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Summary: Researchers in China have developed a new neural network that generates high-quality bird images from textual descriptions using common-sense knowledge to enhance the generated image at three different levels of resolution, achieving competitive scores with other neural network methods. The network uses a generative adversarial network and was trained with a dataset of bird images and text descriptions, with the goal of promoting the development of text-to-image synthesis.

Source: Intelligent Computing.

In an effort to generate high-quality images based on text descriptions, a group of researchers in China built a generative adversarial network that incorporates data representing common-sense knowledge.

Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see.

We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the universe as we see it would make no sense.

But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding.

Organoids aren’t nearly as complex as their full-sized counterparts, but they’re useful for research — scientists can study organ development, monitor disease progression, and even test new treatments on them.

What’s new: When human embryos are about five weeks old, they develop structures called “optic cups” that will eventually become retinas.

Researchers have grown optic cups in the lab before, and they’ve also grown mini brains. Now, researchers at University Hospital Düsseldorf have grown brain organoids with optic cups.

Humans rapidly extract diverse and complex information from ongoing social interactions, but the perceptual and neural organization of the different aspects of social perception remains unresolved. We showed short movie clips with rich social content to 97 healthy participants while their haemodynamic brain activity was measured with fMRI. The clips were annotated moment-to-moment for a large set of social features and 45 of the features were evaluated reliably between annotators. Cluster analysis of the social features revealed that 13 dimensions were sufficient for describing the social perceptual space. Three different analysis methods were used to map the social perceptual processes in the human brain. Regression analysis mapped regional neural response profiles for different social dimensions. Multivariate pattern analysis then established the spatial specificity of the responses and intersubject correlation analysis connected social perceptual processing with neural synchronization. The results revealed a gradient in the processing of social information in the brain. Posterior temporal and occipital regions were broadly tuned to most social dimensions and the classifier revealed that these responses showed spatial specificity for social dimensions; in contrast Heschl gyri and parietal areas were also broadly associated with different social signals, yet the spatial patterns of responses did not differentiate social dimensions. Frontal and subcortical regions responded only to a limited number of social dimensions and the spatial response patterns did not differentiate social dimension. Altogether these results highlight the distributed nature of social processing in the brain.