Lifeboat Foundation

In the second episode of this 12-part podcast series, Tales of the Synapse, neuroscientist Anil Seth describes his research into consciousness, which he describes as “insurance against falling into a single, disciplinary hole.”

Alongside neuroscientists, Seth’s research group at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, also includes string theorists, mathematicians and psychologists. The team also collaborates with academics in the arts and humanities.

His 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. begins by challenging the idea that consciousness is beyond the reach of science, and concludes with a look at consciousness in non-human animals, before asking if artificial intelligence will one day become both sentient and conscious.

Humans and animals detect different stimuli such as light, sound, and odor through nerve cells, which then transmit the information to the brain. Nerve cells must be able to adjust to the wide range of stimuli they receive, which can range from very weak to very strong. To do this, they may become more or less sensitive to stimuli (sensitization and habituation), or they may become more sensitive to weaker stimuli and less sensitive to stronger stimuli for better overall responsiveness (gain control). However, the exact way this happens is not yet understood.

To better understand the process of gain control, a research team led by Professor Kimura at Nagoya City University in Japan studied the roundworm C. elegans. They found that, when the worm first smells an unpleasant odor, its nerve cells exhibit a large, quickly increasing, and continuous response to both weak and strong stimuli. However, after exposure to the odor, the response is smaller and slower to weak stimuli but remains large to strong stimuli, similar to the response to the first exposure to the odor. Because the experience of odor exposure causes more efficient movement of worms away from the odor, the nerve cells have changed their response to better adapt to the stimulus using gain control.

Then the researchers used mathematical modeling to understand this process. Mathematical modeling is a powerful tool that can be used to better understand complex biological processes. They found that the “response to first smell” consists of fast and slow components, while the “response after exposure” only consists of the slow component, meaning that the odor experience inhibits the fast component to achieve gain control. They further found that both responses could be described by a simple differential equation and that the slow and fast components correspond to the leaky integration of a first and second derivative term of the odor concentration that the worm senses, respectively. The results of this study showed that the prior odor experience only appears to inhibit the mechanism required for the fast component.

Substance that transforms into a conductive polymer using the body’s own chemistry could improve implantable electronics.

Scientists once thought their structures impossible. Now, the discovery of the oldest man-made quasicrystal could expand the world of nuclear forensics.

NASA announced Wednesday it has issued an award to The Boeing Company for the agency’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, which seeks to inform a potential new generation of green single-aisle airliners.

Under a Funded Space Act Agreement, Boeing will work with NASA to build, test, and fly a full-scale demonstrator aircraft and validate technologies aimed at lowering emissions.

Over seven years, NASA will invest $425 million, while the company and its partners will contribute the remainder of the agreement funding, estimated at about $725 million. As part of the agreement, the agency also will contribute technical expertise and facilities.

A team of biology researchers from Universität der Bundeswehr, Technische Universität München and the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, has found that people exhale more aerosols when engaging in endurance exercise than they do when engaging in resistance exercise. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As the global pandemic has progressed, scientists across the globe have studied various aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread. One such area of study has been comparison of types of activities that are more or less conducive to transmission of the virus.

In this new study, the researchers looked at exercise options and their related risk. Going to gyms to exercise is a popular way to keep in shape. But doing so can put people at risk from both airborne and surface viral and bacterial infections.

On Friday, Meta announced a new AI-powered large language model (LLM) called LLaMA-13B that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-3 model despite being “10x smaller.” Smaller-sized AI models could lead to running ChatGPT-style language assistants locally on devices such as PCs and smartphones. It’s part of a new family of language models called “Large Language Model Meta AI,” or LLAMA for short.

“Unlike Chinchilla, PaLM, or GPT-3, we only use datasets publicly available, making our work compatible with open-sourcing and reproducible, while most existing models rely on data which is either not publicly available or undocumented,” tweeted project member Guillaume Lample.

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans— benefits all of humanity.

If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.

AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati examined the post-treatment journals kept by participants in a 2014 smoking cessation study that found psychedelics were effective in helping some people quit smoking for years.

In a new paper published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, researchers analyzed the participants’ own words and found that psychedelics combined with talk therapy often helped longtime smokers see themselves as nonsmokers. This new core identity might help explain why 80% of participants were able to stop smoking for six months and 60% remained smoking-free after five years.

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