Lifeboat Foundation

“If cells are dreaming, [these images] are what the cells are dreaming about,” neuroscientist Carlos Ponce told The Atlantic. “It exposes the visual vocabulary of the brain, in a way that’s unbiased by our anthropomorphic perspective.”

Some neurons responded to images that vaguely resembled objects that the scientists recognized, suggesting that the researchers identified the specific neurons that corresponded with particular real-world objects. A blur that resembled a monkey’s face accompanied by a red blotch may have corresponded to another monkey in the lab that wore a red collar. Another blur that resembled a human wearing a surgical mask may have represented the woman who took care of and fed the lab’s monkeys, who wore a similar mask.

Other images that the monkey neurons responded to the most were less realistic, instead taking the form of various streaks and splotches of color, according to The Atlantic.

Just yesterday (2022−08−24) Prof. Smolin had a deep brain stimulator inserted into his left Globus Pallidus to help him better manage his symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Here he talks about that day, his theory of PD and the journey he had been on to getting DBS.

Nvidia’s Q2 2022 earnings revealed a dramatic dip in gaming revenue, but also some ideas on how to bring it back — including discounting its oversupply of GPUs.

An artificial intelligence system trained on words and sentences alone will never approximate human understanding.

Circa 2020 This shape changing metal discovery can lead us closer to foglet machines.

Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Received 25th August 2020, Accepted 16th November 2020.

Continue reading “Polymorphism in metal halide perovskites” »

Eavesdropping on the earliest conversations between tissues in an emerging life could tell us a lot about organ growth, fertility, and disease in general. It could help prevent early miscarriages, or even tell us how to grow whole replacement organs from scratch.

In a monumental leap in stem cell research, an experiment led by researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK has developed a living model of a mouse embryo complete with fluttering heart tissues and the beginnings of a brain.

The research advances the recent success of a team comprised of some of the same scientists who pushed the limits on mimicking the embryonic development of mice using stem cells that had never seen the inside of a mouse womb.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems must understand visual scenes in three dimensions to interpret the world around us. For that reason, images play an essential role in computer vision, significantly affecting quality and performance. Unlike the widely available 2D data, 3D data is rich in scale and geometry information, providing an opportunity for a better machine-environment understanding.

Data-driven 3D modeling, or 3D reconstruction, is a growing computer vision domain increasingly in demand from industries including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Rapid advances in implicit neural representation are also opening up exciting new possibilities for virtual reality experiences.

Even during such routine tasks as a daily stroll, our brain sometimes needs to shift gears, switching from navigating the city to jumping out of the way of a bike or to crossing the street to greet a friend. These switches pose a challenge: How do the brain’s circuits deal with such dynamic and abrupt changes in behavior? A Weizmann Institute of Science study on bats, published today in Nature, suggests an answer that does not fit the classical thinking about brain function.

“Most brain research projects focus on one type of behavior at a time, so little is known about the way the brain handles dynamically changing behavioral needs,” says Prof. Nachum Ulanovsky of Weizmann’s Brain Sciences Department. In the new study, he and his team designed an experimental setup that mimicked real-life situations in which animals or humans rapidly switch from one behavior to another—for example, from navigation to avoiding a predator or a car crash. Graduate students Dr. Ayelet Sarel, Shaked Palgi and Dan Blum led the study, in collaboration with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Johnatan Aljadeff. The study was supervised by Ulanovsky together with Associate Staff Scientist Dr. Liora Las.

Using miniature wireless recording devices, the researchers monitored neurons in the brains of pairs of bats that had to avoid colliding with one another while flying toward each other along a 135-meter-long tunnel at the high speed of 7 meters per second. This amounted to a relative speed—that is, the rate at which the distance between the bats closed, or the sum of both bats’ speeds—of 14 meters per second, or about 50 kilometers an hour.