Lifeboat Foundation

In vivo imaging of large-scale neuronal activity plays a pivotal role in unraveling the function of the brain’s circuitry. Multiphoton microscopy, a powerful tool for deep-tissue imaging, has received sustained interest in advancing its speed, field of view and imaging depth. However, to avoid thermal damage in scattering biological tissue, field of view decreases exponentially as imaging depth increases. We present a suite of innovations to optimize three-photon microscopy for large field-of-view imaging at depths unreachable by two-photon microscopy. These techniques enable us to image neuronal activities of transgenic animals expressing protein calcium sensors in a ~ 3.5-mm diameter field-of-view with single-cell resolution in the deepest cortical layer of mouse brains.

Forget cold plunges. The new flex could soon be human washing machines.

According to one of Japan’s oldest newspapers, an Osaka-based shower head maker called Science has developed a contraption that’s shaped like a cockpit, fills with water when a bather sits in a seat at its center, and measures the person’s pulse and other biological data via sensors to ensure the temperature is just right. It also “projects images on the inside of [its] transparent cover to help the person feel refreshed,” says the outlet.

Dubbed “Mirai Ningen Sentakuki” (human washing machine of the future), the apparatus might never go on sale. Indeed, for now the company’s plans for it appear limited to an expo in Osaka this April, where up to eight people can experience a 15-minute-long “wash and dry” each day after first booking a reservation.

Clone Robotics unveils “Torso,” a humanoid robot with water-powered muscles, mimicking biological movements.

Polish startup Clone Robotics is working on biomimetic robots — one that can carry out movements much like biological creatures.

In 2024, the Kavli Institute of Brain and Mind will reach its 20th anniversary. To celebrate this milestone, we hosted a special symposium on Monday, October 28, 2024 at Salk Institute-The Generative Mind: Biological and Artificial Intelligence. Please enjoy the presentation \.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more common and sophisticated, its effects on human lives and societies raises new questions. A new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology posits how these new technologies might affect human evolution.

In “How Might Artificial Intelligence Influence Human Evolution?” author Rob Brooks considers the inevitable but incremental evolutionary consequences of AI’s everyday use and human-AI interactions—without “dramatic but perhaps unlikely events, including possibilities of human annihilation, assimilation, or enslavement.”

In the paper, Brooks considers (“often with considerable speculation”) some possible forms of human-AI interaction and the evolutionary implications of such interactions via natural selection, including forms of selection that resemble the inadvertent and deliberate selection that occurred when humans domesticated crops, livestock, and companion animals.

We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous entities but, in reality, we’re more like walking ecosystems, teeming with bacteria, viruses, and other microbes. It turns out that differences in these microbes might be as crucial to evolution and natural variation as genetic mutations are.

This novel perspective was discussed in a recent publication by Seth Bordenstein, director of Penn State’s One Health Microbiome Center, who is a professor of biology and entomology and holds the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Endowed Chair in Microbiome Sciences.

He, along with 21 colleagues from around the globe, collectively known as the Holobiont Biology Network, propose that understanding the relationships between microbes and their hosts will lead to a more profound understanding of biological variation.

Step Into the Future with The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence 🎧 The groundbreaking third volume of The Cybernetic Theory of Mind series by Alex M Vikoulov is now available as an audiobook!

Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction audiobook The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence, in addition to a previously published Kindle eBook, part of The Cybernetic Theory of Mind series. Written by Alex M. Vikoulov; Narrated by Virtual Voice; Foreword by Antonin Tuynman, PhD; Format: Audible audiobook (Press Release, Burlingame, CA, USA, November 16, 2024 09.23 AM PST)

Continue reading “From Homo Sapiens to Holo Syntellectus: A Journey into the Cybernetic Singularity” »

Gregory Chaitin ‘s work will limit the capability of AI.

Chirality is a property of some molecules, subatomic particles, living organisms and other physical or biological systems. This property entails a lack of mirror symmetry in these systems’ underlying structures.