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Distributed Cognition: The New Science of Non-Biological Intelligence

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about distributed intelligence and experiments on slime mold and ants.
Links:
https://journals.aps.org/prxlife/pdf/.
ANT Lab • The odorous house ant trail pheromone depo…
Audrey Dussutour • Blob crawling around.
#inteligence #artificialintelligence #biology.

0:00 Intelligence — what is it?
1:10 Mechanical intelligence in the slime mold.
3:30 How it seems to work.
5:55 Ants and swarm intelligence.
6:45 What is the queen for?
8:35 Other swarm animals.
9:45 Ants vs humans.
11:10 Collective intelligence.
12:00 Implications for AI
13:20 Implications for the existence of alien intelligence.

Enjoy and please subscribe.

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The hardware used to record these videos:

USC scientists just unlocked an endless supply of cancer-fighting immune cells

A new stem-cell-inspired technique allows scientists to grow vast numbers of immune-cell progenitors that can be engineered to hunt cancer and strengthen immune responses. In animal studies, the cells fought tumors, restored immune function, and showed promise as a durable, off-the-shelf therapy platform.

We are introducing and open sourcing LongCat-2.0, a large-scale MoE language model with 1.6 trillion total parameters and ~48 billion activated per token —

We are introducing and open sourcing, a large-scale MoE language model with 1.6 trillion total parameters and ~48 billion activated per token — a substantial step up from previous LongCat models, accompanied by several architectural improvements.

Both the full training run and the large-scale deployment are built entirely on AI ASIC superpods. Pretraining spans millions of accelerator-days across more than 35 trillion tokens, with no rollbacks or irrecoverable loss spikes — demonstrating that we have the capability to conduct frontier-scale training on alternative hardware platforms.

To strengthen the model on long-horizon tasks, we introduce LongCat Sparse Attention and train on hundreds of billions of tokens of 1M-context data. Together with dedicated post-training, this gives strong performance on coding and agentic tasks.

Some boreal forest species fail to recover even 100 years after clearcutting

Boreal forests are being clear-cut faster than some of their wildlife and plant species can recover, with a few failing to return even 100 years after harvesting, according to University of Alberta-led research.

The comprehensive global analysis looked at how clear-cutting—when all trees in an area are felled—affects birds, small mammals, spiders, insects, vascular plants, mosses and lichens in forests that are harvested for lumber or pulp and paper production. The researchers compared logged and unlogged areas over many decades, tracking how long it took to return to the biodiversity levels of a mature forest. The findings are published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

While some species came back within 30 years—soon enough to fall within the typical 60-to 80-year logging cycles—others won’t fit into that timeline, warns biologist Dr. Ellen Macdonald, a professor emerita in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences and lead author of the study.

Smoking triggers neutrophil response that may link lungs to heart disease

Scientists at the University of Oklahoma have identified a previously unrecognized immune system pathway that helps explain how cigarette smoking increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. The findings, published in Circulation Research, show that cigarette smoke activates immune cells that trigger widespread inflammation throughout the body, accelerating the buildup of plaque in arteries.

Cigarette smoking is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and is linked to heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening conditions. While smoking’s harmful effects on the lungs are well established, the biological processes that connect cigarette smoke exposure to cardiovascular disease have been less well understood.

Wireless biodegradable sensor could help injured knees heal without dangerous overloading

A biodegradable pressure sensor could help people with knee injuries exercise and heal faster, University of Connecticut researchers report in Science Advances. The knee can take a great deal of abuse, thanks to the cartilage that cushions it. But if it’s not moved and exercised enough, the knee stiffens and has poor blood flow. The cartilage can degrade or tear, worsening any injury already there. So people with injured knees have to move in order to heal. The challenge is knowing how much exercise or movement is too much.

To answer that question, UConn College of Engineering professor Thanh Nguyen, along with Ph.D. student Jinyoung Park and other colleagues, developed a pressure sensor that can be placed inside the knee joint and then degrade harmlessly in the body when no longer needed.

“Overloading destroys the cartilage. But if you don’t move and exercise, if you don’t run, walk, jump, you have a very stiff joint with little blood flowing to it,” says Nguyen, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which is a joint effort by the College of Engineering, School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. “My lab developed a sensor that can monitor the force in real time.”

H. pylori screening could return fivefold value in gastric cancer prevention

Each unit of cost invested in Helicobacter pylori screening can generate approximately a fivefold return in gastric cancer prevention benefits.

The gastric cancer prevention research team at National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, has pioneered a globally applicable preventive model for gastric cancer control. To inform public health policymaking, the research team developed a globally adaptable decision-tree model to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of H. pylori screening. The findings were published in JAMA on June 1, 2026.

Building on Taiwan’s nationwide fecal immunochemical test-based colorectal cancer screening program, the gastric cancer prevention team has conducted a 10-year randomized clinical trial demonstrating that the additional use of an H. pylori stool antigen test (HPSA) alongside fecal occult blood testing could simultaneously achieve the dual goals of colorectal cancer and gastric cancer prevention. The findings were previously published on Sept. 30, 2024, in JAMA.

The AI Power Boom Is Reopening the Public Utility Debate

Not Even Musk Has The Answer To AI’s Power Shortage https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Not-Even-Musk-Has…rtage.html


U.S. utilities are overcapitalized with expensive equity, claiming consumers could pay 10–15% less for electricity if utilities relied more heavily on low-cost government-backed debt, as seen in countries like France and historically in Japan.

Quantum Oscillators Find a Shared Beat

The synchronization of two quantum oscillators reveals a collective rhythm encoded solely in their correlations.

When clocks share a wall, heart cells pulse in a dish, or fireflies flash in a summer field, separate rhythms can somehow become one. Physicists call this phenomenon synchronization. It is familiar in the everyday world but becomes slippery in the quantum world, where an oscillator’s phase can be smeared out by environmental fluctuations and disturbed by measurements. Now, in a trapped-ion experiment, Jiarui Liu at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have observed synchronization between two quantum oscillators [1]. Their demonstration is important not just because it realizes a long-sought quantum version of a textbook nonlinear system, but also because the shared rhythm is hidden: Each oscillator alone shows no phase preference, and the beat emerges only when the two are measured together.

The classical picture of synchronization predates quantum mechanics. A key component is a self-sustained oscillator, a system that keeps repeating the same motion on its own. Such a system continually replaces the energy it loses through damping, while also preventing its motion from growing uncontrollably. Its amplitude is fixed, but its phase remains free, allowing an interaction with another oscillator to lock the two rhythms together.

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