Lifeboat Foundation

We know the brain changes after traumatic injury, and now we have maps from mice showing what that change looks like.

A team of scientists has traced connections between nerve cells throughout the entire brain of mice, showing that distant parts of the brain become disconnected after a head injury.

The stunning visualizations of brain-wide connectivity could help scientists understand how a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, alters cross-talk between different cells and brain regions, first in mice and then in humans.

An Interview with COO Dijam Panigrahi.

“a unified and shared software infrastructure to empower enterprise customers to build and run scalable, high-quality eXtended Reality (XR) – Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) – applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds.”

What does that all mean?

Continue reading “GridRaster Uses the Metaverse to Build High Tech Prototypes and Finished Products” »

Update your world view. Excellent book.

Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.

New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes.

“We looked at the current knowledge of the configuration of plate boundary zones and the past construction of the continental crust,” said Dr. Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide who led the team that produced the new models.

Continue reading “New Understanding of Earth’s Architecture: Updated Maps of Tectonic Plates” »

Scientists have created the first reference charts for the human brain, mapping its growth from infancy to 100 years old. Now, they have to grapple with difficult ethical questions about how they should — and perhaps shouldn’t — be used.

The reference charts are visualizations created from aggregating analyses of over 120,000 brain scans to show ranges in brain size, or gray matter volume, for each age. They also track the human brain’s rapid expansion early in life and its gradual shrinking over time. The researchers primarily developed the charts to provide a standardized measurement that other neuroscientists could use for brain imaging research, with the hope that maybe one day it could lead to a tool used in clinics.

“It’s an absolutely spectacular advancement in neuroscience and neuroimaging,” said Judy Illes, professor of neurology and neuroethics at the University of British Columbia.

Shield AI, an artificial intelligence company focusing on drones and other autonomous aircraft, is on a mission to build “the world’s best AI pilot.” To that end, the San Diego startup has raised $90 million in equity and $75 million in debt as part of a Series E fundraising round. The funding values Shield AI at $2.3 billion.

Hivemind employs state-of-the-art algorithms for planning, mapping, and state-estimation to enable drones to execute dynamic flight maneuvers. On aircraft, Hivemind enables full autonomy and is designed to run fully on the edge, disconnected from the cloud, in high-threat GPS and communication-degraded environments.

Scientists are attempting to map the wiring of the nearly 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Are we close to uncovering the mysteries of the mind or are we only at the beginning of a new frontier?

PARTICIPANTS: Deanna Barch, Jeff Lichtman, Nim Tottenham, David Van Essen.
MODERATOR: John Hockenberry.
Original program date: JUNE 4, 2017

Continue reading “Cartographers of the Brain: Mapping the Connectome” »

Google’s AI division is creating digital versions of – normally hand-drawn – maps of electricity cables, in a move that could benefit the global utility industry.

The firm’s DeepMind engineers have partnered with UK Power Networks which delivers electricity across London, the East and South East, to create digital versions of maps covering more than 180,000km of electricity cables.

The work involves new image recognition software scanning thousands of maps – some of which date back decades – and automatically remastering them into a digital format for future use.

A team of researchers from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and the University of Dayton has developed a way to bend light into a vortex ring using mirrors, lasers and lenses. In their study, published in the journal Nature Photonics, the group built on work done by other teams in which vortex rings were observed incidentally, and then mathematically designed a system that could generate them on demand.

In 2016, another team of researchers discovered that under the right circumstances, strong pulses of light swirling around a central pipe-shaped pulse, could sometimes form into a donut-shaped vortex. Intrigued by the finding, the researchers with this new effort began to wonder if it might be possible to create such vortex rings on demand.

They started by studying the properties and conditions that had led to the formations observed by the team in 2016 and applied mathematics to the problem. They found solutions that appeared to show how such rings could be made—solutions to Maxwell’s equations, in particular, they found, could be used to generate the kind of conformal mapping required.