Lifeboat Foundation

We listened to the ‘music’ of a vast number of stars — some of them 15,000 light-years away!

Using China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), astronomers have discovered three new pulsars in an old Galactic globular cluster known as Messier 15. Two of them turned out to be long-period pulsars, while the remaining one spins so rapidly that it was classified as a millisecond pulsar. The finding was reported in a paper published Dec. 11 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The most rapidly rotating pulsars, with rotation periods below 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Astronomers assume that they are formed in binary systems when the initially more massive component turns into a neutron star that is then spun up due to accretion of matter from the secondary star.

Located some 35,700 light years away from the Earth, Messier 15 (also known as NGC 7078) is a core-collapsed GC with a radius of about 88 light years and an estimated mass of 560,000 solar masses. It is one of the oldest (about 12 billion years old) and most metal-poor Galactic GCs (with a metallicity of approximately −2.25), and one of the most densely packed GCs in our galaxy.

A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has developed the first dual-color optoelectronic neural probe.

Unlike previous, single probes, which often control brain activity in only one direction—excitation or inhibition, but not both—this new design can enhance and silence the electrical activities of the same neurons within specific cortical layers of the brain. It promises aid the investigation of tightly packed neural microcircuits within the cortex and deep brain regions and, in the longer term, add to the functional mapping of the brain.

Guangyu Xu, assistant associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, an appointee of the Dev and Linda Gupta Professorship at UMass Amherst, and principal investigator of the study hopes the device can ultimately help researchers identify the origin of brain diseases.

A new AI tool can predict people’s time of death with high degree of accuracy, finds a study.

New AI can predict people’s time of death with high degree of accuracy, study finds.

Could artificial intelligence (AI) systems become conscious? A trio of consciousness scientists says that, at the moment, no one knows — and they are expressing concern about the lack of inquiry into the question.

In comments to the United Nations, three leaders of the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (AMCS) call for more funding to support research on consciousness and AI. They say that scientific investigations of the boundaries between conscious and unconscious systems are urgently needed, and they cite ethical, legal and safety issues that make it crucial to understand AI consciousness. For example, if AI develops consciousness, should people be allowed to simply switch it off after use?

Such concerns have been mostly absent from recent discussions about AI safety, such as the high-profile AI Safety Summit in the United Kingdom, says AMCS board member Jonathan Mason, a mathematician based in Oxford, UK and one of the authors of the comments. Nor did US President Joe Biden’s executive order seeking responsible development of AI technology address issues raised by conscious AI systems, Mason notes.

For the first time ever, deep brain stimulation has been shown to help people regain cognitive abilities they’d lost following a traumatic brain injury (TBI):

The lasting symptoms of a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be treated with deep brain stimulation, according to a first-of-its kind trial.

Il Mark I Perceptron del 1958 era circondato da enormi attese, che vennero completamente deluse. A distanza di oltre mezzo secolo, è però riconosciuto come il primo antenato di ChatGPT.

“Searching for compounds in the plume is a bit like putting the pieces of a puzzle back together,” says lead author Jonah Peter, “in that we look for the right combination of molecules that reproduce the observed data. Information theory allows us to determine how much detail we can extract from the data without missing important features or overfitting to statistical noise.”

Water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and methane had previously been found in analyses of INMS data, but this study found additional compounds and molecules, including acetylene, propylene, ethane, methanol, molecular oxygen, and hydrogen cyanide. These add to the various hints that Enceladus, despite its frigid perch in the outer solar system, harbors an environment conducive to life deep within its oceans.

Dr Philip Goff (University of Liverpool) speaks at the event “Metaphysics of Mind”, 19th August 2014. Abstract: Cosmopsychism is the conjunction of the following two theses: (i) the cosmos is the one fundamental object, (ii) the cosmos if conscious. I will try out the following argument for this view: Premise 1 – Each and every organic conscious state is irreducible. Premise 2 – No organic conscious state is fundamental. Premise 3 – The only way in which a state can be both irreducible and fundamental is if it is an aspect of a more fundamental state. Conclusion 1 – Therefore each and every organic conscious state is an aspect of a more fundamental state. Premise 4 – If each and every organic conscious state is an aspect of a more fundamental state, then cosmopsychism is highly likely to be true. Conclusion 2 – Therefore, cosmopsychism is highly likely to be true.