Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 4

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

What AI Reveals About the Brain

Can AI become smarter than humans?

In this episode, I talk to Chris Summerfield about the frontier of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, LLMs, AI agents, memory, and superintelligence.

We discuss why models like ChatGPT and Claude can feel so human, why today’s AI still does not learn like the brain, and why continual learning may be one of the most important unsolved problems in AI. Chris explains how human memory works, why sleep matters for learning, and what AI research is teaching us about intelligence itself.

We also discuss the future of work, education, creativity, and whether AI could lead to a more human world — or a much stranger one.

Topics covered:
• ⁠ ⁠Artificial intelligence and the human brain.
• ⁠ ⁠⁠LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude and AI agents.
• ⁠ ⁠⁠AI memory and continual learning.
• ⁠ AI alignment, safety and misalignment.
• ⁠. Superintelligence and self-improving systems.
• ⁠ Hallucinations, reasoning and intelligence.
• ⁠. Education, jobs and the future of work.
• ⁠. Why AI may change how humans understand themselves.

TIMESTAMPS:

Continue reading “What AI Reveals About the Brain” | >

Scientists identify unique receptor that accelerates early neuron growth

Cells have surface receptors that couple to proteins and other molecules to initiate or inhibit certain behaviors. Typically, the number of these receptors increases as the cell matures, but researchers have now identified that one receptor influences cell behavior much earlier than previously thought and appears to help trigger the cell differentiation process to form neurons.

The Hiroshima University-based team published their work, which they said has implications for better understanding neuronal development and brain plasticity — and how those processes become dysregulated — on March 20 in iScience. They specifically found that G protein-coupled receptor 3 (GPR3) represents a unique molecule in this receptor family, as it behaves like an immediate-early gene that rapidly responds and induces downstream signaling. Other G protein-coupled receptors behave like delayed-response genes that aren’t expressed into much later in the cell maturation process.

Understanding early transcriptional responses — how genes are expressed in response to upstream signals — is critical because these programs determine neuronal development, synaptic formation and plasticity, and their dysregulation is associated with neurological disorders such as autism and cognitive dysfunction.

Scientists uncover hidden phosphorus reservoir vital for future food production

Researchers have developed a simpler, more cost-effective method to measure a biologically important form of phosphorus in soils, providing new insights into nutrient cycling that could help improve sustainable agricultural management.

Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth and global food production, yet its natural reserves are finite. Understanding how phosphorus is stored, transformed and made available in soils is critical for maintaining soil fertility while reducing environmental impacts.

In a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, an international research team, including scientists from Sultan Qaboos University, James Hutton Institute, the Environment Authority of Oman and others, optimized a laboratory method for measuring DNA-bound phosphorus (DNA-P) in soils. DNA-P is part of the organic phosphorus pool associated with living microorganisms and plays an important role in nutrient cycling.

Exploiting a common weakness in enzymes could lead to a single vaccine against diarrhea-causing gut pathogens

The bacteria enterotoxigenic E. coli and Shigella together cause hundreds of millions of infections each year and are among the leading causes of diarrheal death, especially in children. Decades of vaccine development efforts have come up short, in part because the usual vaccine targets vary too much from one strain to the next. Now, new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis points to a shared biological feature of these gut pathogens that could lead to a vaccine that protects against both.

Researchers at WashU Medicine, along with collaborators at the University of Missouri and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh, found that enterotoxigenic E. coli (the leading cause of travelers’ diarrhea), Shigella and other diarrhea-causing pathogens rely on three closely related enzymes to get through the gut’s protective mucus layer and cause infection. Based on samples from infected patients and volunteers exposed to the bugs, the team showed that antibodies targeting one shared region of these enzymes can neutralize all three biomolecules and block the bacteria from penetrating the mucus barrier of the intestines.

The results, which appear in PNAS, point to the potential for a single combination vaccine against these major causes of severe diarrhea.

Alzheimer’s Protein APP Acts as Vital Shield for Neurons

Author: Hideaki Matsui Source: Niigata University Contact: Hideaki Matsui – Niigata University Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News.

Original Research: Closed access. “A protective role for APP in nuclear waste clearance via lysosomal exocytosis” by Dougnon G, Otsuka T, Nakamura Y, Sakai A, Yamanaka T, Matsui N, Nakahara A, Ito A, Hatano A, Matsumoto M, Igarashi H, Kakita A, Ueno M, Matsui H. PNAS DOI:10.1073/pnas.

Abstract.

With neuronal data, AI models predict grammar, meaning and context of spoken sentences

By applying machine-learning models to single-cell brain recordings taken from humans in conversation, a research team identified both individual and collective neuronal activity that reflected key features of language. The work, published in Nature, offers unprecedented insight into how neurons encode linguistic information, suggesting that brain activity may one day be used to infer speech-related thoughts, which could be transformative for some patients.

“This level of granularity is necessary for us to more completely understand how the brain generates speech and, ultimately, how we can develop technologies to restore it for individuals with communication disorders,” said Debara Tucci, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).

Electric ‘nose’ can smell when your food’s gone bad

Most of us have used the sniff test to decide whether a slightly expired bottle of milk or a week-old box of takeout is still good to eat. But while the human nose can be quite astute, it doesn’t always catch everything. Each year, millions of people in the U.S. are sickened by food-borne pathogens that thrive in undercooked or spoiled food.

Luckily for our collective stomachs, a new “electronic nose” developed at UC Berkeley can detect the scents associated with spoiled food much more accurately than the human nose. It can also sniff out the presence of common food allergens, like walnuts and peanuts, which can be deadly for those with sensitivities. The nose is described in a new study published in the journal Science Advances.

“I think ‘smart’ fridges—which come with sensors that you can control on your phone—would be a great application for this kind of technology,” said study lead author Carla Bassil, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley and a member of the Javey Research Group. “How great would it be if your fridge could tell you, ‘Hey, your broccoli’s going to go bad soon, so you should probably eat that,’ Or, ” Your chicken is on its last day’?”

‘The best solution is to murder him in his sleep’: AI can learn violent tendencies from each other despite zero references to violence in training data

Scientists found that AI models can inherit a taste for murder (or owls) from other models’ training data.

/* */