As prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers eye limits to the current phase of the technology, a different approach is gaining attention: using living human brain cells as computational hardware.
These “biocomputers” are still in their early days. They can play simple games such as Pong, and perform basic speech recognition.
But the excitement is fuelled by three converging trends.
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AI consciousness, its possibility or probability, has burst into public debate, eliciting all kinds of issues from AI ethics and rights to AI going rogue and harming humanity. We explore diverse views; we argue that AI consciousness depends on theories of consciousness.
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Philip Goff is a British author, panpsychist philosopher, and professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. Specifically, it focuses on how consciousness can be part of the scientific worldview.
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Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.
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Scientists in China have unveiled a supercomputer built on brain-like architecture — specifically, that of a monkey.
Called Darwin Monkey or “Wukong”, the system features over 2 billion artificial neurons and more than 100 billion synapses, putting it roughly on par with the neural structure of a macaque.
Fusion oncoproteins arise when a gene fuses with another gene and acquires new abilities. Such abilities can include the formation of biomolecular condensates, “droplets” of concentrated proteins, DNA or RNA.
The abnormal molecular condensates formed by fusion oncoproteins can disrupt cellular functions and drive cancer development, but the specific protein features behind this process remain unclear.
Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital studied intrinsically disordered regions, unstructured protein segments that are often involved in condensate formation, to determine if they drive fusion oncoproteins to form condensates. They trained a machine learning model, called IDR-Puncta ML, with experimental data from intrinsically disordered regions in fusion oncoproteins to predict the behavior of other such regions.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown the world that a new technology is now affecting the battlefield: artificial intelligence (AI). The Ukrainian and Russian armies are using AI to help locate and identify targets, pilot drones, and support tactical decision-making.
When ice melts into water, it happens quickly, with the transition from solid to liquid being immediate. However, very thin materials do not adhere to these rules. Instead, an unusual state between solid and liquid arises: the hexatic phase. Researchers at the University of Vienna have now succeeded in directly observing this exotic phase in an atomically thin crystal.
Using state-of-the-art electron microscopy and neural networks, they filmed a silver iodide crystal protected by graphene as it melted. Ultra-thin, two-dimensional materials enabled researchers to directly observe atomic-scale melting processes. The new findings significantly advance the understanding of these phase transitions. Surprisingly, the observations contradict previous predictions—a result now published in Science.
The sudden transition in melting ice is typical of the melting behavior of all three-dimensional materials, from metals and minerals to frozen drinks. However, when a material becomes so thin that it is practically two-dimensional, the rules of melting change dramatically. Between the solid and liquid phases, a new, exotic intermediate phase of matter can arise, known as the “hexatic phase.”
As power demand surges in the AI era, the protonic ceramic electrochemical cell (PCEC), which can simultaneously produce electricity and hydrogen, is gaining attention as a next-generation energy technology. However, this cell has faced the technical limitation of requiring an ultra-high production temperature of 1,500°C.
A KAIST research team has succeeded in establishing a new manufacturing process that lowers this limit by more than 500°C for the first time.