Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 4700

A new field of science has been emerging at the intersection of neuroscience and high-performance computing — this is the takeaway from the 2022 BrainComp conference, which took place in Cetraro, Italy from the 19th to the 22nd of September. The meeting, which featured international experts in brain mapping, machine learning, simulation, research infrastructures, neuro-derived hardware, neuroethics and more, strengthened the current collaborations in this emerging field and forged new ones.

Now in its 5th edition, BrainComp first started in 2013 and is jointly organised by the Human Brain Project and the EBRAINS digital research infrastructure, University of Calabria in Italy, the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf and the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. It is attended by researchers from inside and outside the Human Brain Project. This year was dedicated to the computational challenges of brain connectivity. The brain is the most complex system in the observable universe due to the tight connections between areas down to the wiring of the individual neurons: decoding this complexity through neuroscientific and computing advances benefits both fields.

Hosted by the organising committee of Katrin Amunts, Scientific Research Director of the HBP, Thomas Lippert, Leader of EBRAINS Computing Services from the Juelich Supercomputing Centre and Lucio Grandinetti from the University of Calabria, the sessions included a variety of topics over four days.

Read more | >

Bjarke Ingels Group and Barcode Architects collaborated to create ‘Sluishuis’ – an angular residential complex placed above the IJ Lake in Amsterdam. The structure’s sharp geometric ends meet in the air, water, and land, creating a mesmerizing structure that seems to be jutting into the sky while resembling the bow of a ship! It is constructed on an artificial island in the IJ Lake and forms a geometrically-intriguing gateway from the lake.

Designer: Bjarke Ingels Group x Barcode Architects.

Read more | >

A well-known game studio is allegedly using AI voices for a video game. A clarification includes a commitment to human creativity. It’s another footnote in the debate over the value of human labor that will become more common in the future.

It’s the very debate that has erupted so vehemently around AI-generated images in recent months. Are AI images art? If so, can they be equated with human art? Are they detrimental to art? Are they even plagiarism, because the AI examines human works during training – in the inspiration phase, so to speak – and then imitates them in trace elements?

Image generation machines like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney alone raise myriad questions about the value and interplay of human and machine labor. These questions are likely to increase because generative AI will not stop at 2D images. Another area it is already tapping into is audio.

Read more | >

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the University Health Network, have proposed a new mechanistic model (AD2) for Alzheimer’s, looking at it not as a brain disease, but as a chronic autoimmune condition that attacks the brain.

This novel research is published today, in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

“We don’t think of Alzheimer’s as fundamentally a disease of the . We think of it as a disease of the immune system within the brain,” says Dr. Donald Weaver, co-Director of the Krembil Brain Institute and author of the paper.

Read more | >

Methuselah Foundation recently announced a $1 million competition to.
encourage innovation that will enable medicine to move away from unreliable.
animal testing. The change is long overdue. In the U.S., all our food and.
drug research has been guided by the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics.
Act, which requires that every drug be tested on animals. While this was.
state-of-the-art scientific process 84 years ago, we can do much better today. The reason why is simple: Animal testing is unreliable, ineffective.

And costly.

Read more | >