devices or check the pulse of a patient. Furthermore, the haptic system inside the glove should resemble the feeling of an object on your fingertips, providing real-time feedback. This is an important moment for the medical field that could have serious impact, as VR becomes a testing ground for future health tech. It’s interesting to note this development alongside other trends, like the push towards Web5.

By Chuck Brooks

The quantum computing decryption threat will be here soon enough, and it is time for businesses, organizations and governments to protect their data for that inevitability.

Past neuroscience research consistently found a link between deviations from the “normal” iron metabolism, also known as iron dysregulation, and different neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Specifically, brain regions associated with these diseases have been found to be often populated by microglia (i.e., resident immune cells) packed with Iron.

While the association between iron dysregulation and neurodegenerative diseases is well documented, the ways in which iron accumulation affects the physiology of microglia and neurodegeneration are yet to be fully grasped. Researchers at global health care company Sanofi have recently carried out a study aimed at filling this gap in the literature, by better understanding how microglia respond to iron.

“For years it has been known that iron accumulates in affected brain regions in PD, MS and other neurodegenerative diseases,” Timothy Hammond, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told MedicalXpress. “This is something we can see in patients using MRI imaging, where it has been shown that iron levels increase over the course of the disease. We also had our own data from progressive MS patients showing iron dysregulation in brain microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain.”

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI progress, chimps, memes, and markets. Learn more about Connor’s work at https://conjecture.dev.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction.
01:00 Defining artificial general intelligence.
04:52 What makes humans more powerful than chimps?
17:23 Would AIs have to be social to be intelligent?
20:29 Importing humanity’s memes into AIs.
23:07 How do we measure progress in AI?
42:39 Gut feelings about AI progress.
47:29 Connor’s predictions about AGI
52:44 Is predicting AGI soon betting against the market?
57:43 How accurate are prediction markets about AGI?

A pair of scuba divers has captured rare video and photos of a 2.5-meter (eight-foot) giant squid swimming in the waters off Japan’s west coast.

Earlier this month, Yosuke Tanaka and his wife Miki, who operate a diving business in Toyooka city in the Hyogo region, were alerted to the squid by a fishing equipment vendor who had spotted it in a bay.

Continue reading “Couple Captures Rare Footage of a Giant Squid Swimming Off The Coast of Japan” »