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We’ve found an icy new super-Earth that’s orbiting our closest single star

SpiNNaker was built under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber at The University of Manchester, a principal designer of two products that earned the Queen’s Award for Technology —the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, and the BBC Microcomputer.

“The ultimate objective for the project has always been a million cores in a single computer for real time brain modelling applications, and we have now achieved it, which is fantastic.” — Professor Steve Furber, The University of Manchester

Inspired by the human brain, the SpiNNaker is capable of sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously. The SpiNNaker has a staggering 1 million processors that are able to perform over 200 million actions per second.

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Dataset bridges human vision and machine learning

Neuroscience, computer vision collaborate to better understand visual information processing PITTSBURGH—Neuroscientists and computer vision scientists say a new dataset of unprecedented size — comprising brain scans of four volunteers who each viewed 5,000 images — will help researchers better understand how the brain processes images. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Fordham University, reporting today in the journal Scientific Data, said acquiring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans at this scale presented unique challenges. Each volunteer participated in 20 or more hours of MRI scanning, challenging both their perseverance and the experimenters’ ability to coordinate across scanning sessions. The extreme.


I am Human

will be premiering at Tribeca Film Festival in New York.


For the past two years, I have been involved with a documentary on the future of the brain. As announced today in Wired, I’m excited to share that the film, I AM HUMAN, will be premiering at Tribeca Film Festival today in New York! Here is a sneak peek.

The movie follows three people – a woman with Parkinson’s, a quadraplegic, and a blind man – and their journeys with implantable brain interfaces. The film is inspiring, invites fresh reflection on this unique historical moment, and promises to kickstart an important dialogue around our shared future.

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