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Category: neuroscience

Primarily talking about CRISPR.

Daisy Robinton explores bioengineering and its potential to end ageing.

“The use of gene-editing technology paired with the dropping cost of genome sequencing and analysis is greatly facilitating our ability to understand the functional and mechanistic impact of those genetic mutations on diseases caused by mutations in DNA sequence,” she says.

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Beets are a common sweetening ingredient in the juices you’ll find at most health food stores, but a recent study found another reason to drink the bright red juice: It has anti-aging benefits.

Researchers at Wake Forest University knew that exercise has positive anti-aging effects on the brain, and were looking for ways to increase those benefits.

“What we showed in this brief training study of hypertensive older adults was that, as compared to exercise alone, adding a beet root juice supplement to exercise resulted in brain connectivity that closely resembles what you see in younger adults,” W. Jack Rejeski, co-author of the study, told EurekAlert.

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“Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second. The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world — speech — can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

At Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, on Wednesday, the group unveiled what may be Facebook’s most ambitious—and creepiest—proposal yet. Facebook wants to build its own “brain-to-computer interface” that would allow us to send thoughts straight to a computer.

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(credit: Facebook)

Regina Dugan, PhD, Facebook VP of Engineering, Building8, revealed today (April 19, 2017) at Facebook F8 conference 2017 a plan to develop a non-invasive brain-computer interface that will let you type at 100 wpm — by decoding neural activity devoted to speech.

Dugan previously headed Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group, and before that, was Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

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Like islands jutting out of a smooth ocean surface, dreams puncture our sleep with disjointed episodes of consciousness. How states of awareness emerge from a sleeping brain has long baffled scientists and philosophers alike.

For decades, scientists have associated dreaming with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a sleep stage in which the resting brain paradoxically generates high-frequency brain waves that closely resemble those of when we’re awake.

Yet dreaming isn’t exclusive to REM sleep. A series of oddball reports also found signs of dreaming during non-REM deep sleep, when the brain is dominated by slow-wave activity—the opposite of an alert, active, conscious brain.

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Scientists hope they have found a drug to stop all neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia. In 2013, a UK Medical Research Council team stopped brain cells dying in an animal for the first time, creating headline news around the world. But the compound used was unsuitable for people, as it caused organ damage. Now two drugs have been found that should have the same protective effect on the brain and are already safely used in people. “It’s really exciting,” said Prof Giovanna Mallucci, from the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester. She wants to start human clinical trials on dementia patients soon and expects to know whether the drugs work within two to three years.

Why might they work?

The novel approach is focused on the natural defence mechanisms built into brain cells.

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Facebook today unveiled a project from its secretive Building 8 research group that’s working to create a brain-computer interface that lets you type with your thoughts. Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA and the ex-head of Google’s experimental ATAP research group, announced the news today onstage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference. Dugan, who now heads up Building 8, says the goal is “something as simple as a yes-no brain click” that could fundamentally change how we interact with and use technology. While it does not exist today outside of very specific medical research trials, Dugan says her team is actively working to make it a reality.

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In the past 10 years, the best-performing artificial-intelligence systems—such as the speech recognizers on smartphones or Google’s latest automatic translator—have resulted from a technique called “deep learning.”

Deep learning is in fact a new name for an approach to artificial intelligence called neural networks, which have been going in and out of fashion for more than 70 years. Neural networks were first proposed in 1944 by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts, two University of Chicago researchers who moved to MIT in 1952 as founding members of what’s sometimes called the first cognitive science department.

Neural nets were a major area of research in both neuroscience and computer science until 1969, when, according to computer science lore, they were killed off by the MIT mathematicians Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, who a year later would become co-directors of the new MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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