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Dreaming with the Machines

Jacob’s Dream or Jacob’s Ladder by William Blake (1805). Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons. Dark blue background added by SUP staff.

With the advent of powerful tools of artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate gathering, analyzing, and interpreting dreams, new horizons of understanding have emerged for one of the most mysterious expressions of the human psyche. Modern scientists typically reject dreaming as too elusive, too subjective, and too fragmented for rigorous quantitative study. That objection no longer holds: dream reports can now be computationally modeled, and the dynamics of their recurring patterns quantitatively observed. These developments have opened a new era for the study of dreaming, dramatically expanding both our theoretical knowledge about the nature of dreams and our practical knowledge about methods of interpreting their meanings.

Dream researchers today are putting to the empirical test a host of questions that previously could only be asked in the abstract: What can massive collections of high-quality dream records, rendered into computable form, reveal about human nature past and present? How can algorithmic models deepen our understanding of dream patterns and their transformations across cultures and historical epochs? And how do we ensure that the models treat the rawest expressions of the human psyche responsibly and with scientific rigor?

New AI method uses engineering knowledge to estimate disaster damage from incomplete satellite imagery

A new technology has been developed that can rapidly predict city-scale structural damage even when portions of satellite imagery are obscured by clouds or smoke immediately after a disaster.

A research team led by professor In Ho Cho of the Department of Architecture at Seoul National University College of Engineering has presented a scientific artificial intelligence (Scientific AI) and data science framework that uses satellite imagery and various forms of open data to rapidly and accurately predict disaster-related structural damage at the city scale. By incorporating a statistical method for correcting incomplete satellite data, the researchers developed an approach that can estimate structural damage immediately after a disaster without requiring a separate, computationally expensive training stage.

The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Kendall Haven on Story Proof: The Science Behind Story

Six months before ChatGPT arrived, I sat down for two and a half hours with the only West Point graduate ever to become a professional storyteller.

Dr. Kendall Haven also holds a doctorate in oceanography and spent eight years as a senior research scientist at the Department of Energy. Then he walked away to chase what he calls a very different kind of truth.

His bottom line stopped me cold:

“Story is not theoretical anymore. It’s not hyperbole. Story is woven into our DNA. We are story. That’s now science.”

In 2022, that sounded like a storyteller defending his craft. Today, with machines built entirely out of human language, it sounds like something else.

Kendall argues that your brain story-processes information before it ever reaches your conscious mind. Which is why throwing more #data at people almost never changes their behavior. You have to reframe the story instead. And the most effective change stories, he says, are not about change at all. They’re about preservation.

Continue reading “Kendall Haven on Story Proof: The Science Behind Story” | >

Why some young ants start hunting and caring for others early

Some insects, including honeybees and ants, live in highly organized colonies where individuals take on specific roles. In many ant societies, young adult workers typically care for developing young inside the nest before beginning to forage, or search for food, outside it. Some ant species, however, start hunting for food as soon as they reach adulthood, without undergoing a transition period.

One example is Stigmatomma pallipes, a species belonging to a group commonly called Dracula ants because adults can pierce the skin of their developing young and drink a bloodlike fluid called hemolymph. The age-independent behavior of these ants was first reported in a Science paper published in 1978 by Dr. James Traniello, who is now a professor of biology at Boston University.

Researchers at Boston University recently tried to better understand how the brain development of S. pallipes workers contributes to this early readiness for work. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that regions in the brains of S. pallipes reach their largest size during the pupal stage, when immature ants transition into adulthood.

Spiking neural network learns to predict what will happen, when, and how likely it is

Imagine hearing a familiar sound and expecting something to happen. Before the event arrives, the brain can predict what it will be, when it will occur and how likely it is. Yet computational models often treat these questions separately or use learning methods that are difficult to reconcile with biological circuits. A new study proposes an alternative in which one population of spiking neurons learns all three together.

The research team was led by Associate Professor Zenas C. Chao along with Yohei Yamada, an academic specialist, from the International Research Center for Neurointelligence (WPI-IRCN), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

The researchers developed a recurrent spiking-network model to test whether a single neural population could learn event identity, timing and probability using local learning rather than backpropagation or a globally broadcast error signal. The study is published in Communications Biology.

Adjustable nanosensors turn water pressure into fluorescent signals, with stiffness shaping sensitivity

A novel nanovesicle-based platform developed at Institute of Science Tokyo can measure hydrostatic pressure by converting pressure-induced molecular changes into fluorescence signals.

The researchers developed pyrene-modified polyionic complex vesicles and demonstrated that variations in the vesicles’ membrane stiffness regulate their pressure sensitivity. Softer vesicles showed strong sensitivity in the 0.1–50 MPa range, while stiffer vesicles showed pressure-dependent changes in fluorescence lifetime.

These findings enable the investigation of hydrostatic pressure–dependent phenomena in diverse inaccessible environments.

‘Self-blinking dyes’ simplify nanoscale imaging without sacrificing precision

Nanobodies are extremely small antibody fragments that bind to specific molecules. When nanobodies are labeled with dyes, they can be used as probes to enhance super-resolution microscopy. However, conventional blinking dyes often perform poorly when attached to nanobodies, limiting their practical advantages. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen and the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) has now shown that self-blinking dyes—which can switch between bright and dark states on their own—bypass this limitation.

The new approach combines the high labeling accuracy of nanobodies with the robust and straightforward imaging enabled by self-blinking dyes—simplifying experiments, improving reproducibility and increasing the throughput of super-resolution microscopy. The results are published in Nano Letters.

A self-blinking dye is a fluorescent molecule that switches spontaneously between a bright “on” state and a dark “off” state. This blinking is essential for super-resolution microscopy because it allows individual fluorescent molecules to be detected one after another and localized very precisely.

Bitdefender alerta de una campaña global de malware preinstalado en teléfonos Android

La compañía ha identificado Midnight Mimosa, una operación activa desde hace dos años que infecta miles de dispositivos en más de 150 países antes incluso de su primer encendido. El malware, integrado en el firmware, ejecuta fraude publicitario, recopila datos y permite controlar los teléfonos de forma remota.

Stratospheric observatory Sunrise-III reveals intricate solar magnetic structures

A team of researchers led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan discovered unexpectedly intricate magnetic structures above quiet-sun regions by observing the sun with the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise-III during its 2024 flight in Earth’s stratosphere. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Threads within the magnetic canopy Sunrise-III observations revealed thin, elongated, thread-like magnetic structures embedded within the magnetic canopy above a quiet-sun region. The magnetic canopy forms in the solar atmosphere (chromosphere) as magnetic fields concentrated at the solar surface (photosphere) arc outward with increasing altitude, creating an arch of magnetic structures.

The new observations show that this canopy is not a simple, uniformly expanding structure but instead contains numerous thin, elongated magnetic substructures.

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