Lifeboat Foundation

Our complicated emotional lives can often feel like a prison. Insecurities, depression and anxiety can all hold us back in life. But what if we could just eliminate the mental states that we don’t want? Or enhance the moods we do? There’s every reason to believe that this may be commonplace in the future. In fact, a lot of the technology that could achieve this already exists.

More than half of us will have experienced an extended period of sadness or low mood during our lives, and about a fifth will have been diagnosed with major depression, although these figures depend a lot on the culture in which you live. The fact that mood disorders are so common – and also so difficult to treat – means that research into the future of mood modulation is constantly evolving.

If you go to a doctor in the UK with suspected depression today, you will start on a pathway of care including “talking cures” such as cognitive behavioural therapy, or drug treatments including serotonin re-uptake inhibitors like Prozac. People who do not respond to these treatments may progress to heavier regimes or combinations of drug treatments. Since most psychoactive drug treatments are associated with side effects, there is pressure to develop new treatment options that are better tolerated by most people.

Stress-susceptible animals that behaved as if they were depressed or anxious were restored to relatively normal behavior by tweaking the system, according to a study appearing in the July 20 issue of Neuron.

“If you ‘turn the volume up’ on animals that hadn’t experienced stress, they start normal and then they have a problem,” said lead researcher Kafui Dzirasa, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and neurobiology. “But in the animals that had experienced stress and didn’t do well with it, you had to turn their volume up to get them back to normal. It looked like stress had turned the volume down.”

Artificial Intelligence has made tremendous progress these past few years, but what are the biggest AI Researchers expecting Artificial Intelligence to look like in the year 2030. They’ve made some amazing futurism predictions on all the amazing human abilities and efficiencies these AI’s will likely have. Human level AI will likely be a thing and other technology predictions like the metaverse will likely turn out to be true aswell.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The Future of Artificial Intelligence.
00:53 Artificial Intelligence Predictions for 2030
02:15 The Metaverse in 2030
04:00 Other Technology Predictions for 2030
06:41 Last Words.
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#future #ai #2030

Nobel Prize in physics in 2018 and professor emeritus at the École polytechnique, Gérard Mourou is a scientist that nothing can stop. After revolutionizing ophthalmic surgery with the invention of a new laser technique, the physicist launched a challenging scientific project, which only a researchers of this fame could imagine: the transmutation of radioactive waste by high-power laser. Andra met him to find out more.

It is on the plateau of Saclay, south of Paris, that we meet Gérard Mourou. Here at École Polytechnique, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been working in his laboratory for many years. His enthusiasm remains intact when it comes to addressing the issue of lasers. His research on the subject represents the project of a lifetime. “For a long time, the power of lasers was limited, due to the risk of destroying them. Alongside Donna Strickland, with whom I share the Nobel Prize, we invented the technique of CPA (Chirped Pulse Amplification): the laser emits an ultrashort pulse that we will stretch a colossal factor before amplifying it. Thanks to the CPA one can produce considerable power, to the order of the petawatt (10e15W), without destroying the laser. This represents the equivalent of a hundred times the world electricity grid, ” explains Gérard Mourou.

For the physicist, this new invention opens perspectives in several areas, starting with ophthalmic surgery. An application that came to light as a result of an unlikely combination of circumstances: One of my students was aligning the laser for an experiment when it got the pulse in the eye. We went to the hospital where an intern found that the damage to the retina was absolutely perfect. This laser was the cleanest knife possible…

Elon Musk said Tesla moved the horn to the center of its steering yoke, where some customers said it belonged all along.

Icon’s new three-bedroom home with uniquely curved walls proves that 3D printing can create welcoming and warm houses for the average homeowner.

Black holes are among the most compelling mysteries of the universe. Nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole. And at the center of nearly every galaxy there is a supermassive black hole that’s millions to billions of times more massive than the sun. Understanding black holes, and how they become supermassive, could shed light on the evolution of the universe.

Three physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have recently developed a model to explain the formation of supermassive black holes, as well as the nature of another phenomenon: dark matter. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, theoretical physicists Hooman Davoudiasl, Peter Denton, and Julia Gehrlein describe a cosmological phase transition that facilitated the formation of supermassive black holes in a dark sector of the universe.

A cosmological phase transition is akin to a more familiar type of phase transition: bringing water to a boil. When water reaches the exact right temperature, it erupts into bubbles and vapor. Imagine that process taking place with a primordial state of matter. Then, shift the process in reverse so it has a cooling effect and magnify it to the scale of the universe.

A relic from a billion-year-old collision.

A relic from the billion-year-old collision that birthed the Abell 3,667 galaxy cluster was captured in fresh, stunning detail.

Summary: The perceptual accuracy of visual information and its subjective interpretation use separate neural mechanisms that can be manipulated independently of each other.

Source: University of Bologna

A research group from the University of Bologna discovered the first causal evidence of the double dissociation between what we see and what we believe we see: these two different mechanisms derive from the frequency and amplitude of alpha oscillations.