Whoever told you that money cannot buy happiness is bat shit crazy, because Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen is living an extraordinary life. On Wednesday, Forbes reported Allen is donating $300 million of his $14 billion fortune in his eponymous Allen Institute for Brain Science to fund new projects to map and observe the human brain and, in Allen’s words, “to one day understand the essence of what makes us human.” That brings the total amount Allen has invested in the Institute to $500 million. The announcement was made at a press conference today in Seattle and in a commentary in Nature, one of the world’s best scientific journals, written by Christof Koch, the Institute’s Chief Scientific Officer, and R. Clay Reid of Harvard Medical School. They lay out a way of doing brain research that involves optogenetics, a kind of deep stimulation of the brain using light, connectomics, the study of connections in the brain, and brain observatories, ways of monitoring what happens in the brain in real time.

Allen said he’s not interested in collecting intellectual property. The goal is to create open science at an industrial scale. The institute says that every month 50,000 scientists access its brain map data. “We know that such an expensive project will have critics,” Koch and Reid write. “The resources required could fund hundreds of other projects, so why focus them in this way? Our response is that funding agencies are already spending billions of dollars on many smaller projects across all areas of biomedical research, and the Allen Institute wants to pioneer a new approach. We want to understand one piece of brain tissue by integrating knowledge across techniques and scales, rather than distributing the funds more widely.” Ed Boyden, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab who is one of the pioneers in the field of optogenetics, echoed that sentiment. “The Allen Institute is assembling an extraordinary set of tools to tackle brain circuitry in a vertically integrated way, from the parts lists to how they all work together,” he wrote via Facebook chat. “It is impossible for an ordinary lab group to bring all these pieces together.”

Allen’s remarks are eloquent, inspiring, and incredibly powerful, and Forbes has included them in their feature article which you can read by visiting Forbes.com. To learn more about the extraordinary work being done by Paul Allen’s institute be sure to visit AllenInstitute.org. For more fascinating stories about the human brain you can visit The Human Brain on FEELguide.

Sources: Jason Silva on Facebook and Forbes

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The WOW Files: Billionaire Paul Allen Pouring $500M Into Quest To Find Essence Of Humanity In Brain

AT&T improperly received millions of dollars from a government reimbursement fund by ignoring fraudulent use of the IP Relay call system provided free of charge to hearing- and speech-impaired US residents, the US government alleged this week.

“The United States brings this action to recover millions of dollars that have been paid to Defendant AT&T for its improper handling and billing of thousands of Internet Protocol Relay calls made by Nigerian and other international users seeking to defraud merchants in the United States,” the US said in a complaint filed yesterday in US District Court in Western Pennsylvania.

The US government reimburses IP Relay providers $1.30 per minute, but calls originating outside the US and calls made by people without a hearing impairment are ineligible for reimbursement. IP Relay allows hearing-impaired users to place phone calls by typing messages into an Internet-based system. The messages are relayed to the intended recipient by assistants employed by AT&T and other providers. The FCC started requiring providers to verify the accuracy of each user’s name and mailing address in 2009, but AT&T found a way to skirt the rules, the Justice Department said.

“The complaint alleges that, out of fears that fraudulent call volume would drop after the registration deadline, AT&T knowingly adopted a non-compliant registration system that did not verify whether the user was located within the United States,” Justice officials said in a press release. “The complaint further contends that AT&T continued to employ this system even with the knowledge that it facilitated use of IP Relay by fraudulent foreign callers, which accounted for up to 95 percent of AT&T’s call volume. The government’s complaint alleges that AT&T improperly billed the TRS (Telecommunications Relay Services) Fund for reimbursement of these calls and received millions of dollars in federal payments as a result.”

In a statement e-mailed to Ars, AT&T said it follows the FCC’s rules. “AT&T has followed the FCC’s rules for providing IP Relay services for disabled customers and for seeking reimbursement for those services,” AT&T spokesperson Marty Richter said. “As the FCC is aware, it is always possible for an individual to misuse IP Relay services, just as someone can misuse the postal system or an email account, but FCC rules require that we complete all calls by customers who identify themselves as disabled.” AT&T’s statement did not say whether it verified the location of users as required by the government.

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AT&T collected millions from taxpayers in fraudulent charges, US says

Zothecula writes “While it’s generally accepted that memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains, the exact process has never been entirely understood. Strengthened synaptic connections between neurons definitely have something to do with it, although the synaptic membranes involved are constantly degrading and being replaced – this seems to be somewhat at odds with the fact that some memories can last for a person’s lifetime. Now, a team of scientists believe that they may have figured out what’s going on. Their findings could have huge implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers May Have Discovered How Memories Are Encoded In the Brain

The US Senate passed amended legislation to allow legalized “crowdfunding” today. The CROWDFUND Act (Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure) was approved by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio, 73-26.

With the act’s passage, companies would be required to use SEC-approved crowdfunding platforms that provide investor protection. This is an addition to the House of Representatives’ JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act. Both bills have bipartisan support, with the main business concern being low investment barriers could encourage fraud. Hopefully, the Senate’s amendments address that exact issue.

Under the new legislation, yearly crowdfunding is capped at $1 million per year for businesses. Investors will also have their contributions capped based on income, with some people only allowed a maximum of $2,000. The House and Senate bills have yet to be reconciled and signed, but crowdfunding outlets like Crowdfunder already claim $13.55 million is waiting to be committed to more than 900 companies.

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Senate passes legislation to legalize crowdfunding

Until January, Megaupload was a major customer of Carpathia Hosting. Now Megaupload is facing a federal indictment, and its servers have become a major burden for Carpathia.

Carpathia is the proud owners of 1,103 servers with approximately 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on them. The government seized Megaupload’s assets, so the firm can’t pay its bills and Carpathia has cancelled Megaupload’s service contract. But Carpathia hasn’t been able to reuse the servers for other customers because doing so might interfere with the Megaupload court case or invite lawsuits from Megaupload customers who lose data as a result.

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ISP: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

The ”dizzying” success of the doodling app Draw Something was underscored Wednesday when news broke that gaming titan Zynga was purchasing the company behind the app, New York-based OMGPOP, for over $200 million. Here, a look at the numbers behind the popular new app:

20.5 million – daily active Draw Something users

3 billion – total drawings since the game was released seven weeks ago

$250,000 – Net profit Draw Something earns per day (after Apple’s 30 percent cut)

9 – years it took for AOL to hit 1 million users

9 – days it took for Draw Something to hit 1 million users

More numbers here

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The ”dizzying” success of the doodling app Draw…