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A giant anaconda, a vampire hedgehog, a dwarf squirrel, and a tiger cat were among the new species named by science in 2024. Found from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the mountaintops of Southeast Asia, each new species shows us that even our well-known world contains unexplored chambers of life.

This year, in Peru’s Alto Mayo Landscape alone, scientists uncovered 27 new-to-science species, including four new mammals, during a two month expedition. Meanwhile, the Greater Mekong region yielded 234 new species, and scientists from the California Academy of Sciences described 138 new species globally. The ocean depths continued to surprise, with more than 100 potentially new species found on an unexplored underwater mountain off Chile’s coast. Two new mammal species were found in India this year, including the world’s smallest otter.

Scientists estimate only a small fraction of Earth’s species have been documented, perhaps 20% at best. Even among mammals, the best-known group of animals, scientists think we’ve only found 80% of species. Yet most of the hidden species are likely bats, rodents, shrews, moles and hedgehogs.

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In a paper published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness psychology researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) worked with 54 participants to examine the effects of surveillance on an essential function of human sensory perception – the ability to detect another person’s gaze.

Lead author, Associate Professor of neuroscience and behaviour Kiley Seymour, said previous research has established the effects on conscious behaviour when people know they are being watched, but the new study provided the first direct evidence that being watched also has an involuntary response.

“We know CCTV changes our behaviour, and that’s the main driver for retailers and others wanting to deploy such technology to prevent unwanted behaviour,” Associate Professor Seymour said.

However, we show it’s not only overt behaviour that changes – our brain changes the way it processes information.

We found direct evidence that being conspicuously monitored via CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception – the ability to consciously detect a face.

Continue reading “Big brother: the effects of surveillance on fundamental aspects of social vision” | >

The future of AI in 2025 is set to bring transformative advancements, including humanoid robots, infinite-memory systems, and breakthroughs in superintelligence. OpenAI is pushing the boundaries with innovations in voice AI, web agents, and scalable applications across industries like robotics and healthcare. With AGI milestones like the o3 system and growing focus on AI safety and energy efficiency, the next phase of artificial intelligence promises to reshape technology and society.

Key Topics:
OpenAI’s vision for the future of AI, from infinite-memory systems to humanoid robots.
The role of AGI in accelerating advancements in robotics, biology, and voice AI
Challenges like energy demands, AI safety, and the race toward superintelligence.

What You’ll Learn:
How OpenAI’s innovations are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence in 2025
Why features like infinite memory and advanced web agents are game-changers for AI applications.
The transformative potential of AI systems that can autonomously improve and adapt.

Why It Matters:

Continue reading “AGI ACHIEVED: What’s Next for AI in 2025? (Superintelligence Ahead)” | >

Cisco Systems senior visioneer, Annie Hardy, joins me to discuss AI and the future of the internet.

“We are all now connected to the internet, like neurons in a giant brain.” –Stephen Hawking.

Unless you are living in a remote cabin completely off-grid, it has reached the point where you cannot avoid artificial intelligence. It’s in our search engines, it’s on our phones, it’s on the social media on our phones. It’s permeating the internet at a breakneck pace.

Annie Hardy, a fellow member of the Association of Professional Futurists and a senior visioneer at Cisco Systems, spends most of her working hours assessing the future of artificial intelligence and the internet. She joins me in this episode of Seeking Delphi, for an in depth look at where it’s headed.

Continue reading “#66–Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Internet, with Annie Hardy” | >

Scientists at Newcastle University have created a new lung scanning method that shows real-time changes in lung function. This technique tracks airflow in and out of the lungs, particularly in patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or those who have had a lung transplant. This innovation could help doctors detect declines in lung function earlier.

Read Full Story.

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Genesis integrates various physics solvers and their coupling into a unified framework.

AI robotics training has been increased tremendously with the help of a new tool. Called ‘Genesis’, the tool is a new open-source computer simulation system.

Unveiled by a large group of university and private industry researchers, the system reportedly lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world.

