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Category: food

Learning and motivation are driven by internal and external rewards. Many of our day-to-day behaviours are guided by predicting, or anticipating, whether a given action will result in a positive (that is, rewarding) outcome. The study of how organisms learn from experience to correctly anticipate rewards has been a productive research field for well over a century, since Ivan Pavlov’s seminal psychological work. In his most famous experiment, dogs were trained to expect food some time after a buzzer sounded. These dogs began salivating as soon as they heard the sound, before the food had arrived, indicating they’d learned to predict the reward. In the original experiment, Pavlov estimated the dogs’ anticipation by measuring the volume of saliva they produced. But in recent decades, scientists have begun to decipher the inner workings of how the brain learns these expectations. Meanwhile, in close contact with this study of reward learning in animals, computer scientists have developed algorithms for reinforcement learning in artificial systems. These algorithms enable AI systems to learn complex strategies without external instruction, guided instead by reward predictions.

The contribution of our new work, published in Nature (PDF), is finding that a recent development in computer science – which yields significant improvements in performance on reinforcement learning problems – may provide a deep, parsimonious explanation for several previously unexplained features of reward learning in the brain, and opens up new avenues of research into the brain’s dopamine system, with potential implications for learning and motivation disorders.

Reinforcement learning is one of the oldest and most powerful ideas linking neuroscience and AI. In the late 1980s, computer science researchers were trying to develop algorithms that could learn how to perform complex behaviours on their own, using only rewards and punishments as a teaching signal. These rewards would serve to reinforce whatever behaviours led to their acquisition. To solve a given problem, it’s necessary to understand how current actions result in future rewards. For example, a student might learn by reinforcement that studying for an exam leads to better scores on tests. In order to predict the total future reward that will result from an action, it’s often necessary to reason many steps into the future.

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From river-clogging plants to disease-carrying insects, the direct economic cost of invasive species worldwide has averaged about $35 billion a year for decades, researchers said Monday.

Since 1960, damage from non-native plants and animals expanding into new territory has cost society more than $2.2 trillion, more than 16 times higher than previous estimates, they reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The accelerating spread of —from mosquitoes to to tough-to-eradicate plants—blights agriculture, spreads disease and drives the growing pace of species extinction.

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Forget the gym—living longer could hinge on simple daily habits. Dr. Gareth Nye emphasizes whole-day activity, clean eating, quality sleep, and genetic awareness as the real drivers of longevity. Standing desks, frozen veggies, and knowing your family health risks might be more effective than intense workouts in boosting life expectancy and preventing chronic illness.

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Kurzweil co-founded Beyond Imagination in 2018 with Harry Floor, a scientist and film producer, to develop autonomous A.I. systems capable of physical labor. The company is building humanoid robots aimed at addressing labor shortages in sectors such as health care and agriculture. Its advisory board includes motivational speaker Tony Robbins, former Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and former Paramount Pictures CEO James Gianopulos.

Between 2018 and 2019, the startup raised $4.2 million in seed funding and was most recently valued at $25 million, per Crunchbase. Reuters reported that its upcoming valuation could reach $500 million, with Gauntlet Ventures—a Dallas-based venture capital firm—expected to be the sole investor in the new round.

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Lassi Rautiainen is a Finnish photographer who captured photographs of a unique friendship between a female grey wolf and a male brown bear. The two buddies were seen every night for ten consecutive days. They spend a few hours together between 8. p.m. and 4. a.m. The wolf and the bear even share food with one another.

Apparently, it is very rare to observe a wolf and a bear getting along this well. It is unsure as to how and why the two creatures became friends in the first place. Lassi assumes that the wolf and the bear felt lonely and weren’t very sure as to how to survive on their own. They were also young so they must have found it nice to share the rare events that occur in the wild.

Lassi was glad to have come across these two friends because it made the perfect story. He felt as if the wolf and the bear found it safe being together. “No one had observed bears and wolves living near each other and becoming friends in Europe” he expressed. This unlikeliest of friendships is sure to inspire us all.

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Ultra-processed foods now dominate the food supplies of high-income countries, with over 50% of energy intake coming from ultra-processed foods in the United States. Observational data has revealed that greater ultra-processed food consumption is associated with adverse mental health outcomes, while data from randomized controlled trials has demonstrated improvements to mental health following reduction in ultra-processed food intake. Ultra-processed foods are known to contain high concentrations of microplastics, largely due to both the processing and packing procedures. In light of recent findings which demonstrated alarming microplastic concentrations in the human brain, we propose that microplastics may partially mediate the adverse mental health effects of increasing ultra-processed food intake. In this viewpoint, we discuss the overlapping mechanisms for adverse mental health, paucity of research in the area, and propose a Dietary Microplastic Index (DMI) to study this potential relationship.

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Higher intakes of black tea, berries, citrus fruits and apples could help to promote healthy ageing, new research has found.

This study conducted by researchers from Edith Cowan University, Queen’s University Belfast and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that foods rich in flavonoids could help to lower the risk of key components of unhealthy ageing, including frailty, impaired physical function and poor mental health.

“The goal of medical research is not just to help people live longer but to ensure they stay healthy for as long as possible,” ECU Adjunct Lecturer Dr Nicola Bondonno said.

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Researchers in Australia are working on a way to lower the cost of producing solar thermal energy by as much as 40% with the help of shatterproof rear-view mirrors originally designed for cars.

That could be huge for agriculture and industrial facilities which need large amounts of heat for large-scale processes at temperatures between 212 — 754 °F (100 — 400 °C). That addresses food production, drying crops, grain and pulse drying, sterilizing soil and treating wastewater on farms; industrial applications include producing chemicals, making paper, desalinating water, and dyeing textiles.

A quick refresher in case you’re out of the loop: solar thermal energy and conventional solar energy (photovoltaic) systems both harvest sunlight, but they work in fundamentally different ways. Solar thermal setups capture the Sun’s heat rather than its light, use reflectors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, and convert solar radiation directly into heat energy. This heat can be used directly for heating buildings, water, or the aforementioned industrial processes.

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University of New Mexico researchers studying the health risks posed by gadolinium, a toxic rare earth metal used in MRI scans, have found that oxalic acid, a molecule found in many foods, can generate nanoparticles of the metal in human tissues.

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A research team from the School of Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has developed a new computational model to study the movement of granular materials such as soils, sands and powders. By integrating the dynamic interactions among particles, air and water phases, this state-of-the-art system can accurately predict landslides, improve irrigation and oil extraction systems, and enhance food and drug production processes.

The flow of granular materials—such as soil, sand and powders used in pharmaceuticals and food production—is the underlying mechanism governing many natural settings and industrial operations. Understanding how these particles interact with surrounding fluids like water and air is crucial for predicting behaviors such as soil collapse or fluid leakage.

However, existing models face challenges in accurately capturing these interactions, especially in partially saturated conditions where forces like and viscosity come into play.

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