Scientists found a mysterious cosmic object that’s between 10 and 100 times more powerful than all known supernovas. What could it be?
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For the Singularity to Truly Arrive, We’d Need a Machine That Eats the Sun
However, if you’re rich and you don’t like the idea of a limit on computing, you can turn to futurism, longtermism, or “AI optimism,” depending on your favorite flavor. People in these camps believe in developing AI as fast as possible so we can (they claim) keep guardrails in place that will prevent AI from going rogue or becoming evil. (Today, people can’t seem to—or don’t want to—control whether or not their chatbots become racist, are “sensual” with children, or induce psychosis in the general population, but sure.)
The goal of these AI boosters is known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. They theorize, or even hope for, an AI so powerful that it thinks like… well… a human mind whose ability is enhanced by a billion computers. If someone ever does develop an AGI that surpasses human intelligence, that moment is known as the AI singularity. (There are other, unrelated singularities in physics.) AI optimists want to accelerate the singularity and usher in this “godlike” AGI.
One of the key facts of computer logic is that, if you can slow the processes down enough and look at it in enough detail, you can track and predict every single thing that a program will do. Algorithms (and not the opaque AI kind) guide everything within a computer. Over the decades, experts have written the exact ways information can be sent, one bit—one minuscule electrical zap—at a time through a central processing unit (CPU).
“A Neural Cellular Automaton Model of Memory Transfer” by Etienne Guichard and Stefano Nichele
This is a ~1 hour 25 minute talk and Q&A discussion at our Center by Etienne Guichard (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FWNXN98AAAAJ&hl=en) and Stefano Nichele (https://www.nichele.eu/), titled “A Neural Cellular Automaton Model of Memory Transfer, with application to the ARC-AGI dataset”. Their preprint is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.
Wind isn’t the only threat: Scientists urge shift to more informed hurricane scale
Wind alone does not account for all hurricane-related fatalities. Storm surge and rainfall do as well. Yet the current warning system—the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale—measures a storm’s strength solely by wind speed.
A new research paper published in Nature Scientific Reports and co-authored by Jennifer Collins, a hurricane researcher and University of South Florida geosciences professor, argues that in order to keep people safe, it’s time for a change. The authors propose replacing the SSHWS with the Tropical Cyclone Severity Scale, which incorporates storm surge and rainfall in addition to wind.
“Frequently, people use the storm’s category to decide whether to evacuate,” Collins said. “That’s incredibly dangerous because if they hear it’s only a tropical storm or Category 1, too often no alarm bells go off, and they see no cause for concern.”
Mantle Cell Lymphoma Translocations Rewire Chromosome-Wide Gene Expression
Translocations are chromosomal “cut and paste” errors that drive many lymphomas, a type of blood cancer and the sixth most common form of cancer overall. This includes mantle cell lymphoma, a rare but aggressive subtype diagnosed in about one in every 100,000 people each year.
A study by researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, has shown a new way translocations promote cancer. The translocation most typically found in mantle cell lymphoma drags a powerful regulatory element into a new area of the human genome, where its new position allows it to boost the activity of not just one but 50 genes at once.
The discovery of this genome rewiring mechanism shows the traditional focus on the handful of genes at chromosomal breakpoints is too narrow. The study also greatly expands the list of potential drug targets for mantle cell lymphoma, for which there is no known cure.
Immune cells in the brain help shape adolescent neural circuits
Making a smoothie, going for an evening walk, or having empathy for a loved one are all examples of executive functions that are controlled by the brain’s frontal cortex. This area of the brain goes through profound change throughout adolescence, and it is during this time that abnormalities in maturing circuits can set the stage for neurodevelopmental disorders, such as schizophrenia and ADHD.
Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester have discovered that microglia, the brain’s immune cells, play a key role in how the brain adapts to the changes in this area during adolescence, which may transform how neurodevelopmental disorders are treated during this window and, possibly, into adulthood.
“A better understanding of the ways we can drive changes in these circuits offers new targets for disease treatment,” said Rianne Stowell, Ph.D., research assistant professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and first author of the study out today in Nature Communications.
