Longevity science

Activating an enzyme known to play a role in the anti-aging benefits of calorie restriction delays the loss of brain cells and preserves cognitive function in mice, according to a study published in the May 22 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The findings could one day guide researchers to discover drug alternatives that slow the progress of age-associated impairments in the brain.

Working with bioengineers and neurosurgeons, Daniel Lim, a neurosurgeon and stem-cell scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has designed a needle that bends for for delivering stem cells to the brain,  Nature News reports.

The device can deposit cells anywhere within a 2-centimetre radius along a track, a volume bigger than an entire mouse brain.

What if you could read my mind? What if I could beam what I’m seeing, hearing, and thinking, straight to you, and vice versa? What if an implant could store your memories, augment them, and make you smarter?

Long the stuff of science fiction, technology that can directly tap into, augment, and connect human brains is becoming science fact. And that means big changes for all of us.

Building a vast digital simulation of the brain could transform neuroscience and medicine and reveal new ways of making more powerful computers.

Reductionist biology—examining individual brain parts, neural circuits and molecules—has brought us a long way, but it alone cannot explain the workings of the human brain, an information processor within our skull that is perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the universe. We must construct as well as reduce and build as well as dissect. To do that, we need a new paradigm

“Neuroscience — one of the greatest challenges facing science and engineering — is at a crossroads. …There exist few general theories or principles that explain brain function [due partly to] limitations in current methodologies,” say neuroscientists in a new ACS Nano open-access paper, “Nanotools for Neuroscience and Brain Activity Mapping.”

Many forward-thinking scientists are looking into solutions that would strengthen the brain by reinforcing its neurons with non-biological neurons made from carbon nanotubes.

These new artificial neurons would not only act as electrical bypass circuitry, giving patients a ‘fail-safe’ system should their brain become damaged, but would also enhance performance of healthy cells, providing ‘superhuman’ brain functions. Thoughts could be processed millions of times faster.

Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth believes that he can live forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. But first he has to die.

“The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body,” he says.

He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin — before he dies of natural causes.