Personal Perspective: Can we prevent bad actors from using it for bad things?
The DOD is looking for tech that will protect against “cognitive attacks” that could disable soldiers wearing virtual reality devices.
Each October, the Nobel Prizes celebrate a handful of groundbreaking scientific achievements. And while many of the awarded discoveries revolutionize the field of science, some originate in unconventional places. For George de Hevesy, the 1943 Nobel Laureate in chemistry who discovered radioactive tracers, that place was a boarding house cafeteria in Manchester, U.K., in 1911.
De Hevesey had the sneaking suspicion that the staff of the boarding house cafeteria where he ate at every day was reusing leftovers from the dinner plates – each day’s soup seemed to contain all of the prior day’s ingredients. So he came up with a plan to test his theory.
In a suite of 21 papers published in the journals Science (12), Science Advances , and Science Translational Medicine , a large consortium of researchers shares new knowledge about the cells that make up our brains and the brains of other primates. It’s a huge leap from previously published work, with studies and data that reveal new insights about our nervous systems’ cellular makeup across many regions of the brain and what is distinctive about the human brain.
The research consortium is a concerted effort to understand the human brain and its modular, functional nature. It was brought together by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.
Hundreds of scientists from around the world worked together to complete a range of studies exploring the cellular makeup of the human brain and those of other primates, and to demonstrate how a transformative new suite of scalable techniques can be used to study the detailed organization of the human brain at unprecedented resolution.
We Don’t Know Neptune at All
Posted in space
Eventually, maybe by the early 2040s, would like to see every large body in solar system, from the Sun out to Pluto to have a probe like the Cassini probe in a permanent orbit around it. So we have 24/7 live feed / study of all of them. And, ASI could run all of it by that point.
You know, the planet?
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, but sometimes it would be nice to have known the outcomes before making a choice. This is as true in day-to-day life as it is in quantum mechanics. But it seems that the quantum world has something we do not have: a way to alter yesterday’s choices today, before they become tomorrow’s mistakes.
None of this is real time-travel. Physicists remain skeptical about that possibility. However, it is possible to simulate a closed time-loop with quantum mechanics, thanks to the property of entanglement. When two particles are entangled, they are in a single state even if they are separated by huge distances. A change to one is a change to the other, and this happens instantaneously.
So a particle can be prepared for an experiment, entangled, and sent to the experiment. Then scientists can modify its entangled companion, changing the way the particle in the experiment behaves.
In a recent study led by Ravi Salgia, M.D., Ph.D., the Arthur & Rosalie Kaplan Chair in Medical Oncology, a team of researchers from City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, and other institutions found that nongenetic mechanisms are important in lung cancer patients who develop a resistance to one cancer therapy. Their findings were published in the October 13 issue of the journal Science Advances.
The team’s study explored resistance to the anti-cancer medication sotorasib in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Sotorasib inhibits a specific mutation of a protein, KRAS G12C, that causes unchecked cell growth.
The researchers’ findings suggest that, initially, most tumor cells are sensitive to sotorasib. But some cells can become tolerant to therapeutic treatment without resorting to genetic mutations or alterations by manipulating the KRAS-sotorasib interaction network. Furthermore, they found that if sotorasib treatment is withheld, the tumor cells revert to becoming sensitive again, implying that the phenomenon is reversible and thus is driven by nongenetic mechanisms.
When asked to design a robot that can walk, an AI told researchers to check out this blob thing.