Lifeboat Foundation

AMISHI JHA: Where is your attention right now? The human brain’s attention system is actually the success story of what makes us unique as human beings. Because attention fuels our ability to think, to feel, and connect, what we pay attention to is our life. For a long time, through our evolutionary history, the brain started to suffer from a very big problem which is that there’s far more information out in the environment than could be fully processed.

Attention ended up becoming a very useful solution because it allows us to prioritize information, but there are qualities of the human experience that disable attention. Given how powerful attention is, we need to really respect where we place this precious brain resource. The mind is no different than the body. The mind needs to be exercised daily to optimize our psychological well-being. Knowing this, I became very interested in understanding if we might be able to train attention.

Summary: Close and supportive parental relationships can help mitigate the genetic and environmental risk of developing alcohol use disorder for at-risk teens.

Source: state university of new york.

For teens at elevated risk of developing alcohol use disorder (AUD), close relationships with parents can help mitigate their genetic and environmental vulnerability, a new study suggests.

A boost to the ratings.

Abstract. Understanding adaptation to the local environment is a central tenet and a major focus of evolutionary biology. But this is only part of the adaptionist story. In addition to the external environment, one of the main drivers of genome composition is genetic background. In this perspective, I argue that there is a growing body of evidence that intra-genomic selective pressures play a significant part in the composition of prokaryotic genomes and play a significant role in the origin, maintenance and structuring of prokaryotic pangenomes.

With recent developments in language modeling (LM) research, machine-generated text applications have spread to a number of previously untapped domains. However, a significant issue remains that LM-generated text frequently contains factual errors or inconsistencies. This problem usually arises in any LM generation scenario, but it is particularly problematic when generation is performed in uncommon domains or when it requires up-to-date information that the LM was not trained on.

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) methods, which display the LM pertinent documents from a grounded corpus during generation, offer a possible solution to this problem. Current RALM strategies concentrate on changing the LM architecture to include external data. However, this approach often makes deployment significantly complex. Working on this problem statement, AI21 Labs, an organization that develops artificial intelligence systems, introduced an alternative strategy called In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (In-Context RALM), which can supplement an existing language model with ready-made external information sources. The necessary files are added as input into the language model, which keeps the underlying LM architecture unaffected. The team published their findings in a research paper titled “In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models.”

In the same publication, AI21 Labs also unveiled Wordtune Spices, an addition to their Wordtune text editor. Wordtune Spices is an artificial intelligence robot that helps authors swiftly generate text and create content, thereby accelerating the pace of the composition of academic papers, theses, and creative documents. Spices’ main principle is based on the In-context RALM technique. Users of Spices have access to 12 prompt alternatives, including explications, definitions, and even jokes. Users can select the prompt that best supports their use case and receive a string of supplemental sentences to bolster their case and provide further details.

Could the rise of advanced AI tools mean the end of some creative and knowledge jobs? Here’s what the experts had to say.

Fur is a distinguishing trait of mammals although baldness is an attractive variety of mammalian oddities. Check out how humans lost their fur despite still having the gene responsible for it.

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Ingeniously simple lab experiment led by Prof Clare Burrage recognised by Blavatnik awards.