A new study reveals that raising oxygen tension during weeks four to six of brain organoid development significantly promotes neurogenesis, guided by the oxygen-binding protein neuroglobin.
What happens when intelligence escapes the bounds of flesh and bone? In this episode, we explore post-biological civilizations—entities that may trade biology for digital minds, machine bodies, or stranger forms still—and ask what becomes of identity, purpose, and humanity when the body is no longer required.
Watch my exclusive video Antimatter Propulsion: Harnessing the Power of Annihilation — https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–… Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa… Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: Post-Biological Civilizations: Life Beyond Flesh and Bone Episode 498a; May 11, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Edited by: Ludwig Luska Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Chris Zabriskie, “Unfoldment, Revealment” Phase Shift, “Forest Night” Lewis Gill, “The Phobos Diary” Stellardrone, “Red Giant” 0:00 Intro 1:24 The Physical Presence of Post-Biological Civilizations 3:38 Societal & Cultural Aspects of Post-Biological Life 5:08 The Scifi Path to Post-Biological Life 8:03 The Singularity and the Ultimate Transition 9:47 Many Paths to Post-Biological Life 17:50 The Fermi Paradox & Post-Biological Civilizations 27:39 Ethics & the Fate of Humanity 29:17 The Transition Process at a Civilizational Scale.
Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur.
Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa…
Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30.
SFIA Discord Server: / discord.
Credits:
Post-Biological Civilizations: Life Beyond Flesh and Bone.
Episode 498a; May 11, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by: Ludwig Luska.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Chris Zabriskie, \
A new study shows that the human brain organizes action-outcome associations in cognitive maps, much like how it maps physical space for navigation.
Modern ideas about reality sometimes sound like a wild story. The notion that everything around us might be bits and bytes is easy to brush aside, yet it continues to intrigue many curious minds.
This perspective has led some researchers to wonder if physical forces might be signals of an underlying information system.
According to physicist Melvin M. Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, certain features of gravity may hint at information contained in a universal computational code.
A groundbreaking new technique called EPSILON allows researchers to map the proteins involved in memory formation with unprecedented detail, providing a window into the molecular architecture of learning.
Eukaryogenesis occurred suddenly, driven by the growing length of genes and the limitations on producing longer proteins. An international team of four senior scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published groundbreaking research in the journal PNAS that explores one of the mos
Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures.
Oregon State University College of Engineering researchers have developed a more efficient chip as an antidote to the vast amounts of electricity consumed by large-language-model artificial intelligence applications like Gemini and GPT-4.
“We have designed and fabricated a new chip that consumes half the energy compared to traditional designs,” said doctoral student Ramin Javadi, who, along with Tejasvi Anand, associate professor of electrical engineering, presented the technology at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in Boston.
“The problem is that the energy required to transmit a single bit is not being reduced at the same rate as the data rate demand is increasing,” said Anand, who directs the Mixed Signal Circuits and Systems Lab at OSU. “That’s what is causing data centers to use so much power.”
Tuochao Chen, a University of Washington doctoral student, recently toured a museum in Mexico. Chen doesn’t speak Spanish, so he ran a translation app on his phone and pointed the microphone at the tour guide. But even in a museum’s relative quiet, the surrounding noise was too much. The resulting text was useless.
Various technologies have emerged lately promising fluent translation, but none of these solved Chen’s problem of public spaces. Meta’s new glasses, for instance, function only with an isolated speaker; they play an automated voice translation after the speaker finishes.
Now, Chen and a team of UW researchers have designed a headphone system that translates several speakers at once, while preserving the direction and qualities of people’s voices. The team built the system, called Spatial Speech Translation, with off-the-shelf noise-canceling headphones fitted with microphones. The team’s algorithms separate out the different speakers in a space and follow them as they move, translate their speech and play it back with a 2–4 second delay.
For a while, in the Middle Ages, there was a real craze for trying to turn unassuming lead into pure, gleaming gold.
Perhaps those ancient alchemists should have been building a particle collider. According to a new paper, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider produced about 86 billion gold nuclei from high-speed lead nuclei during the facility’s second run, between 2015 and 2018.
This is not actually much gold – mere trillionths of a gram. Nor does it last very long – just fractions of a second. But what’s really cool here is the way physicists quantified the gold production: by counting the number of protons accompanying neutrons involved in the lead interactions using the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector’s zero degree calorimeters (ZDCs).