Out of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible — thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.
Anthropic found a strikingly similar divide inside their AI model, Claude.
Their experiments were inspired by a leading theory in neuroscience: the global workspace theory. It holds that a thought becomes consciously accessible when it enters a shared “workspace” that’s broadcast across the brain.
They found a set of representations in Claude’s neural activity that play a similar role.
But there are other possible CAR T risks for autoimmune patients. In February, FDA officials published a paper endorsing CAR T’s potential in autoimmunity but warning of “unpredictable long-term toxicity.” CAR T treatment for cancer, the authors noted, has been linked to diverse long-term issues such as Parkinson’s disease. There have also been cases in which the bioengineered cells themselves turned malignant, causing new, T cell-based cancers.
Causing a secondary cancer may be an acceptable risk when treating a life-threatening cancer, but probably not for autoimmunity, says Matt Lunning, medical director for gene and cellular therapy at Nebraska Medicine, in Omaha. How to balance the risk between the impacts of an autoimmune disease, which can range widely in severity, and the difficult-to-quantify risk of future side effects or cancers remains a major open question.
Researchers are already working on second-and third-generation versions of CAR T that they expect to be safer for both cancer and autoimmunity. For example, James Howard, a neuromuscular neurologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is testing a technology from a company called Cartesian Therapeutics that encodes the CAR using molecules of mRNA, the short-lived genetic messenger used in Covid-19 vaccines, instead of long-lasting DNA. The CAR T cells should wipe out B cells for only as long as the mRNA persists, then lose their B cell-targeting abilities. With no chance for genetically modified T cells to hang around long-term, there should be no cancer risk.
2 Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
3Department of Computational Biology, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
4Department of Neurological Surgery, Malnati Brain Tumor Institute of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
A study conducted by the Sant Pau Research Institute (IR Sant Pau) and Hospital de Sant Pau has identified for the first time in living individuals a brain pattern related to the tau protein that changes according to the stage of Huntington’s disease. This discovery opens the door both to the use of new biomarkers for monitoring the disease and to the development of treatments for a condition for which no therapeutic options are currently available.
Using positron emission tomography—a molecular neuroimaging technique known as PET—and the second-generation radiotracer [¹⁸F]PI-2620, the researchers demonstrated that this signal can already be detected in some mutation carriers who have not yet developed clinically manifest disease and that, as the disease progresses, the signal increases and spreads according to an organized anatomical distribution.
The study, published in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, provides new insights into the biological processes that occur between the genetic alteration responsible for the disease and the onset of its motor, cognitive and neuropsychiatric manifestations.
Using CHARLS data from 2011 to 2020, researchers found that sleep duration and self-reported sleep quality were associated with Parkinson’s disease risk in middle-aged and older Chinese adults. Short sleep was linked to higher PD risk, while age-specific patterns suggested a linear association in adults aged ≤60 years and a U-shaped relationship in those aged 60 years.
Hy3 is a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model from Tencent (21B active, 192 experts with top-8 routing) built for reasoning, agentic workflows, and real-world production use. It supports a configurable reasoning effort: a direct no-think mode by default, plus low and high chain-of-thought modes for complex math, coding, and multi-step problems. With a 256K context window, Hy3 targets long-horizon tasks, including improved coreference resolution, multi-turn constraint tracking, and stable tool-calling that generalizes across agent scaffoldings.
Tencent positions it as a reliable, cost-effective option across coding, document processing, financial analysis, game development, and frontend design, with a strong emphasis on grounded, anti-hallucination behavior that answers when grounded and flags when evidence is missing rather than fabricating.
In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors.
But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.
Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania developed a new trajectory-planning system that tackles both challenges at once. Their technique enables a UAV to react to obstacles in milliseconds while staying on a smooth flight path that minimizes travel time.
Autophagy is the process by which cells remove damaged proteins, recycle worn-out organelles (e.g., mitochondria), clear cellular waste and provide nutrients during stress. Autophagy is essential for muscles because they are constantly under mechanical stress. If autophagy is too low, damaged proteins accumulate and muscle gradually weakens. If it is too high, muscle tissue can begin breaking itself down.
Disruption of autophagy has been implicated in a wide range of muscle disorders, and abnormal muscle autophagy is frequently observed in neurogenic diseases. However, the neuronal signaling pathways that control this process had previously remained largely unknown.
Now, researchers led by Prof. Zhang Hong from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have identified two parallel neuronal circuits that regulate the autophagy-lysosome pathway in the body wall muscle of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny nematode worm. Their research has uncovered a previously unknown mechanism by which the worm’s nervous system maintains muscle homeostasis.
