The neurotransmitter dopamine has often been linked to pleasure-seeking behaviors and making stimuli paired with rewards (e.g., food, drinks) valuable. Nonetheless, the processes through which this key chemical messenger contributes to learning have not yet been fully elucidated.
Space lovers have an opportunity to watch two unique occurrences at the International Space Station this week, but you will have to stay up pretty late — or wake up very early — to see them live.
According to NASA, the cargo spacecraft carrying three tons of food, fuel and supplies to the ISS is for the Expedition 71 crew.
The unpiloted spacecraft – called Progress 88 – is scheduled to launch on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 2:43 p.m. local time.
It’s a Saturday afternoon at a kids’ birthday party. Hordes of children are swarming between the spread of birthday treats and party games. Half-eaten cupcakes, biscuits and lollies litter the floor, and the kids seem to have gained superhuman speed and bounce-off-the-wall energy.
But is sugar to blame?
The belief that eating sugary foods and drinks leads to hyperactivity has steadfastly persisted for decades. And parents have curtailed their children’s intake accordingly.
Our guest in this episode is Dr. Mark Kotter. Mark is a neurosurgeon, stem cell biologist, and founder or co-founder of three biotech start-up companies that have collectively raised hundreds of millions of pounds: bit.bio, clock.bio, and Meatable.
In addition, Mark still conducts neurosurgeries on patients weekly at the University of Cambridge.
We talk to Mark about all his companies, but we start by discussing Meatable, one of the leading companies in the cultured meat sector. This is an area of technology which should have a far greater impact than most people are aware of, and it’s an area we haven’t covered before in the podcast.
Selected follow-ups:
Lowtek Games combined the multifunctionality of a screen with the beauty of a pop-up book in a unique project that will take your imagination to another level. Codenamed Lowtek Lightbook, this interactive experience allows you to not only read stories but also play various games.
For example, you can color pictures with digital paints, find hidden objects, run away from aliens, or deliver food to them – all thanks to projection mapping and Lowtek Games’ clever thinking. Moreover, the story of Bib Goes Home can be even more engaging if you manually make Bib go home and explore his surroundings using a controller and a projector.
Users simply register by taking a selfie and then verify their identity and payment transaction by looking at the restaurant’s camera, according to CNBC.
In essence, it acts very similar to Apple’s Face ID.
The Cali-based software company explained the tech on its website, reading: ‘PopID is the universal gateway for verifying an individual’s identity based on their face for applications such as loyalty and payment.’
Dead stars known as white dwarfs, have a mass like the sun while being similar in size to Earth. They are common in our galaxy, as 97% of stars are white dwarfs. As stars reach the end of their lives, their cores collapse into the dense ball of a white dwarf, making our galaxy seem like an ethereal graveyard.
Despite their prevalence, the chemical makeup of these stellar remnants has been a conundrum for astronomers for years. The presence of heavy metal elements—like silicon, magnesium, and calcium—on the surface of many of these compact objects is a perplexing discovery that defies our expectations of stellar behavior.
“We know that if these heavy metals are present on the surface of the white dwarf, the white dwarf is dense enough that these heavy metals should very quickly sink toward the core,” explains JILA graduate student Tatsuya Akiba. “So, you shouldn’t see any metals on the surface of a white dwarf unless the white dwarf is actively eating something.”
Imagine a technology that could genetically rewire organisms in real-time, silencing critical genes across entire ecosystems with unknown effects.
Understanding the biological processes of getting older could help us lead longer lives, and stay healthier later in life – and a new study links the speed at which our brain ages with the nutrients in our diets.
Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln mapped brain scans against nutritional intake for 100 volunteers aged between 65 and 75, looking for connections between certain diets and slower brain aging.
They identified two distinct types of brain aging – and the slower paced aging was associated with nutrient intake similar to what you would get from the Mediterranean diet, shown in previous studies to be one of the best for our bodies.
All sensations—hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love—are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have. Consequently we know that an LLM cannot have subjective experiences of those states. In other words, it cannot be sentient.
An LLM is a mathematical model coded on silicon chips. It is not an embodied being like humans. It does not have a “life” that needs to eat, drink, reproduce, experience emotion, get sick, and eventually die.
It is important to understand the profound difference between how humans generate sequences of words and how an LLM generates those same sequences. When I say “I am hungry,” I am reporting on my sensed physiological states. When an LLM generates the sequence “I am hungry,” it is simply generating the most probable completion of the sequence of words in its current prompt. It is doing exactly the same thing as when, with a different prompt, it generates “I am not hungry,” or with yet another prompt, “The moon is made of green cheese.” None of these are reports of its (nonexistent) physiological states. They are simply probabilistic completions.
