Lifeboat Foundation

Genes inherited from Denisovans, extinct human relatives, may help Papua New Guineans in the lowlands fight off infection, while mutations to red blood cells may help highlanders live at altitude.

Some people, like Sam Harris, say that science has values of its own. According to him, even a statement like “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen” is value-laden. But I don’t think that it is value-laden, it is simply a factual statement. Perhaps demonstrating that statement to be true requires values, but that statement by itself is true whatever your values are. So, then, what have professional philosophers (besides Sam Harris) written or said about this matter, of whether science is value-free, and also whether even basic scientific statements are value-free?

For our final feature celebrating Women’s History Month, we interviewed Chiara Bartolozzi, a senior researcher moving the needle in neuromorphic engineering.

Every year for Women’s History Month, All About Circuits spotlights the contributions of distinguished women engineers worldwide. For this article, we interviewed Chiara Bartolozzi, a senior researcher and neuromorphic chip expert at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Since earning a degree in engineering from the University of Genova and a Ph.D. in neuroinformatics from ETH Zurich, Bartolozzi has led important research in neuromorphic engineering. She also helped design iCub, a toddler-sized humanoid robot developed at IIT that serves as a robotics testbed worldwide.

It’s mind-bending tech that could soon transform our lives. What do qubits and cats have to do with it?

A research team headed by chemists at the University of California, Irvine has discovered a previously unknown way in which light interacts with matter, a finding that could lead to improved solar power systems, light-emitting diodes, semiconductor lasers and other technological advancements.

The Red Planet launches large bursts of plasma into space from its upper atmosphere, much like the sun’s coronal mass ejections, despite not having a global magnetic field.

By Alex Wilkins

Researchers have made a digital map showing a tiny chunk of a human brain in unprecedented detail.

Based on a brain tissue sample that had been surgically removed from a person, the map represents a cubic millimeter of brain—an area about half the size of a grain of rice. But even that tiny segment is overflowing with 1.4 million gigabytes of information—containing about 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels and 150 million synapses, the connections between neurons.

The researchers published their findings in the journal Science on Friday. They have made the data set freely available online and provided tools for analyzing and proofreading it.

Gary Marcus’ book Kluge is about the human brain and its workings. And I have been interested in how the brain works since my undergratuate days at Allegheny College working with Pete Elias and researching the learning of mice (1968) and especially into my doctoral work with Dick King at UNC-Chapel Hill. I actually think there is only modest improvement in some aspects of what we have learned about the brain since I graduated in 1977.

But we have come a long way… In ancient Greece, thinkers like Hippocrates and Aristotle grappled with the nature of the mind and its connection to the brain. While Hippocrates believed that the brain was the seat of intelligence and consciousness, Aristotle argued that the heart was the center of reason and emotion, with the brain serving merely as a cooling mechanism. We now know that the brain actually does have some impacts on thinking for most people. (grin)

I thought to share the AI book summary produced by Perplexity when I asked it to summarize the main ideas about how the brain evolved to produce this thing we can consciousness… I slightly edited the output. As Spock would say, “Fascinating.”