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Restoring And Extending The Capabilities Of The Human Brain — Dr. Behnaam Aazhang, Ph.D. — Director, Rice Neuroengineering Initiative, Rice University

Dr. Behnaam Aazhang, Ph.D. (https://aaz.rice.edu/) is the J.S. Abercrombie Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director, Rice Neuroengineering Initiative (NEI — https://neuroengineering.rice.edu/), Rice University, where he has broad research interests including signal and data processing, information theory, dynamical systems, and their applications to neuro-engineering, with focus areas in (i) understanding neuronal circuits connectivity and the impact of learning on connectivity, (ii) developing minimally invasive and non-invasive real-time closed-loop stimulation of neuronal systems to mitigate disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson, depression, obesity, and mild traumatic brain injury, (iii) developing a patient-specific multisite wireless monitoring and pacing system with temporal and spatial precision to restore the healthy function of a diseased heart, and (iv) developing algorithms to detect, predict, and prevent security breaches in cloud computing and storage systems.

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Tesla is planning to use its Optimus robot, also known as Tesla Bot, in its stores in an attempt to help sales, but not necessarily how you think.

We are not talking about robots taking care of customers walking into the stores, or at least not just yet.

Sources familiar with the matter told Electrek that Tesla has been experimenting with using Optimus humanoid robot display units inside its stores in China.

Almost half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with chemicals known as “forever chemicals,” according to a new study from the US Geological Survey.

The number of people drinking contaminated water may be even higher than what the study found, however, because the researchers weren’t able to test for all of these per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, chemicals that are considered dangerous to human health. There are more than 12,000 types of PFAS, according to the National Institutes of Health, but this study looked at only 32 of the compounds.

In an interview with GQ, 54-year-old David Sinclair says his lifestyle changes got him back to his “20-year-old brain.”

An object lurking in the foggy dawn of the Universe has given astronomers a big surprise.

Observations collected through the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed an active supermassive black hole 9 million times the mass of the Sun – one that is actively growing as it slurps up matter from the space around it.

Continue reading “The Earliest Supermassive Black Hole Ever Found Has Been Identified” »

OpenAI is forming a new team led by Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, to develop ways to steer and control “superintelligent” AI systems.

In a blog post published today, Sutskever and Jan Leike, a lead on the alignment team at OpenAI, predict that AI with intelligence exceeding that of humans could arrive within the decade. This AI — assuming it does, indeed, arrive eventually — won’t necessarily be benevolent, necessitating research into ways to control and restrict it, Sutskever and Leike say.

“Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue,” they write. “Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us.”

New X-ray capability could find wide application in environmental and medical research, as well as the development of batteries and microelectronic devices.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and various universities have successfully used X-ray beams to analyze a single atom.

An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus.

In a groundbreaking study published in Cell Genomics, a team of scientists led by Chris Walsh from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital has unveiled intriguing findings about the genetic factors contributing to schizophrenia and introduces a novel avenue for investigating the causes of psychiatric disorders.

Health care professionals are overcoming these obstacles with a new treatment called hepatic artery infusion pump chemotherapy that shrinks liver tumors, giving more people a chance for surgery. This treatment also can shrink tumors in the bile ducts inside the liver, called intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.

“Our goal is to expand the number of patients who could be offered curative treatment,” says Dr. Thiels. “We are also aiming to reduce the risk of cancer recurring in people with high-risk liver tumors.”

Continue reading “Colorectal cancer in the liver: New treatment gives more people hope for a cure” »