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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has extended the state of emergency declared in response to the spread of poliovirus after sewage tested positive in Brooklyn and Queens.

Hochul said the state disaster emergency will remain in place at least through Nov. 8 to support statewide efforts to boost the vaccination rate against polio.

The New York State Department of Health, in a statement Tuesday, said the sewage sample that tested positive in Brooklyn and Queens is genetically linked to the virus that paralyzed an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County over the summer.

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The metaverse is set to disrupt our lives — its development should not be taken lightly.

Building it must not be hastened by a few companies; it must be careful, calculated, thoughtful and most of all, collaborative.

This was the key takeaway of a panel discussion (moderated by GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi) on the technical standards and building blocks of the metaverse at this week’s MetaBeat event.

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Analysis of data obtained over the past two weeks by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) investigation team shows the spacecraft’s kinetic impact with its target asteroid, Dimorphos, successfully altered the asteroid’s orbit. This marks humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object and the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology. Images such as the below helped scientists understand the orbit change resulting from DART’s impact.

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Bull’s-eye: NASA’s DART craft successfully changed the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos by colliding into the rocky body two weeks ago, according to the space agency.

The test shows humanity has the capability to stop an asteroid from hitting the planet, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a Tuesday press conference (Opens in a new window). “If an Earth-threatening asteroid was discovered, and we can see it far enough away, this technique could be used to deflect it,” he added.

The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was a spacecraft about the size of a refrigerator. When it collided with Dimorphos on September 26th, it was traveling at 14,000 miles per hour, which caused a noticeable impact that telescopes and radar images were able to capture.

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The brain’s ability to adapt and rewire itself throughout life continues to surprise neuroscientists. Researchers have found a way to restore sight in adult mice with a form of congenital blindness, in spite of the rodents’ relative maturity.

The mice were modeling a rare human disorder of the eye’s retina, called leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), which often causes blindness or severe visual impairment at birth.

This inherited condition seems to be caused by a mutation in any one of dozens of genes associated with the retina and its light-sensing abilities.

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QNTYM Railway is a ‘software level’ application that can be deployed on current hardware meaning there will be no need for changes in physical network infrastructure (hardware). The QNTYM Railway is an inherently quantum secure, self-defending, resilient, digital infrastructure capable of lightning-fast speed with a significant sustainability proposition. From a command & control standpoint, the QNTYM Railway is also integrated with leading vendors where users can benefit from having threat intel, vulnerability, device & incident response management capabilities all automated and in one place, hence reducing complexity.

In terms of speed, the QNTYM Railway has demonstrated consistent throughput speeds of 350+ Mbit/s, (and above). The QNTYM Railway provides integration and interoperability that is in a class of its own allowing technology to reach new levels. For the past year, QDEx Labs has been stress-assessing the QNTYM Railway across three interconnected cloud environments (AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure); they found that not only are they consistently experiencing the minimum requirement of 250 Mbit/s for 8k video streaming, but they are also, in fact, recording data streams reaching 3 to 4 times that amount with little to no processor load and added latencies in the microsecond (NOT millisecond) range.

The bottom line is that this architecture has now proven capable of hosting an ultra-realistic 3D metaverse. Results like these are something that Web3 and Metaverse projects currently lack and will require.

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Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of biology. He is a director of the Allen Discovery Center, director at the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, and principal investigator at the Levin Lab.

0:00 intro.
1:38 bioelectricity and developmental biology.
7:56 memory and conditioning in GRNs.
11:50 is there a privileged cognitive substrate?
13:55 Godel type limits.
15:45 multi-scale competency architecture.
25:12 intelligence.
27:00 conceptual framework for cognition.
29:45 does cognition bottom out somewhere?
36:47 synthetic cognition.
39:23 sci-fi that captures this well.
45:16 consciousness, hard problem, and the consciousness of development.
51:09 where does the self come from?
54:06 how do different emergent levels interact.
56:50 top-down causality.
1:02:28 where do goals come from?
1:07:06 balancing conceptual and empirical work.

Michael Levin’s Website:
https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/

Podcast.

Continue reading “Michael Levin on the foundations of cognition | Thing in itself w/ Ashar Khan” | >