Stephen Wolfram shares surprising new ideas and results from a scientific approach to metaphysics. Discusses time, spacetime, computational irreducibility, significance of the observer, quantum mechanics and multiway systems, ruliad, laws of nature, objective reality, existence, mathematical reality.
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Neural and computational mechanisms underlying one-shot perceptual learning in humans
In one-shot perceptual learning, what we see can be dramatically altered by a single past experience. Using psychophysics, fMRI, iEEG, and DNNs, the authors identify neural and computational mechanisms underlying this remarkable ability in humans.
Milky Way’s ‘Central Black Hole’ is Compact Object Composed of Fermionic Dark Matter, Study Says
For decades, the motions of stars near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy have been treated as some of the clearest evidence for a supermassive black hole.
A generalizable foundation model for analysis of human brain MRI
Artificial intelligence applied to brain magnetic resonance imaging could transform neurological care. Here the authors present BrainIAC, a foundation model that can be used across diverse clinical tasks with limited training data.
Physicists push thousands of atoms to a ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ state — bringing the quantum world closer to reality than ever before
Researchers have demonstrated that a nanoparticle of 7,000 sodium atoms can act as a wave, creating a record-setting superposition.
Rare ‘universal paralog’ genes may reveal a pre-LUCA evolutionary record
All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called “last universal common ancestor” (LUCA) represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study. Previous research on the last universal common ancestor has found that all the characteristics we see in organisms today, like having a cell membrane and a DNA genome, were already present by the time of this ancestor. So, if we want to understand how these foundational characteristics of life first emerged, then we need to be able to study evolutionary history prior to the last universal common ancestor.
In an article published in the journal Cell Genomics, scientists Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College), Greg Fournier (MIT), and Betül Kaçar (University of Wisconsin‑Madison) describe a method to do just that.
“While the last universal common ancestor is the most ancient organism we can study with evolutionary methods,” said Goldman, “some of the genes in its genome were much older.” The authors describe a type of gene family known as a “universal paralog,” which provides evidence of evolutionary events that occurred before the last universal common ancestor.
New optical method bypasses light’s limit by 100,000× to image atoms
Scientists have shattered the diffraction limit, using continuous-wave lasers to resolve images at 0.1 nanometers.
Caltech Researchers Extend Optical Fiber’s Ultralow Loss Performance to Photonic Chips
California Institute of Technology researchers have demonstrated fiber-like ultralow optical loss on silicon wafers at visible wavelengths.
Imaging the sub-moiré potential using an atomic single electron transistor
An atomic single electron transistor, which utilizes a single atomic defect in a van der Waals material as an ultrasensitive, high-resolution potential sensor, is used to image the electrostatic potential within a moiré unit cell.
Researchers Find Brain Mechanism Behind ‘Flashes of Intuition’
Despite decades of research, the mechanisms behind fast flashes of insight that change how a person perceives their world, termed “one-shot learning,” have remained unknown. A mysterious type of one-shot learning is perceptual learning, in which seeing something once dramatically alters our ability to recognize it again.