Lifeboat Foundation

All human experience is rooted in the brain, but we just barely understand how it works. That’s partially because it’s hard to study: Scientists can’t just run experiments on living brains, and experiments on animal brains don’t always translate to humans. That’s why researchers developed the brain organoid, an artificially grown, three-dimensional cluster of human neurons that faithfully mimics brain development — and, as Japanese scientists reported Wednesday in Cell Stem Cell, the neural activity of a living brain as well.

Neurons in a living brain respond to stimuli by “firing” off electrical impulses, which they use to communicate with one another and with other parts of the body. The scientists behind the new paper discovered that the brain organoids they grew from scratch in their lab also started to exhibit synchronized activity, just like neurons in an actual brain. That team included first and co-corresponding author Hideya Sakaguchi, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University currently at the Salk Institute.

“I was very excited to see some of the neurons activated at the same time robustly at first,” Sakaguchi, who did the first of his experiments in December 2016, tells Inverse. “Neurons first show individual activities, but as they form networks and connections between other neurons, they start to show synchronized activities.”

This is not a moth penis, although it is involved in reproduction. And it’s inflatable.

DMT, an active compound of the psychedelic Ayahuasca, is naturally occurring in the mammalian brain, researchers have discovered. The study revealed DMT levels increased significantly in the rat visual cortex following cardiac arrest.

The gut of elite athletes has a bacterium that enhances performance.

So, if something is universal, doesn’t it mean that it will apply to everybody? If so, why are individual countries racing to experiment with UBI? (Sam Altman, chairman of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI, may be the exception to date but he is attempting that in a silo).

To truly address the root causes of exploitation and inequality, why isn’t the paradigm of ‘I win, you lose’ Nonsense surfaced? Is that because you are so preoccupied with surviving/getting ahead for yourself, you are not aware Business-as-usual is the water we swim in?

Most countries don’t even have a minimum wage but Silicon Valley technocrats like Bill Gate, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and others globally are universal basic income (UBI) advocates. To expedite the latest Business-as-usual gold rush, UBI could be an initial bait.

The U.N. predicts climate change will push 120 million people into poverty by 2030.

A formerly little-known molecule created in labs by scientists could help future buildings withstand even the most ferocious of storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes by making walls that are virtually indestructible, according to new research from a team of British scientists at the University of Exeter.

The substance is known to researchers and construction experts as graphene, a combination of the prefix graphite and the suffix –ene, coined by the German scientist who pioneered it. The product has a wide array of potential applications including anti-corrosive coatings, lubricants, and motor oils. But in the last two decades, a radical new application has become apparent to those who study this innovative new product. The application of graphene in construction became apparent when researchers established that the inclusion of graphene oxide significantly increases both tensile and compressive strength in concrete composites—in other words, the world’s most common construction material can be fortified to become a kind of “super-concrete.”

Autonomous driving company Waymo has launched its tie-in with Lyft, using a “handful” of vehicles to pick up riders in its Phoenix testing zone, per CNBC. To be eligible, Lyft users requesting a ride have to be doing a trip that both starts and ends in the area of Phoenix that it’s already blocked for for its own autonomous testing.

The number of cars on the road is less than 10, since Waymo plans to eventually expand to 10 total for this trial but isn’t there yet. Those factors combined mean that the number of people who’ll get this option probably isn’t astronomical, but when they are opted in, they’ll get a chance to decide whether to go with the autonomous option via one of Waymo’s vans (with a safety driver on board) or just stick with a traditional Lyft.

Waymo and Lyft announced their partnership back in May, and the company still plans to continue operating its own Waymo One commercial autonomous ride-hailing service alongside the Lyft team-up.

General-purpose language works for computer vision, robotics, statistics, and more.