Populations of dopamine neurons don’t simply signal reward prediction errors—they encode rich maps of possible future outcomes, including when and how much a reward might be.
Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, discusses how humanoid robots like Digit are transforming logistics and manufacturing. She speaks with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone about the rapid advances in automation and the next era of robots in the workplace at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco. (Source: Bloomberg)
Many of these smaller worlds are shrouded in haze, but this one seems to have clear skies and to be unusually hot.
TOI-421 B sits several times closer to its star than earth does to the sun. The planet’s atmosphere reaches around 1,340°F, which is intense even by exoplanet standards.
Astronomers using the Webb Telescope used a method known as transmission spectroscopy to spot water in the planet’s upper layers.
Plant DNA has become a frontier for artificial intelligence, with large language models turning genetic sequences into interpretable content for researchers. These tools treat bases like words, revealing hidden patterns that once eluded traditional methods.
A study published by Dr. Meiling Zou from Hainan University describes how language-based models interpret extensive plant genomes with remarkable precision.
Our earliest models of reality were expressed as static structures and geometry, until mathematicians of the 16th century came up with differential algebra, a framework which allowed us to capture aspects of the world as a dynamical system. The 20th century introduced the concept of computation, and we began to model the world through state transitions. Stephen Wolfram suggests that we may be about to enter a new paradigm: multicomputation. At the core of multicomputation is the non-deterministic Turing machine, one of the more arcane ideas of 20th century computer science. Unlike a deterministic Turing machine, it does not just transition from one state to the next, but to all possible states simultaneously, resulting in structures that emerge over the branching and merging of causal paths.
Stephen Wolfram studies the resulting multiway systems as a model for foundational physics. Multiway systems can also be used as an abstraction to understand biological and social processes, economic dynamics, and model-building itself.
In this conversation, we want to explore whether mental processes can be understood as multiway systems, and what the multicomputational perspective might imply for memory, perception, decision making and consciousness.
About the Guest: Stephen Wolfram is one of the most interesting and least boring thinkers of our time, well known for his unique contributions to computer science, theoretical physics and the philosophy of computation. Among other things, Stephen is the creator of the Wolfram Language (also known as Mathematica), the knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha, the author of the books A New Kind of Science and A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.
We anticipate that this will be an intellectually fascinating discussion; please consider reading some of the following articles ahead of time:
The Concept of the Ruliad: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-the-ruliad/
The universe is a complete unknown to humans. We are not yet able to control and understand the system in which Earth is located, as evidenced by the possible discovery made by a group of astronomers from the University of Taiwan, who suggest that they may have found clues to the existence of a ninth planet.
The Solar System is currently known to be made up of eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, apart from Pluto, which has long been considered a dwarf planet. But one more could join this select group, according to an infrared study carried out between 1986 and 2006.
The work was based on data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Japanese satellite AKARI, which detected an object moving between 46.5 billion and 65.1 billion miles from the Sun, meaning it would take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete an orbit.
As part of the Chicago-Carnegie Hubble Program, astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have performed new measurements of the Hubble constant.
Not only can the drug metformin help to effectively manage type 2 diabetes, it may also give older women a better chance of living to the grand old age of 90, according to new research – thanks, it seems, to a variety of anti-aging effects.
The research used data from a long-term US study of postmenopausal women. Records on a total of 438 women were picked out – half who took metformin for their diabetes, and half who took a different diabetes drug, called sulfonylurea.
While there are a lot of caveats and asterisks to the study, those in the metformin group were calculated to have a 30 percent lower risk of dying before the age of 90 than those in the sulfonylurea group.
