Lifeboat Foundation

As COVID has demonstrated, when pathogens are moving through the population, we adjust, limiting interactions, even isolating, and generally changing the way we associate with one other. Humans are not alone. New research from Harvard scientists provides some insight into how pathogens change animal social behaviors.

“Extreme environmental conditions have a very strong influence on all animals,” said Yun Zhang, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. But while this behavior has been seen in animals from simple fruit flies all the way up to primates, researchers have not understood what happens inside an individual animal’s brain that leads to infection-induced changes in social behavior.

In their new paper, published in Nature, Zhang and colleagues studied the small roundworm C. elegans, which exists in nature with two sexes: hermaphrodites that produce both eggs and sperm, and males. Under normal conditions, the hermaphrodites are loners, preferring to self-reproduce over mating with males. However, Zhang’s team found that the hermaphrodite worms infected by a pathogenic strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa became more interested in one another and increased their mating with males.

Summary: Study reveals how the brain juggles morally conflicting outcomes while learning, finding people who opt to make decisions for personal gain at the expense of others can comprehend and empathize with potential negative outcomes, but still ultimately choose to pursue options that benefit them.

Source: KNAW

New research from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience sheds light on how the brain juggles morally conflicting outcomes during learning.

Biophysical Therapeutics, a drug discovery platform company that leverages computational biology, has emerged from stealth. The primary targets of the Delaware-based company are cancer, the diseases of aging (including Alzheimer’s disease) and – excitingly – aging itself.

Founded by Dr Michael Forrest, a Cambridge University biochemistry graduate with a PhD in computer science, Biophysical Therapeutics boasts renowned biotech entrepreneur Professor George Church (of Harvard Medical School) as an advisor to the company. Professor Bruno Conti of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California is also an advisor.

Longevity. Technology: Back in 2006, Conti and his team reported an exciting result in the prestigious journal Science. They showed (in female mice) that slightly reducing the metabolic rate by slightly reducing metabolic heat generation (decreasing body temperature by 0.34°C) increased lifespan by 20%.

Summary: Researchers investigate brain region synchronization in order to assist control of brain-machine interfaces.

Source: UPF Barcelona.

Just a few decades ago, the possibility of connecting the brain with a computer to convert neural signals into concrete actions would have seemed like something from science fiction.

Wake up and smell the cortex.

How long is the present? The answer, Cornell researchers suggest in a new study, depends on your heart.

They found that our momentary perception of time is not continuous but may stretch or shrink with each heartbeat.

The research builds evidence that the heart is one of the brain’s important timekeepers and plays a fundamental role in our sense of time passing—an idea contemplated since ancient times, said Adam K. Anderson, professor in the Department of Psychology and in the College of Human Ecology (CHE).

Because it CAN be done does not mean it SHOULD be done.

We humans have not yet developed a strong understanding of unintended consequences.

Human neurons can survive — and even develop — after being transplanted into newborn rats. But are they still rats?

Continue reading “Researchers make human neurons grow inside living rat brains” »

There’s an excessive amount of innovation embedded in right now’s cutting-edge pc chips, however not a lot of it’s as out-of-the-box because the considering that’s driving Australian startup Cortical Labs. The corporate, like so many startups with synthetic intelligence in thoughts, is constructing pc chips that borrow their neural community inspiration from the organic mind. The distinction? Cortical is utilizing precise organic neurons, taken from mice and people, to make their chips.

“We’re constructing the primary hybrid pc chip which entails implanting organic neurons on silicon chips,” Hon Weng Chong, CEO and co-founder of Cortical Labs, informed Digital Tendencies.

That is completed by first extracting neurons in two other ways, both from a mouse embryo or by remodeling human pores and skin cells again into stem cells and inducing these to develop into human neurons.

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Del Paulhus delve deep into the Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy, and the newly added Sadism. From these four traits, researchers can quantify much of the darkness of humanity, and begin to study it in a way that yields numerical results, and the potential to make substantial predictions.

Dr. Delroy Paulhus is a personality researcher whose work in dark personality traits, via a variety of psychometric methods, has yielded measures of the Dark Tetrad. His work has also validated measures of socially desirable responding, perceived control, free will and determinism, and over-claiming. His work has been published in over 150 articles and books, and his current citation count exceeds 43,000.

Continue reading “Women, Pornography, and Sadism | Dr. Del Paulhus | EP 327” »