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In a good or a bad mood, focused or distracted, our internal states directly influence our perceptions and decision-making. While the role of motivation on the performance of behavioral tasks has been known for more than a century—thanks to the work of psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dilligham Dodson—its precise effect on the brain remains unclear.

A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the EPFL, has revealed how motivation alters the neural circuits responsible for preceding in mice. This study reveals why a level of motivation that is too high or too low can affect our perception and therefore our choices. These results, featured in the journal Neuron, open up new perspectives in learning methods.

Going to work early in the morning, choosing a restaurant at lunchtime: many of our decisions are motivated by needs such as earning a living or satisfying our hunger. However, decision-making is a complex process, which can also be influenced by external factors, such as the environment or other individuals, and by our internal states, such as our mood, our level of attention or our degree of motivation.

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A new study from North Carolina State University shows a reproducible way of studying cellular communication among varied types of plant cells by “bioprinting” these cells via a 3D printer. Learning more about how plant cells communicate with each other—and with their environment—is key to understanding more about plant cell functions and could ultimately lead to creating better crop varieties and optimal growing environments.

The researchers bioprinted cells from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and from soybeans to study not just whether plant cells would live after being bioprinted—and for how long—but also to examine how they acquire and change their identity and function.

“A plant root has a lot of different cell types with specialized functions,” said Lisa Van den Broeck, an NC State postdoctoral researcher who is the first author of a paper describing the work. “There are also different sets of genes being expressed; some are cell-specific. We wanted to know what happens after you bioprint and place them into an environment that you design: Are they alive and doing what they should be doing?”

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A CREEPY image of a female has been discovered lingering in an AI’s mind, the product of some unintentional programming.

Artificial intelligence machines have always promoted efficiency, but recently many people have expressed fear of them becoming sentient.

Swedish musician Supercomposite shared that fear after discovering an AI-generated image of a woman they dubbed ‘Loab’.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=50y4PcAhf2Q&feature=share

‎ The U.S. move to protect the semiconductor industry continues apace. This Tuesday, the Commerce Department ordered a ban on selling high-tech equipment to large Chinese semiconductor companies such as Yangtze River Storage, Changxin Storage, SMIC, and others. In addition, foreign residents in the United States will not be allowed to work for Chinese companies without special permission. Experts and analysts said these measures could severely damage China’s semiconductor industry.

#ChinaRevealed #ChinaNews

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A classic thought experiment in the philosophy of mind is reduplication, in which a person (or her mind) is duplicated such that two or more descendant people of shared mental ancestry now exist where previously there was one. The philosophical quandary is to resolve what happened to the original person’s identity. Did she survive and if so, in which of the resulting people’s minds? Which of the two resulting people is the original and which is a mere copy of denigrated identity status? Alternatively, is there something fundamentally wrong with the wording of such questions, such that we should we adopt a different perspective on the nature of personal identity that offers alternative solutions to the reduplication quandary? Reduplication further arises not only in abstract philosophical musings, but also in the futuristic and variously conceivable (depending on the reader’s tastes), technology of mind uploading, in which a person’s physical brain is emulated via the technology of whole brain emulation. While mind uploading might produce a single result, such as if the original brain is destroyed by the uploading process and only one upload is created, we can also conceive of either nondestructive scenarios (in which the original brain is not destroyed) or scenarios that produce multiple uploads. Either case results in multiple descendant minds, each operating in distinct physical systems (brains or cloned brains, or computers of some sort). The philosophy of personal identity has produced several possible stances on the nature of personal identity. The most popular are body identity and psychological identity, with other options including closest continuer identity, space-time worm identity and branching identity. However, there is always room for new theories to enter the discussion. The way in which blockchains work, and Bitcoin’s mining process and protocol for handling orphaned blocks, suggests a new theory of identity along with a new solution to the reduplication problem. The proposed blockchain solution to personal identity has applications to the handling of the reduplication problem as it may arise during a futuristic mind uploading procedure.

A blockchain holds a hashed transaction ledger, essentially the history of all transactions encoded to prevent any subsequent alteration of the history. In this way, all transactions back to the beginning of the ledger’s history can be confirmed by any interested party. Deceit, fraud, and other attempts to undermine the history simply don’t work, and consequently blockchains enable a variety of interactions with the currently most popular being digital currency. In addition to more conventional applications, blockchains could also be used to assign identity status (original or copy) to the descendent minds of a mind uploading procedure. Each descendant could then venture out into the world confident that their identity status will be honored by all third parties thereafter. Let us call this the blockchain theory of personal identity.

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Inspired by living things, the unique material is 10 times as durable as natural rubber.

For the first time, researchers use only light and a catalyst to change properties such as hardness and elasticity in molecules of the same type, according to a new study published October 13 in Science.

The ability to control the physical properties of a material using light as a trigger is potentially transformative.

IStock/selimcan.

Inspired by living things like trees and shellfish, the team created a unique material that is ten times as durable as natural rubber and may lead to more flexible electronics and robots.

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The San Diego County Water Authority is planning to use its San Vicente Reservoir to store solar power making clean energy in the region viable, according to an article by NPR published on Friday.

Powering 130,000 homes

The project will take ten years to be built and will see large underground pipes connect San Vicente’s lake to a new reservoir about 1,100 feet higher. California’s solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir, storing electricity.

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The E-Walker has been tried and tested on Earth, but it’s yet to prove itself in space.

Large construction projects in space may be one step closer to reality, thanks to a new walking space robot. Researchers have designed the E-Walker — a state-of-the-art walking robot — to take on the behemoth task of space construction. A robot prototype has already been tested here on Earth by assembling a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope. The telescope would usually be built in space, which is the E-Walker’s future duty.

Doubling up on its potential duties, a smaller-scale prototype of the same robot has also been created and shows promise for large construction applications on Earth, such as maintenance of wind turbines.

The team’s findings were presented in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

IStock/Vitaly Kusaylo.

Researchers have designed the E-Walker – a state-of-the-art walking robot – to take on the behemoth task of space construction. A robot prototype has already been tested here on Earth by assembling a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope. The telescope would usually be built in space, which is the E-Walker’s future duty.

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