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U.S. health regulators gave early approval to a new Alzheimer’s drug from Eisai Co. and Biogen Inc., the most promising to date in a new class of medicines that may help slow cognitive decline caused by the disease.

The Food and Drug Administration granted conditional approval to the drug, called lecanemab, based on an early study finding it reduced levels of a sticky protein called amyloid from the brains of people with early-stage Alzheimer’s. The companies will sell it under the brand name Leqembi.

You may have come home with it after a recent trip to New England. Or you may have gotten it from that friend or family member who flew in from New York over the holidays.

The newest Omicron subvariant of concern is XBB.1.5, and it has arrived in Southern California. This version of the coronavirus is more contagious and more resistant to existing immunity than any of its predecessors.

“It’s just the latest and greatest and most infectious variant,” said Paula Cannon, a virologist at USC. “It’s amazing to me that this virus keeps finding one more trick to make itself even more infectious, even more transmissible.”

In other words, what appears to be emergent to us today, with our present limitations of what its within our power to compute, may someday in the future be describable in purely reductionist terms. Many such systems that were once incapable of being described via reductionism have, with superior models (as far as what we choose to pay attention to) and the advent of improved computing power, now been successfully described in precisely a reductionist fashion. Many seemingly chaotic systems can, in fact, be predicted to whatever accuracy we arbitrarily choose, so long as enough computational resources are available.

Yes, we can’t rule out non-reductionism, but wherever we’ve been able to make robust predictions for what the fundamental laws of nature do imply for large-scale, complex structures, they’ve been in agreement with what we’ve been able to observe and measure. The combination of the known particles that make up the Universe and the four fundamental forces through which they interact has been sufficient to explain, from atomic to stellar scales and beyond, everything we’ve ever encountered in this Universe. The existence of systems that are too complex to predict with current technology is not an argument against reductionism.

In this video I discuss why Neuromorphic processors is the future of AI #NeuromorphicChips #Loihi #IntelNeuromorphic.

➞ Register for Phenom AI Day here:
https://bit.ly/3l4CDWx.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 — Intro.
00:32 — Phenom AI day (Ad)
01:03 — What is Neuromorphic Chip.
03:19 — Intel Loihi explained.
07:16 — New Intel Loihi 2
09:45 — Analog Neuromorphic chip by Rain Neuromorphic.
10:45 — Other chips.

***

Clip taken from my conversation with Professor Michael Levin. Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C96Hq8kDORU&ab_channel=Thinginitself.

Podcast.
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Sam Baron, Australian Catholic University.

Black holes form natural time machines that allow travel to both the past and the future. But don’t expect to be heading back to visit the dinosaurs any time soon. At present, we don’t have spacecraft that could get us anywhere near a black hole. But, even leaving that small detail aside, attempting to travel into the past using a black hole might be the last thing you ever do.