The universe’s expansion may actually have started to slow rather than accelerating at an ever-increasing rate as previously thought, a new study suggests.
“Remarkable” findings published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society cast doubt on the long-standing theory that a mysterious force known as ‘dark energy’ is driving distant galaxies away increasingly faster.
Instead, they show no evidence of an accelerating universe.
AGI Unbound Series.
A series of focused interviews with the most interesting and impactful thought leaders in the field. We press on first principles—how they define core ideas in their domain, how they see the present, and where they believe intelligence is headed. Brought to you by SingularityNET and the AGI Society.
About this interview — Joscha Bach.
In this kickoff episode, cognitive scientist Joscha Bach explores consciousness as a coherence-forming learning process, argues for a computational view of mind, and outlines why machine consciousness should be treated as a testable hypothesis rather than a slogan. He discusses the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, contrasts today’s “idiot-savant” AI with developmental intelligence, sketches futures from universal basic intelligence to post-human infospheres, and offers frank advice to new researchers on pursuing bold, technically grounded work.
#AGI #AI #Consciousness #SingularityNET #AGISociety #JoschaBach #DecentralizedAGI
SingularityNET was founded by Dr. Ben Goertzel with the mission of creating a decentralized, democratic, inclusive, and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). An AGI is not dependent on any central entity, is open to anyone, and is not restricted to the narrow goals of a single corporation or even a single country.
The SingularityNET team includes seasoned engineers, scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, and marketers. Our core platform and AI teams are further complemented by specialized teams devoted to application areas such as finance, robotics, biomedical AI, media, arts, and entertainment.
New research from the University of Waterloo is making inroads on one of the biggest problems in theoretical computer science. But the way to do it, according to Cameron Seth, a Ph.D. researcher working in the field of algorithmic approximation, is by breaking the problem down into smaller pieces.
“Everyone working in computer science and mathematics knows about the ‘P vs. NP’ problem,” Seth says. “It’s one of the notorious Millennium Prize Problems: so famous and so difficult that solving one will earn you a million dollars.”
To understand the crux of the “P vs. NP” problem, imagine an enormous jigsaw puzzle or a Sudoku puzzle. It would be a “P” problem if it could be solved relatively quickly by a computer, whereas they would be an “NP” problem if they were extremely difficult to solve, but a provided solution could be quickly verified.
A pair of swiveling, human-like robotic arms, built for physical artificial intelligence research, mirror the motions of an operator in a VR headset twirling his hands like a magician.
With enough practice, arms like these can complete everyday tasks alone, says Tokyo company Enactic, which is developing humanoid robots to wash dishes and do laundry in short-staffed Japanese care homes.
Welcome to the future of AI as it starts to infiltrate the material world in the form of smart robots, self-driving cars and other autonomous machines.
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have uncovered unexpected traces of bacteria within brain tumors. This discovery offers new insights into the environment in which brain tumors grow and sets the stage for future studies seeking to improve treatment outcomes.
Published today in Nature Medicine, the data revealed that bacterial genetic and cellular elements were present inside brain tumor cells and across the tumor microenvironment. These bacterial components appeared biologically active, potentially influencing tumor behavior and progression in patients with gliomas and brain metastases.
The multi-institutional study was led by Golnaz Morad, D.D.S, Ph.D., postdoctoral research fellow in Surgical Oncology, and Jennifer Wargo, M.D., professor of Surgical Oncology and Genomic Medicine and core member of the James P. Allison Institute—working in close collaboration with MD Anderson’s Platform for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research (PRIME-TR).
They also used a recently validated map of deep brain areas. This in vivo atlas, Brainstem Navigator, maps the regions involved in regulating the autonomic, immune and endocrine systems.
The authors analytic approach was guided by decades of basic research that has identified two main brain pathways in mammals: one set of pathways (allostatic) that sends signals from the brain to control the body’s organs, and the other set (interoceptive) that sends signals from the body to the brain, informing it about what’s happening inside us.
The findings replicated and expanded on their previous 3 Tesla work, confirming nearly all the direct connections identified in non-human mammals: 100% of those between cortical areas and 96% of those linking subcortical areas to both cortical and other subcortical areas. As expected, the authors found two-way connections between the brain areas that help manage the body’s needs (like the anterior cingulate cortex) and the areas that sense what’s happening inside the body (like the posterior insula). This means these regions communicate back and forth, helping the brain predict and regulate what the body needs.
Mounting evidence suggests that one of the brain’s central roles is to anticipate and meet the body’s energy needs. The findings place the monitoring and regulation of the body’s needs at the functional core of the human brain, showing the close connection between mental and physical health.
Previous studies in both animal models and humans have pointed to the existence of a distributed system in the brain that helps it anticipate and prepare for the body’s energy needs — a process called allostasis — as well as monitor the sensory conditions inside the body, known as interoception.
In an earlier study using 3 Tesla fMRI, the team mapped a network supporting allostasis and interoception in the human brain, but the comparatively limited spatial resolution and sensitivity of the 3 Tesla technology made it difficult to fully capture the system’s smaller structures in the brainstem, which are known to play a key role in these processes.