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Recently published neuroimaging research provides evidence that the directional connectivity between several brain regions plays an important role in emotional processing abilities.

Although interest in emotional intelligence has been steadily growing since the 1990s, the underlying neural mechanisms behind it have yet to be clearly established. The new study, which appears in NeuroImage, is part of a process to begin to fill in this gap in scientific knowledge.

“Emotional intelligence is one of the least studied topics, especially in conjunction with cutting-edge computational neuroimaging techniques,” explained lead researcher Sahil Bajaj, the director of the Multimodal Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Boys Town National Research Hospital.

China laid out seven “frontier” technologies in its 14th Five Year Plan. These are areas that China will focus research on and include semiconductors and brain-computer fusion.

Yuichiro chino | moment | getty images.

However, such work is already underway in the U.S. at Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. Musk is working on implantable brain-chip interfaces to connect humans and computers.

There is considerable debate over whether plants are conscious and this, indeed, is an important question. Here I look at developments in neuroscience, physics and mathematics that may impact on this question. Two major concomitants of consciousness in animals are microtubule function and electrical gamma wave synchrony. Both these factors may also play a role in plant consciousness. I show that plants possess aperiodic quasicrystal structures composed of ribosomes that may enable quantum computing, which has been suggested to lie at the core of animal consciousness. Finally I look at whether a microtubule fractal suggests that electric current plays a part in conventional neurocomputing processes in plants.

Ranjan KC

| Phononic crystals as a nanomechanical computing platform.


Without electronics and photonics, there would be no computers, smartphones, sensors, or information and communication technologies. In the coming years, the new field of phononics may further expand these options. That field is concerned with understanding and controlling lattice vibrations (phonons) in solids. In order to realize phononic devices, however, lattice vibrations have to be controlled as precisely as commonly realized in the case of electrons or photons.