Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: neuroscience

Dreeming big.

Dreem Announces $35 Million Financing from lead investors Johnson & Johnson Innovation and Bpifrance (press release):

“Dreem, a neurotechnology company, today announced the closing of a new round of funding, raising $35 million USD to rapidly accelerate product development, invest in strategic research and development, and advance the future of sleep technology. Last year, Dreem introduced a comprehensive solution to address a suite of sleep problems and enhance the quality of rest during the night. The Dreem headband monitors brain activity to track sleep accurately and uses auditory stimulation as a medium to help people fall asleep faster, get deeper sleep, and wake up refreshed.

With the $35 million investment, led by strategic investor JJDC, Dreem will bring next-generation sleep technology to markets across the globe and continue to invest in R & D for future sleep-related scientific discoveries and technological innovations … Dreem previously raised a total of $22 million, from billionaire French entrepreneur Xavier Niel, entrepreneur and biotech investor Dr. Laurent Alexandre, and one of the top French insurance leaders — MAIF. With additional investment from JJDC and Bpifrance, Dreem has raised nearly $60 million in less than four years.”

Read more

Recommended Books ➤

📖 Life 3.0 — http://azon.ly/ij9u
📖 The Master Algorithm — http://azon.ly/excm
📖 Superintelligence — http://azon.ly/v8uf

This video is the twelfth and final in a multi-part series discussing computing. In this video, we’ll be discussing the future of computing, more specifically – the evolution of the field of computing and extrapolating forward based on topics we’ve discussed so far in this series!

[0:31–5:50] Starting off we’ll discuss, the 3 primary eras in the evolution of the field of computing since its inception, the: tabulating, programming and cognitive eras.

Afterwards, we’ll discuss infinite computing, a paradigm that incorporates cloud computing and the principles of heterogenous architecture that is accelerating the transition to cognitive computing.

Finally, to wrap up, we’ll discuss the future of computing, ubiquitous computing, fueled by the rise of abundant, affordable and smart computing devices, where computing is done using any device, in any location and in any format.

Read more

So what’s the catch?

For one, iPSCs can take months to make and the process is expensive. Furthermore, reverting cells back to a stem cell state wipes out their history, which is sometimes useful for studying disease progression.

In essence, iPSCs are the middlemen between one cell type and another. What if we could simply take out the middleman altogether?

Read more

A remarkable new study has successfully used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique to edit a specific gene in mice engineered to have fragile X syndrome (FXS), a single-gene disorder often related to autism. The single gene edit in the live mice resulted in significant improvements in repetitive and obsessive behaviors, making this the first time gene editing has been used to effectively target behavioral symptoms related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

FXS is a genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability, seizures and exaggerated repetitive behavior. Previous studies have shown that the repetitive behaviors associated with FXS are related to a specific excitatory receptor in the brain that, when dysregulated, causes exaggerated signaling between cells.

The CRISPR technique homes in on the gene that controls that excitatory receptor, the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5), and essentially disables it, dampening the excessive signaling the corresponds with repetitive behaviors. In mice treated with the new system, obsessive digging behavior was reduced by 30 percent and repetitive leaping actions dropped by 70 percent.

Read more

For the first time ever researchers have had a breakthrough in creating a cocktail of drugs that caused new neurons to grow in the brains of mice.

In my last article I gave a detailed account on the debate of neurogenesis. While some neuroscientists claim that neurogenesis takes place within the adult mammalian human brain other researchers contest that idea claiming that new neurons stop developing at a very young age. Whichever side of the debate you are on one thing remains certain, that there are neurological diseases that leave negative impacts on cognitive function. This has left researchers looking for various ways to treat Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other brain damage.

While the brain is incredibly complex and past research has failed to offer much hope for Alzheimer’s disease, Hongkui Deng at Paking University Health Science Center in China may finally be able to change that.

For the first time ever researchers have had a breakthrough in creating a cocktail of drugs that caused new neurons to grow in the brains of mice.

