Lifeboat Foundation

There’s an old saying in neuroscience: “neurons that fire together wire together.” This means the more you run a neuro-circuit in your brain, the stronger that circuit becomes. This is why, to quote another old saw, “practice makes perfect”. The more you practice piano, or speaking a language, or juggling, the stronger those circuits get.

Scientists have known this for years. However, nowadays researchers learn another part of the truth: In order to learn something, even more important than practicing is the ability to unlearn, or to break down the old neural connections. This is called “synaptic pruning”.

Wonder how much this would be really true.

What would happen if everyone in the world had an IQ score over 200 points? This is a type of intelligence that only comes along every so often. An IQ level of 200 is as high, or higher, than the theoretical IQs of history’s greatest minds like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Isaac Newton.

In recent research published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, Northwestern Medicine scientists identified a new pathway in the brain that can be manipulated to alleviate depression.

The pathway offers a promising new target for developing a drug that could be effective in individuals for whom other antidepressants have failed.

New antidepressant options are important because a significant number of patients don’t adequately improve with currently available antidepressant drugs.

Continue reading “Scientists find new path in brain to ease depression” »

Slime mold, a unicellular organism living in forest litter, offers a curious case of learning without a brain. This blob-like creeping organism learns from experience and imparts the knowledge to peers.

New version of this out: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/01/02/americas-r…-cold-war/ #transhumanism #biohacking

Unlike other epic scientific advances…the immediate effect of genetic editing technology is not dangerous. Yet, it stands to be just as divisive to humans as the 70-year proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

The playing field of geopolitics is pretty simple: If China or another country vows to increase its children’s intelligence via genetic editing, and America chooses to remain “au naturel” because they insist that’s how God made them, a conflict species-deep will quickly arise.

Continue reading “America’s refusal to embrace gene editing could start the next Cold War” »

In a breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have grown intestinal tissues with functional nerves in a laboratory setup using human pluripotent stem cells. The synthesized tissue was used to study Hirschsprung’s disease, a congenital condition where nerve cells are missing from the colon, causing complications in passing stool. The research is detailed in Nature Medicine.

A pluripotent stem cell is a precursor cell to all the other types of cells in the body. In a petri dish, the stem cells were treated in a biochemical bath that triggered the formation into intestinal tissue. The novel part of the study was the construction of a nervous system on the intestinal organoid. The researchers manipulated neural crest cells to grow a system of nerves. By putting together the neural crest cells and the intestinal tissue at the exact time, they successfully grew together into a complex functional system.

The tissues were transplanted into mice. They worked successfully and showed a structure “remarkably similar” to that of a natural human intestine.

Continue reading “Regenerative Medicine: Scientists Have Successfully Engineered Functioning Human Nerves” »

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Every business is becoming a technology business and nowhere is that truer than in the financial services industry, now as banks try to compete with start ups and established technology companies for tech talent they could find themselves getting into warm water…

This could be a huge deal, a game changer even.

Definitely research to follow closely.

Continue reading “Immune cells in covering of brain discovered; may play critical role in battling neurological diseases” »

Some of the most famous artists in history may have left subtle clues to brain disease in their work, scientists have found.