Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7

A study led by Paolo Padoan, ICREA research professor at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), is challenging the understanding of planetary disk formation around young stars.

The paper, published in Nature Astronomy, reveals that the environment plays a crucial role in determining the size and lifetime of these planetary disks, which are the sites of planet formation.

When a star forms, it is surrounded by a spinning disk of gas and dust. Over time, this material eventually forms the planets. Traditionally, scientists believed that once a disk forms, it simply loses too much over time as it feeds the star and the growing planets.

Read more | >

A recent study conducted in southern Italy presented some surprising findings that linked the regular consumption of poultry to potential increases in gastrointestinal cancers and all-cause mortality. This has caused one question to arise — is eating chicken really as healthy as we think it is?

The study’s findings indicated that exceeding the weekly recommended amounts — that is, eating more than 300 grams (g) of poultry, such as chicken and turkey, per week — resulted in a 27% higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to eating moderate amounts.

Moreover, the research suggested that higher poultry intake was linked to a 2.3% increase in the risk of gastrointestinal cancers, with a higher observed risk among men at 2.6%. The findings were published in the journal Nutrients.

Read more | >

We discuss Michael Levin’s paper “Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue.” Levin is a scientist at Tufts University, his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making across biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. His work spans developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. 🎥 Next, watch my first interview with Michael Levin… What are Cognitive Light Cones? • What are Cognitive Light Cones? (Mich… ❶ Memories as Agents 0:00 Introduction 1:40 2024 Highlights from Levin Lab 3:20 Stress sharing paper summary 6:15 Paradox of change: Species persist don’t evolve 7:20 Bow-tie architectures 10:00 🔥 Memories as messages from your past self 12:50 Polycomputing 16:45 Confabulation 17:55 What evidence supports the idea that memories are agential? 22:00 Thought experiment: Entities from earth’s core ❷ Information Patterns 31:30 Memory is not a filing cabinet 32:30 Are information patterns agential? 35:00 🔥 Caterpillar/butterfly… sea slug memory transfer 37:40 Bow-tie architectures are EVERYWHERE 43:20 Bottlenecks “scary” for information ❸ Connections & Implications 45:30 🔥 Black holes/white holes as bow-ties (Lee Smolin) 47:20 What is confabulation? AI hallucinations 52:30 Gregg Henriques & self-justifying apes… all good agents storytellers 54:20 Information telling stories… Joseph Campbell’s journey for a single cell 1:00:50 What comes next? 🚾 Works Cited 🚩 Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/6/481 https://thoughtforms.life/suti-the-se… our way to health with robot cells | Michael Levin (Big Think 2023) • Biohacking our way to health with rob… https://peregrinecr.com/ 🚀 What is this channel? Exploring Truth in philosophy, science, & art. We’ll uncover concepts from psychology, mythology, spirituality, literature, media, and more. If you like Lex Fridman or Curt Jaimungal, you’ll love this educational channel. p.s. Please subscribe! Young channel here. =) #science #memory #biology #computing #mind #intelligence #attractor #polycomputing #bioelectric #cybernetics #research #life

Read more | >

At the Artificiality Summit 2024, Michael Levin, distinguished professor of biology at Tufts University and associate at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, gave a lecture about the emerging field of diverse intelligence and his frameworks for recognizing and communicating with the unconventional intelligence of cells, tissues, and biological robots. This work has led to new approaches to regenerative medicine, cancer, and bioengineering, but also to new ways to understand evolution and embodied minds. He sketched out a space of possibilities—freedom of embodiment—which facilitates imagining a hopeful future of \.

Read more | >

Recorded 6 November 2024. Michael Levin of Tufts University presents “Non-neural intelligence: biological architectures for problem-solving in diverse spaces” at IPAM’s Naturalistic Approaches to Artificial Intelligence Workshop. Abstract: The familiar, readily-recognized intelligence of brainy animals has long served as inspiration for AI. However, biological intelligence is far older than neurons, and indeed than multicellularity. My lab studies problem-solving in cells, tissues, and even subcellular components, operating in different spaces and at different scales than conventional intelligent agents. In this talk, I will describe a framework for detecting, communicating with, and creating collective intelligences, and show examples of how the fundamental properties of life suggest novel approaches for ethically relating to diverse and fascinating engineered and hybrid intelligences. Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/wo…

Read more | >

Fred Ehrsam, billionaire co-founder of Coinbase, is shifting his next big bet from cryptocurrency to the human brain, unveiling a non-invasive brain-computer interface designed to modulate brain activity with sound waves.

Ehrsam’s entry as the latest competitor to join the race to develop accessible brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) follows similar recent efforts from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.

On April 8, Ehrsam’s startup, Nudge, unveiled its first product, the Nudge Zero. A noninvasive brain interface device that uses ultrasound to modulate brain activity, the technology represents the first start-up venture to pursue this unique approach with BCI technology.

Read more | >

The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three Dutch scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 1078 years to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 101100 years.

The researchers have published their findings in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The research by black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom (all from Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands) is a follow-up to a 2023 paper by the same trio.

Read more | >

New theoretical research by Michael Wondrak, Walter van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke of Radboud University has shown that Stephen Hawking was right about black holes, although not completely. Due to Hawking radiation, black holes will eventually evaporate, but the event horizon is not as crucial as had been believed. Gravity and the curvature of spacetime cause this radiation too. This means that all large objects in the universe, like the remnants of stars, will eventually evaporate.

Using a clever combination of quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking argued that the spontaneous creation and annihilation of pairs of particles must occur near the (the point beyond which there is no escape from the gravitational force of a black hole).

A particle and its anti-particle are created very briefly from the quantum field, after which they immediately annihilate. But sometimes a particle falls into the black hole, and then the other particle can escape: Hawking radiation. According to Hawking, this would eventually result in the evaporation of .

Read more | >