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Summary: Learning a new language can affect musical processing in children, researchers report. Findings support the theory that musical and linguistic functions are closely linked in the developing brain.

Source: University of Helsinki.

Research has shown that a music-related hobby boosts language skills and affects the processing of speech in the brain. According to a new study, the reverse also happens—learning foreign languages can affect the processing of music in the brain.

“We patronize [the animals] for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.” Animals diverge from us in wonderfully creative ways. Did you know dogs have magnetotactic abilities and prefer to relieve themselves along a north-south axis? And dolphins echolocation allows them to see X-ray-like images & “tell” other dolphins what they’ve seen without our clumsy, 1-word-at-a-time process. Instead, they create a visual picture of what they saw in the minds of other dolphins, perhaps even “bolding” aspects they want to emphasize.

https://www.robertlanza.com/the-Most-Amazing-Things-About-Animal-Consciousness/

A form of reinforcement learning helps in the trade-offs between power, performance, and area in chips.

“The reason a glucose-responsive insulin is important is that the biggest barrier to the effective use of insulin, especially in Type 1 diabetes, is the fear of the consequences of blood sugar going too low,” says study author Michael A. Weiss.

For sufferers of diabetes, keeping blood glucose levels within a healthy range can be a difficult and labor-intensive balancing act that often requires regular insulin injections, but some scientists imagine a future where medicine does the heavy lifting for them. A team at Indiana University School of Medicine has taken a promising step towards this future, demonstrating a type of “synthetic hinge” that swings into action when blood glucose levels call for corrective action.

The hormone insulin plays a vital role in keeping glucose at healthy levels in the blood, pulling it out of the bloodstream and helping turn it into energy. In diabetes patients, insufficient amounts or insulin that results in a reduction in effectiveness means that blood glucose levels are left to rise to potentially dangerous levels, which can have serious consequences.

Continue reading “‘Synthetic hinge’ opens a door to smart, glucose-responsive insulin” »

Interesting.

The NASA team is considering renaming its new groundbreaking telescope due to anti-LGBTQ+ claims involving its honoree James Webb.

DeepMind has released a new paper that shows impressive advances in reinforcement learning. How far does it bring us toward general AI?

SpaceX gears up to launch its Starship rocket to all-new heights.

SpaceX is gearing up to launch its Starship rocket to all-new heights, and CEO Elon Musk has shared photos of the team hard at work.

Two conditional transgenic mouse lines based on CRISPRa and CRISPRi enable epigenome editing in vivo.

The idea is to offer the predictions for the structure of practically every protein with a known sequence of amino acids free of charge. “We believe that this is the most important contribution to date that artificial intelligence has contributed to scientific knowledge,” he said following the publication of DeepMind’s research in the medical journal Nature.

DeepMind, a company bought by Google, predicts with unprecedented precision the 3D structure of nearly all the proteins made by the human body.