A roadmap for brain emulation models at the human scale.
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New Drug Slashes Dangerous Blood Fats by Nearly 40% in First Human Trial
When we eat, the body turns surplus calories into molecules called “triglycerides”, especially when those calories come from carbs, sugar, fats, and alcohol. Triglycerides are a type of fat or “lipid”, and the body stores them in fat cells to use as fuel between meals.
However, too much of this fat can become harmful. High triglyceride levels can lead to “hypertriglyceridemia” (“excess triglycerides in the blood”), a condition tied to a much higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and pancreatitis. That is why people are widely encouraged to support healthy triglyceride levels through diet and exercise, while more severe cases may require medication.
Is Betelgeuse about to explode into a supernova? Astronomers finally have an answer
Between late 2019 and early 2020, the red supergiant Betelgeuse showed signs of weakening that led many to wonder whether its long-expected explosion into a supernova just a few hundred light-years from the Solar System might be imminent. Other ideas were put forward, and more recently, fresh data have shed new light on the question.
It’s well established that stars with masses greater than eight to ten times that of the Sun won’t end up as white dwarfs like our Sun will. Instead, they explode as type II supernovae, leaving behind a neutron star and sometimes, if the mass is high enough, a stellar black hole.
Located roughly 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse is one of these stars, and it’s clearly nearing the end of its life. It sits in the red supergiant phase, outside the main sequence on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram.
Scientists Uncover Potential “Two-in-One” Treatment for Diabetes and Heart Disease
Earlier work linked the experimental drug ‘IC7Fc’ to improvements in type 2 diabetes, and new research now points to a possible role in cardiovascular health as well. Scientists report that the compound may lower the risk of heart disease by reducing harmful cholesterol in the bloodstream and calming inflammatory activity that damages blood vessels over time.
The findings come from a preclinical study published in Science Advances, led by researchers at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands in collaboration with Monash University and other international partners.
In experiments involving mice genetically predisposed to heart disease, treatment with IC7Fc led to clear reductions in blood fat (triglycerides) and cholesterol, markers closely linked to the development of cardiovascular complications.
Conscious AI: Conflations and Comparisons
Consciousness, like intelligence, is multi-faceted. This makes the future of AI more unpredictable and potentially even more hazardous.
Well, no. Of course not. There’s no fundamental necessity for these two characteristics to be tightly bound together. A chatbot can provide a human companion with sparkling conversation without having its own inner sparkle of feeling. Like an actor, it can mimic expressions of emotional highs and lows whilst lacking any interior passion. It can talk persuasively about having an inner life without there being any inside inside.
Easy-to-use tool can identify high- and low-risk metastatic prostate cancer patients earlier
A new study published in Nature Communications provides a framework for researching whether earlier, model-guided treatment intensification can meaningfully improve survival for patients with aggressive disease.
“Early decline in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) to very low levels is one of the strongest predictors of long-term survival in metastatic prostate cancer. However, clinicians currently have to wait up to six months after starting therapy to see whether a patient achieves this favorable response. For patients who do not respond well, this delay may allow the cancer to progress and become more resistant to treatment,” said Soumyajit Roy, MD, a radiation oncologist at UH Seidman Cancer Center and first author of the study.
Because existing clinical risk stratification tools—such as disease volume or metastatic burden—are relatively imprecise, there has been an unmet need for a reliable, easy-to-use tool that can risk stratify patients earlier, before that critical six-month window closes. Researchers wanted to determine whether it is possible to predict early treatment response at the time of diagnosis for men with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) who are treated with modern androgen receptor pathway inhibitors (ARPIs), which are now standard of care worldwide.
What babies can teach AI
Researchers at Google DeepMind tried to teach an AI system to have that same sense of “intuitive physics” by training a model that learns how things move by focusing on objects in videos instead of individual pixels. They trained the model on hundreds of thousands of videos to learn how an object behaves. If babies are surprised by something like a ball suddenly flying out of the window, the theory goes, it is because the object is moving in a way that violates the baby’s understanding of physics. The researchers at Google DeepMind managed to get their AI system, too, to show “surprise” when an object moved differently from the way it had learned that objects move.
Yann LeCun, a Turing Prize winner and Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that teaching AI systems to observe like children might be the way forward to more intelligent systems. He says humans have a simulation of the world, or a “world model,” in our brains, allowing us to know intuitively that the world is three-dimensional and that objects don’t actually disappear when they go out of view. It lets us predict where a bouncing ball or a speeding bike will be in a few seconds’ time. He’s busy building entirely new architectures for AI that take inspiration from how humans learn. We covered his big bet for the future of AI here.
The AI systems of today excel at narrow tasks, such as playing chess or generating text that sounds like something written by a human. But compared with the human brain—the most powerful machine we know of—these systems are brittle. They lack the sort of common sense that would allow them to operate seamlessly in a messy world, do more sophisticated reasoning, and be more helpful to humans. Studying how babies learn could help us unlock those abilities.