According to researchers, an AI agent is also planned to generate 3D physics simulations from text prompts.

Continue reading “New physics engine lets robots practice tasks 430,000x faster” | >

The growth of maize, sugarcane and sorghum has been greatly boosted by modifying the plants to take advantage of higher carbon dioxide levels now found in the air.

This was done by simply increasing the activity of two genes, says Coralie Salesse-Smith at the University of Illinois. The finding should lead to the creation of new varieties whose yields go up as CO2 levels continue to rise.

For most of the time that photosynthetic cells that turn sunlight into food have existed, atmospheric levels of CO2 have been much higher (and the planet has been much hotter). As CO2 levels fell particularly low from about 35 million years ago, it exacerbated a fundamental flaw in photosynthesis that involves probably the most abundant protein on the planet, called rubisco.

Image: Przemyslaw Koch/Getty Images

Continue reading “Genetic tweak to three key crops massively boosts their growth” | >

Using an AI tool, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have analyzed brain images from 70-year-olds and estimated their brains’ biological age. They found that factors detrimental to vascular health, such as inflammation and high glucose levels, are associated with an older-looking brain, while healthy lifestyles were linked to brains with a younger appearance.

The results are presented in a paper titled “Biological brain age and resilience in cognitively unimpaired 70-year-old individuals” in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

Every year, over 20,000 people in Sweden develop some form of dementia, with Alzheimer’s disease accounting for approximately two-thirds of cases. However, the speed at which the brain ages is affected by various risk and health factors.

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Furthermore, GDF-15 levels have been positively associated with the aging process. In fact, Tanaka et al. (Tanaka et al. 2018) showed that this cytokine had the strongest positive correlation with age in humans, and several reports describe higher levels of GDF-15 in older individuals (Semba et al. 2020; Doerstling et al. 2018; Liu et al. 2020). Aging is characterized by a decline in physiological function and changes in body composition, being a major risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases. As such, GDF-15 is also associated with several age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease (Echouffo-Tcheugui et al. 2021), cancer (Wischhusen et al. 2020), metabolic syndrome (Ho et al. 2023; Carballo-Casla et al. 2022), or diabetes (Ouyang et al. 2020; Merchant et al. 2023), among others (Candia et al. 2021; Iglesias et al. 2023). In addition, it has been proposed as a biomarker for the risk of death in patients with cardiovascular conditions and an accurate all-cause mortality marker (Candia et al. 2021; Iglesias et al. 2023; Nopp et al. 2021). GDF-15 has also been positively associated with deteriorated muscle function and sarcopenia (Semba et al. 2020; Kim et al. 2022, 2020; Nakajima et al. 2019; Lee et al. 2022), a highly prevalent condition among the elderly that increases the risk of frailty (Picca et al. 2020).

It is widely accepted that human aging may be influenced by epigenetic alterations (López-Otín et al. 2023). In this sense, age biomarkers based on DNA methylation have proven useful in predicting the risk of age-related diseases and mortality (Fransquet et al. 2019). Among several developed epigenetic clocks, DNAm GrimAge has shown a higher prediction capacity of mortality and morbidity risk (Lu et al. 2022). Notably, GDF-15 is one of the markers included for the calculation of this clock (Lu et al. 2019). Thus, understanding the interplay between GDF-15 and aging can be crucial for improving the assessment of and management of age-associated conditions.

For all this, the aim of this study was to characterize the changes in circulating GDF-15 levels with age in a population of healthy individuals from the Balearic Islands and investigate its potential associations with different epigenetic and biological clocks, physical performance and other age-related biomarkers.

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The mystery of dark matter could be solved in as little as 10 seconds.

When the next nearby supernova goes off, any gamma-ray telescope pointing in the right direction might be treated to more than a light show – it could quickly confirm the existence of one of the most promising dark matter candidates.

Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley predict that within the first 10 seconds of a supernova, enough hypothetical particles called axions could be emitted to prove they exist in a relative blink.

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