A new study suggests the brain begins making decisions much earlier than scientists previously thought. Researchers found that even primary sensory regions are influenced by higher brain areas through rapid feedback loops, rather than simply passing information forward. This more dynamic view of brain function could help engineers design future AI systems that think more like biological brains while using far less power.
Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to express complex and structured meanings. Some have therefore argued for a tight relationship between complex thought and language, postulating that reasoning, including logical reasoning, relies on linguistic representations. We systematically investigated the relationship between logical reasoning and language using two complementary approaches. First, we used noninvasive brain imaging (fMRI) to examine neural activity as healthy adults engaged in logical reasoning tasks.
A major barrier to harnessing energy via nuclear fusion is the fuel source.
Most proposed fusion reactors (the donut-shaped tokamak reactors) are powered by the fusion of tritium and deuterium.
Both are isotopes of hydrogen, but tritium is radioactive, and deuterium is stable.
The combination drug ceftazidime-avibactam (CZA) is a last line of defense against the common Pseudomonas aeruginosa hospital bug: It’s the drug that gets called in when nothing else works, but there’s now evidence that it may not keep working for long.
Based on an analysis of two critically ill patients with P. aeruginosa infections, the bacteria are developin g genetic mutations that change the enzymes they produce – and can ward off an attack from CZA.
Researchers led by a team from Tongji University in China have now published a new paper in Microbiology Spectrum detailing the mutations and what it might mean for fighting P. aeruginosa in the future.
Fourteen years ago, a science fiction author looked me in the eye and told me the singularity was already old news.
This was 2012. Almost nobody outside a small circle was talking about it. And Karl Schroeder, one of Canada’s sharpest minds in #ScienceFiction and foresight, was telling me to stop staring at it.
His words stuck with me: take the singularity, use it, it’s a lens. Then develop other lenses. Keep hunting for blind spots.
At the time, I thought he was just being contrarian. Today, with #AI swallowing every headline and every boardroom, I think he saw something most of us are still missing.
Schroeder doesn’t hand you easy answers. We got into the technological maximum, the Rewilding, why he believes “technology is legislation,” and why he rates the singularity as possible but not probable. He picked apart almost every assumption I walked in with.
Here is what keeps nagging me. The blind spot he warned me about in 2012 might be the exact thing everyone is fixated on in 2026.
Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Comple…
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Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the author of a new book titled \.
There must be some extra mass that we can’t see – and astronomers call this ‘dark matter’
Astronomers don’t know what dark matter is. And it turns out there’s quite a lot they don’t know about ordinary matter, either.
In fact, quite a lot of ‘normal’ matter is missing. But astronomers now think they might have found it – and it’s been hiding in plain sight all along.