What this cocktail does when injected into the brain is it hijacks the astrocytes into behaving like new neurons. This is significant for a number of reasons. One important detail about astrocyte cells is that they can survive after a stroke while regular neurons die. Another important detail is that there are 10 times more astrocytes in the brain than neurons. That means that there are 1 trillion glia cells within the brain. So not only are they more resilient than neurons they outnumber them too.

Deng and his team of researchers have found that when the cocktail is injected into the brains of mice that it effectively gives the cell a new identity by erasing its old one and giving it a new one. Not only did the cells change shape but they showed change in gene activity too.

The results were substantial. While it remains speculative as to how closely the cells resemble normal neurons, around 80 to 90 per cent of the astrocytes started to resemble neurons and even mimicked their behavior by electrical signals the same way regular neurons do.

“They are unlikely to be a 100 percent match” Deng stated. “But the treatment was safe and none of the mice developed any health problems”.

Matthew Grubb at King’s College London states that “if it holds up it’s absolutely amazing, and has a lot of potential applications and exciting consequences. If you’ve got a degenerating brain, for example in Alzheimer’s disease, and you could get the brain to regrow neurons itself, it would be a huge step forward.”

The next step for the researchers will be to test the cocktail in mice that have had a stroke. The hope is that the cocktail will cause the astrocytes to behave as neurons and help the mice recover.

While Grubb admits it is difficult to predict the effects of the treatment in humans, if it works in mice then it offers new hope for those who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. While it is unlikely to bring back lost memories Grubb thinks it might restore the ability to create new ones.

Even though the research is promising there still remain challenges as Roger Barker at the University of Cambridge points out. The sheer numbers of cells lost in a neurodegenerative disease is something to consider. “In Parkinson’s, a quarter of a million cells are lost from either side of the brain. Currently Barker is conducting clinical trials of implants of brain tissue taken from aborted fetuses as a treatment for Parkinson’s.

Another challenge is to distinguish the types of neurons the drugs will make. As Grubb points out, if you make too many of the type of neurons that excites their neighbors you end up triggering epilepsy. Grubb also points out that different brain disorders effects different types of neurons which is another reason why we need to be capable of distinguishing them. The neurons that die from Parkinson’s are the neurons that create the chemical dopamine for example.

Another example is balancing the risks for rewards. As Grubb points out “you’d have to have extremely good control over what cells you’re programming, where they’re going to go, and which cells they’ll connect to. If the treatment were to be used to boost grey matter, for example, this could provide a way to improve skills like memory. However, too much grey matter has been linked to causing people to be being easily distracted.

While the research is definitely groundbreaking it is still in its early stages. Hopefully in the near future it will offer treatments to those who need them.

New Scientist

We have a ‘thirst for knowledge’ but sometime ‘ignorance is bliss’, so how do we choose between these two mind states at any given time?

UCL psychologists have discovered our brains use the same algorithm and neural architecture to evaluate the opportunity to gain information, as it does to evaluate rewards like food or money.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also finds that people will spend money to both obtain advance knowledge of a good upcoming event and to remain ignorant of an upcoming bad event.

Read more

Compare an analog and a digital audio recording medium. VHS video tape — an analog medium — stores a continuous curve of modulated audio/visual information. In a digital CD continuous audio is sliced into 44,100 frames a second, and represented by discrete numbers.

On playback the sounds are presented as continuous, much as the individual still frames of a motion picture appear continuous when played back fast enough. Most people can’t hear the difference between digital and analog recordings, me included, but those who say they do may spend thousands on turntables and tube amps to get the full analog experience.

From measurements, we know that neuron currents are continuous, not step functions. The important question is how is the information represented by these signals? Most psychological research assumes continuous or analog representation, but in the lengthy paper Is Information in the Brain Represented in Continuous or Discrete Form? James Tee and Desmond Taylor of the University of Canterbury make a strong theoretical and experimental case for digital data.

Read more

Ever watch ‘Your Brain on Blank’? Ever have a question about the brain? Then you’re in the right place. Join us as neuroscience Ph.D. candidate Shannon Odell takes a few minutes to answer some of the write-in questions from our viewers about how different stimuli affect your brain.

Read more