Lifeboat Foundation

When a person experiences a happy or sad mood, which brain cells are active?

To answer that question, scientists need to understand how individual brain cells contribute to a larger network of brain activity and what role each cell plays in shaping behavior and overall health. Until now, it’s been difficult to get a clear view of how brain cells in living animals behave over extended periods of time.

But Jia Liu’s group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has developed an electronic implant that collected detailed information about brain activity from a single cell of interest for more than a year. Their findings, based on research in mice, are reported in Nature Neuroscience.

Summary: Study reveals how neural populations in different people synchronize during social interaction and tasks of cooperation.

Source: SPIE

Humans are social creatures. But what leads to them being this way?

A bioelectric material can potentially be used for treating neurological diseases or even creating next-generation pacemakers.

“People on metformin have 30% lower rates of almost every kind of cancer. It delays cognitive decline. Even people with diabetes who are obese and have more disease to start with but are on metformin have lower mortality rates than people without diabetes who aren’t on the drug.”

What he says is born out in numerous studies. Overall, this safe, super-cheap, decades-old drug not only treats diabetes, but it also seems to delay and compress the years of chronic illness associated with the final stage of life and extend what geroscientists call the “healthspan.”

Metformin is just one of many medications, including other old ones and some brand new inventions, that academic researchers and biotech startups are exploring to slow, stop, or perhaps even reverse aging.

For the first time, a researcher at the University of Delaware College of Health Sciences in collaboration with a team at the National Institute on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health, has determined that the naturally occurring dietary supplement known as nicotinamide riboside (NR) can enter the brain.

The discovery was made by Christopher Martens, assistant professor of kinesiology and applied physiology and director of the Delaware Center for Cognitive Aging Research, and Dr. Dimitrios Kapogiannis, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Aging. The finding is significant because it supports the idea that NR, upon reaching the brain, can alter the metabolism of relevant biological pathways involved in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Their work was recently published in the journal Aging Cell.

Upon consumption, NR is readily converted into nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), which is critical to cellular repair and the repair of damaged DNA.

John Vervaeke and Donald Hoffman talk about infinity, ego, death, non-dualism, and what is reality. Sponsors:
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Continue reading “Hoffman Λ Vervaeke: Redefining Reality” »

Hey folks, I’m excited to share a new essay with y’all on my proposed route towards nanoscale human brain connectomics. I suggest that synchrotron ‘expansion x-ray microscopy’ has the potential to enable anatomical imaging of the entire human brain with sub-100 nm voxel size and high contrast in around 1 year for a price of roughly $10M. I plan to continue improving this essay over time as I acquire more detailed information and perform more calculations.

For a brief history of this concept: I started exploring this idea during undergrad (working with a laboratory-scale x-ray microscope), but was cut short by the pandemic. Now, I’m working on a PhD in biomedical engineering centered on gene therapy and synthetic biology, but I have retained a strong interest in connectomics. I recently began communication with some excellent collaborators who might be able to help move this technology forward. Hoping for some exciting progress!

By Logan Thrasher Collins.

Continue reading “Feasibility of mapping the human brain with expansion x-ray microscopy” »

Step one for uploading your brain after the singularity… keep it cognitively functional until then.

It’s been estimated that one in three cases of dementia is preventable. You can’t do anything right now to stop or reverse the underlying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, but you can do something about hypertension and vascular disease risk factors.

Continue reading “Can I Prevent Dementia?” »

Summary: In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers developed an electronic implant that collected information about brain activity from a single neuron for over one year.

Source: Harvard.

When a person experiences a happy or sad mood, which brain cells are active?