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A Chinese company says it’s successfully developed a brain chip and implanted it into a monkey — who can now remotely control a robot arm with the device.

That’s according to state-run news media outfit Xinhua, putting Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink on notice that there will be international as well as domestic competition for his brain-computer interface venture.

The company, Beijing Xinzhida Neurotechnology, which is backed by the Chinese government, unveiled its device, the NeuCyber Array BMI (brain-machine interface) System at a technology convention in Beijing on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Russellian monism is a theory in the metaphysics of mind, on which a single set of properties underlies both consciousness and the most basic entities posited by physics. The theory is named for Bertrand Russell, whose views about consciousness and its place in nature were informed by a structuralist conception of theoretical physics. On such a structuralist conception, physics describes the world in terms of its spatiotemporal structure and dynamics (changes within that structure) and says nothing about what, if anything, underlies that structure and dynamics. For example, as it is sometimes put, physics describes what mass and charge do, e.g., how they dispose objects to move toward or away from each other, but not what mass and charge are. Thus, Russell writes the following about the events physics describes:

All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (Russell 1959: 18)

Continue reading “Russellian Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)” »

For the first time, researchers have simulated neurological junctions called synapses using the same water and salt ingredients the brain uses, contributing to an emerging field that combines biology with electronics called iontronics.

The team from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Sogang University in South Korea claim to have been inspired by the functioning of the human brain, which also uses charged particles called ions dissolved in water to transmit signals within neurons.

An important feature of the brain’s ability to process information is synaptic plasticity, which allows neurons to adjust the strength of connections between them in response to input history.

A new review of research evidence has explored the key differences in how women and men sleep, variations in their body clocks, and how this affects their metabolism.

Dennett consciousness quining qualia.

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Is consciousness nothing more than an illusion? That idea defined the work of Daniel Dennett (1942–2024)

By John Horgan

Philosopher Daniel Dennett died a few days ago, on April 19. When he argued that we overrate consciousness, he demonstrated, paradoxically, how conscious he was, and he made his audience more conscious.

Researchers from the University of Cologne and the University of Würzburg have discovered through training studies that individuals can improve their ability to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar words, enhancing reading efficiency. Recognizing words is necessary to understand the meaning of a text. When we read, we move our eyes very efficiently and quickly from word to word. This reading flow is interrupted when we encounter a word we do not know, a situation common when learning a new language.

The words of the new language might have yet to be comprehended in their entirety, and language-specific peculiarities in spelling still need to be internalized. The team of psychologists led by junior professor Dr. Benjamin Gagl from the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Human Sciences has now found a method to optimize this process.

The current research results were published in npj Science of Learning under the title ‘Investigating lexical categorization in reading based on joint diagnostic and training approaches for language learners’. Starting in May, follow-up studies extending the training program will be carried out within a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The dynamic characteristics of the inverters have been simulated by varying the inverter output (load) capacitance (C_OUT), connected to the inverter output across a 1000 nm long interconnect (assumed for simulations of the NM circuit, described in “NM circuit” subsection), from 1 aF to 1 fF. By evaluating the delay \(({t}_{{{{{{\rm{p}}}}}}})\) of the input-to-outpution, and the instantaneous current drawn from the supply during thision, the average power dissipation, and the energy-delay-product (EDP), is evaluated for both the 2D-TFET and the FinFET implementations. The higher delay of the 2D-TFET (due to its lower ON-current) translates to higher EDP, and the EDP metrics get worse as the load capacitance is further increased. In fact, as will be shown later, the main advantages of TFETs are in implementations of sparse switching circuits where its much lower OFF-current and small SS help in lowering the static power dissipation, thereby improving the overall performance.

Figure 2c shows an 11-stage ring oscillator, implemented considering both interconnect and device parasitics, and designed with minimum sized 2D-TFET and FinFET inverters. Figure 2 d, e compares the transient characteristics of the FinFET and the 2D-TFET ring oscillators, from which the frequency of oscillation is extracted to be 10 GHz and 57 MHz, respectively, corresponding to single-stage delays of 10 ps and 1.6 ns. The delay of the 2D-TFET ring oscillator is larger due to its lower ON-current. The effect of the enhanced Miller capacitance in creating large overshoots and undershoots of the output voltage in TFETs is also observed in Fig. 2e.

Static random-access memory (SRAMs), which occupy up to 70% of the processor area are the main memory elements in designing CPU cache memory offering fast memory access and can be used for synapse weight retention in a designed NM system comprising of several neurons. However, this large prevalence of SRAMs also results in a large power consumption. In fact, SRAM data access in Intel’s Loihi⁵ has been estimated to be more energy intensive than each neuronal spike, necessitating the development of low-power SRAM implementations. Although SRAM design with 2D-TFETs can improve the energy-efficiency, the standard SRAM design utilizes two access transistors for operation, which require bidirectional current flow, and are therefore, ill-suited for implementation with unidirectional-TFETs. This necessitates the development of a modified SRAM design, which either uses a pass transistor network of TFETs, or solitary 2D-FETs, for implementing the function of the access transistors (Fig. 2f–l).

An antibody screen of two distinct multiple sclerosis cohorts reveals an autoantibody signature that is detectable years before symptom onset and linked to a common microbial motif, according to a paper in Nature Medicine. Read the paper: