Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The fruit fly larva connectome showed circuit features that were strikingly reminiscent of prominent and powerful machine learning architectures. “Some of the architectural features observed in the Drosophila larval brain, including multilayer shortcuts and prominent nested recurrent loops, are found in state-of-the-art artificial neural networks, where they can compensate for a lack of network depth and support arbitrary, task-dependent computations,” they wrote. The team expects continued study will reveal even more computational principles and potentially inspire new artificial intelligence systems. “What we learned about code for fruit flies will have implications for the code for humans,” Vogelstein said. “That’s what we want to understand—how to write a program that leads to a human brain network.”

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The animal brain consists of tens of billions of neurons or nerve cells that perform complex tasks like processing emotions, learning, and making judgments by communicating with each other via neurotransmitters. These small signaling molecules diffuse—move from high to low concentration regions—between neurons, acting as chemical messengers.

Scientists believe that this diffusive motion might be at the heart of the brain’s superior function. Therefore, they have aimed to understand the role of specific neurotransmitters by detecting their release in the brain using amperometric and microdialysis methods. However, these methods provide insufficient information, necessitating better sensing techniques.

To this end, scientists developed an optical imaging method wherein protein probes change their fluorescence intensity upon detecting a specific . Recently, a group of researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology in Japan led by Professor Yasuo Yoshimi has taken this idea forward. They have successfully synthesized fluorescent molecularly imprinted polymeric nanoparticles (fMIP-NPs) that serve as probes to detect specific neurotransmitters–serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine.

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A team of researchers led by the University of Innsbruck have observed a quantum tunneling effect in experiments that build off 15 years of research into such reactions and marks the slowest charged particle reaction ever observed until now. But while such chemical reactions have only been theoretical up to this point, can it be achieved in real-world experiments?

“It requires an experiment that allows very precise measurements and can still be described quantum-mechanically,” said Dr. Roland Wester, who is a professor of theoretical *physics at the University of Innsbruck, and lead author of the study. “The idea came to me 15 years ago in a conversation with a colleague at a conference in the United States.”

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Sand dunes are not uncommon on the surface of Mars. However, during observations to see how the frost from winter melts on the planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of strange Martian dunes that appear almost completely circular. This almost perfectly circular appearance is unusual, which has sparked the interest of NASA and astronomers worldwide.

According to NASA’s page detailing the image, the strange Martian dunes appear to have steeper sides on the south side. NASA says this is because the windows on Mars generally move towards the south. Of course, they can vary, but the effect is clearly seen in these images, where the southern side of the circular dunes is steeper.

The images of these strange Martian dunes were made possible thanks to the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), an instrument on the MRO. HiRISE is the largest and the most powerful camera that humanity has ever sent to another planet, and it has delivered exceptional observations about the surface of the Red Planet.

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One of the most fundamental rules of physics, undisputed since Einstein first laid it out in 1905, is that no information-carrying signal of any type can travel through the Universe faster than the speed of light. Particles, either massive or massless, are required for transmitting information from one location to another, and those particles are mandated to travel either below (for massive) or at (for massless) the speed of light, as governed by the rules of relativity. You might be able to take advantage of curved space to allow those information-carriers to take a short-cut, but they still must travel through space at the speed of light or below.

Since the development of quantum mechanics, however, many have sought to leverage the power of quantum entanglement to subvert this rule. Many clever schemes have been devised in a variety of attempts to transmit information that “cheats” relativity and allows faster-than-light communication after all. Although it’s an admirable attempt to work around the rules of our Universe, every single scheme has not only failed, but it’s been proven that all such schemes are doomed to failure. Even with quantum entanglement, faster-than-light communication is still an impossibility within our Universe. Here’s the science of why.

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Walk through a maze of mirrors, you’ll soon come face to face with yourself. Your nose meets your nose, your fingertips touch at their phantom twins, stopped abruptly by a boundary of glass.

Most of the time, a reflection needs no explanation. The collision of light with the mirror’s surface is almost intuitive, its rays set on a new path through space with the same ease as a ball bouncing off a wall.

For over sixty years, however, physicists have considered a subtly different kind of reflection. One that occurs not through the three dimensions of space, but in time.

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While attending an event called AI in Focus — Digital Kickoff, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Germany, Andreas Braun, spoke about GPT-4 and its upcoming unveiling (via Heise). According to Braun, the next iteration of GPT will be shown off next week and it will allow users to create new types of AI-generated content.

We will introduce GPT-4 next week, where we have multimodal models that will offer completely different possibilities – for example, videos.

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A new concept called organoid intelligence, with the aim of developing a new generation of biocomputers, has recently been detailed by a group of researchers. They want to harness advances in the reproduction of human brain cells in vitro to offer superior intelligence to the computers and smart devices of the future. This technology promises to be much more powerful and efficient than any form of artificial intelligence as we know it.

This notion of organoid intelligence is described in a paper outlining a roadmap to developing this technology published in the journal Frontiers of Science, by numerous scientists, mainly from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. According to them, work on cerebral organoids, derived from human stem cells, should make it possible in the relatively near future to reproduce entities endowed with memory and a genuine capacity for learning. Organoids are miniature organs grown in vitro. The term organoid intelligence (OI) encompasses all these developments, leading to a form of biological computing — or biocomputing — that leverages neurons bred in a lab. All of which is enough to make the likes of ChatGPT seem outdated already.

Complex interfaces could eventually be networked, with brain organoids connected to sensory organoids such as retinal organoids. This could, for example, lead to new therapeutic applications.

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More than 107 million science papers have just been cataloged for the public’s use thanks to a new project called The General Index.

Typically, academic studies exist behind a paywall — locking up potentially important information not only from the public but, perhaps more importantly, from other scientists.

The General Index wants to set that information free. The index acts almost like a Google search for scientific papers, but with a twist. Only snippets of the papers are provided, so it is up to users to mine the data and make sense out of it all.

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