Clip from 1964 BBC Horizon program.
Scientists had a hard time reconstructing how complex molecular parts are being held together. However, that was before SISSA’s Cristian Micheletti and his team studied how the DNA double helix unzips when translocated at high velocity through a nanopore.
DNA Double Helix’s Unzipping
DNA has a double helix structure because it consists of two spiral chains of deoxyribonucleic acid. Its shape is reminiscent of a spiral staircase.
Our brains aren’t limited to producing just one type of brain wave at a time, but usually, one type is dominant, and the type it is can often be linked to your level of alertness: delta waves may dominate when you sleep, while gamma waves might dominate when you concentrate intensely.
The idea: Researchers have previously observed that people with Alzheimer’s — a devastating neurological disease affecting more than 6 million people in the US alone — may have weaker and less in-sync gamma waves than people who don’t have the disease.
In a series of past studies, MIT researchers demonstrated a deceptively simple way to increase the power and synchronization of these waves in mouse models of Alzheimer’s: expose the animals to lights flickering and/or sounds clicking at a frequency of 40 Hz.
Organoids are an incredible tool for research into the brain. Cerebral organoids are created by growing human stem cells in a bioreactor. They might be the key to unlocking the answers to many of our questions about the brain. We explain how they’re made and some of the discoveries they’ve helped with so far!
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✍ Thumb by “Broken” Bran — https://twitter.com/BranGSmith.
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REFERENCES:
Where 99% of mass comes from: https://youtu.be/KnbrRhkJCRk.
ElectroWeak Unification: https://youtu.be/u05VK0pSc7I
Symmetry Breaking: https://youtu.be/yzqLHiA0uFI
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CHAPTERS:
Fresh on the heels of GPT-4’s public release, a team of Microsoft AI scientists published a research paper claiming the OpenAI language model — which powers Microsoft’s now somewhat lobotomized Bing AI — shows “sparks” of human-level intelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Emphasis on the “sparks.” The researchers are careful in the paper to characterize GPT-4’s prowess as “only a first step towards a series of increasingly generally intelligent systems” rather than fully-hatched, human-level AI. They also repeatedly highlighted the fact that this paper is based on an “early version” of GPT-4, which they studied while it was “still in active development by OpenAI,” and not necessarily the version that’s been wrangled into product-applicable formation.
Disclaimers aside, though, these are some serious claims to make. Though a lot of folks out there, even some within the AI industry, think of AGI as a pipe dream, others think that developing AGI will usher in the next era of humanity’s future; the next-gen GPT-4 is the most powerful iteration of the OpenAI-built Large Language Model (LLM) to date, and on the theoretical list of potential AGI contenders, GPT-4 is somewhere around the top of the list, if not number one.
The Hidden Genes That Make Us Human
Posted in genetics
Check out Brilliant here: https://brilliant.org/Eons.
In the search for the genes that make us human, some of the most important answers were hiding not in the genes themselves, but in what was once considered genomic junk.
Thanks to Riley J. Mangan, Ph.D. Candidate, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Duke University for his help with this episode!
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It’s a long-debated flaw in CRISPR: When you try to give Cas9 to a patient to snip its DNA, that person’s immune system may recognize that the protein comes not from us but from our ancient microbial foes. And it might then attack.
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It’s incredibly rechargeable, made from safe materials, and—get this—not going to catch on fire.
This sure didn’t take long — a ChatGPT clone for your desktop.
In this video I discuss New AI Model developed by researchers from Stanford and how AI models train each other to get better. Exciting times!
Stanford Paper: https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html.