Economist Robin Hanson says we’re on the brink of a strange new era. Read an excerpt of “The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth” below.
Eugene Sergeev / Shutterstock.
What will the next great era be like, after the eras of foraging, farming, and industry?
New keys unlock how words are stored in our brains.
Researchers have created a new map of the human brain which shows where we organize words depending on their meaning—and it could help us read minds more accurately than ever.
Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, have published an interactive version of the map online. It allows you to explore the whole brain, clicking around to see where different types of words—from social and spatial, to violent and visual—are stored.
The team constructed the maps by playing seven different participants a two-hour chunk of The Moth Radio Hour while scanning their brains using functional MRI. The brain scans showed how the oxygen levels in blood across the brain changed, and this data was then used as a measure of how active a particular part of the brain was.
What if a map of the brain could help us decode people’s inner thoughts?
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have taken a step in that direction by building a “semantic atlas” that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.
The findings, to be published April 28, 2016 in the journal Nature, are based on a brain imaging study that recorded neural activity while study volunteers listened to stories from the “Moth Radio Hour.” They show that at least one-third of the brain’s cerebral cortex, including areas dedicated to high-level cognition, is involved in language processing.
Talk about changing everything that we thought about the brain and learning.
A new study from the University of Toulouse found that intelligence and learning aren’t limited to organisms with brains. By studying the mold Physarum polycephalum they found it can, over time, learn to navigate even irritating environments.
We definitely need precision medicine. If you don’t believe it is worth that; then I have a few widows & widowers who you should speak to; I have parents that you should speak with; I have a list of sisters & brothers that you should speak with; and I have many many friends (including me) that you should speak with about how we miss those we love because things like precision medicine wasn’t available and could have saved their lives.
Precision medicine is the theme for the 10th annual symposium of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Nano Biotechnology, Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9 a.m. in the Owens Auditorium at the School of Medicine. This year’s event is cohosted by Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative (also known as Hopkins in Health) and features several in Health affiliated speakers.
By developing treatments that overcome the limitations of the one-size-fits-all mindset, precision medicine will more effectively prevent and thwart disease. Driven by data provided from sources such as electronic medical records, public health investigations, clinical studies, and from patients themselves through new point-of-care assays, wearable sensors and smartphone apps, precision medicine will become the gold standard of care in the not-so-distant future. Before long, we will be able to treat and also prevent diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and cancer with regimes that are tailor-made for the individual.
Hopkins in Health is a signature initiative of Johns Hopkins University’s $4.5 billion Rising to the Challenge campaign is a collaboration among three institutions: the University, the Johns Hopkins Health System, and the Applied Physics Laboratory. These in Health researchers combine clinical, genetic, lifestyle, and other data sources to create innovative tools intended to improve decision-making in the prevention and treatment of a range of conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and infectious disease. The goal is to “provide the right care to the right person at the right time.”
The longer you gaze at this depiction of the hidden architecture of the universe, the more you can’t help but notice how similar it looks to neurons communicating with each other in the human brain.
3D interactive visualization lets users explore the vast, hidden structure of the universe.
By Amanda Montañez on April 14, 2016.
BOSTON: In an intriguing approach to the fight against cancer, researchers for the first time have used light to prevent and reverse tumors using a technique called optogenetics to manipulate electrical signaling in cells.
Scientists at Tufts University performed optogenetics experiments on frogs, often used in basic research into cancer because of the biological similarities in their tumors to those in mammals, to test whether this method already used in brain and nervous system research could be applied to cancer.
“We call this whole research program cracking the bioelectric code,” said biologist Michael Levin, who heads the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.
