David Chalmers in his book: Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, eventually gets around to addressing the 800-pound gorilla in the room for any discussion of the simulation hypothesis. Can consciousness itself be simulated, and if so, would the resulting entity be conscious?
In the post on the Chinese room, while concluding that Searle’s overall thesis isn’t demonstrated, I noted that if he had restricted himself to a more limited assertion, he might have had a point, that the Turing test doesn’t guarantee a system actually understands its subject matter. Although the probability of humans being fooled plummets as the test goes on, it never completely reaches zero. The test depends on human minds to assess whether there is more there than a thin facade. But what exactly is being assessed?
I just finished reading Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Mitchell recounts how, in recent years, deep learning networks have broken a lot of new ground. Such networks have demonstrated an uncanny ability to recognize items in photographs, including faces, to learn how to play old Atari games to superhuman levels, and have even made progress in driving cars, among many other things.
But do these systems have any understanding of the actual subject matter they’re dealing with? Or do they have what Daniel Dennett calls “competence without comprehension”?
The dream of living forever has long been the stuff of science fiction. But for some scientists, it’s a real-world challenge worth pursuing. According to molecular… Continue Reading →
In our Founder Interview series, we highlight the brightest minds in preventive health, wellness, and longevity. In Episode 6, we’re honored to feature Dr. Emil Kenziorra, founder and CEO at Tomorrow Biostasis —one of the world-leading human cryopreservation experts.
Tell us a little about yourself and your current venture
Doctor and researcher by training, entrepreneur by trade. Longevity has always been my motivation, with a focus on maximal life span extension. I’m running Tomorrow.bio and the non-profit European Biostasis Foundation to push human cryopreservation forward.
A research team has developed the world’s first next-generation betavoltaic cell by directly connecting a radioactive isotope electrode to a perovskite absorber layer. By embedding carbon-14-based quantum dots into the electrode and enhancing the perovskite absorber layer’s crystallinity, the team achieved both stable power output and high energy conversion efficiency.
The work is published in the journal Chemical Communications. The team was led by Professor Su-Il In of the Department of Energy Science & Engineering at DGIST.
The newly developed technology offers a stable, long-term power supply without the need for recharging, making it a promising next-generation energy solution for fields requiring long-term power autonomy, such as space exploration, implantable medical devices, and military applications.
A research team has succeeded in inducing ferromagnetism, a key property of conventional magnets, in pure vanadium oxide, a compound not previously recognized for such magnetic behavior. Through a series of experiments, the team verified that by precisely adjusting the oxidation state of vanadium ions, they could induce the element to behave magnetically.
The research is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The team was led by Professor Chun-Yeol You from the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST.
Vanadium oxide (VO) is widely known for its metal-insulator transition (MIT), a phenomenon in which its electrical conductivity dramatically changes depending on temperature. While its electronic properties have been extensively studied, its magnetic properties —especially the possibility of ferromagnetism—remain largely unexplored. VO typically exhibits antiferromagnetic or paramagnetic behavior, which limits its application as a magnetic material.
Researchers at QuTech in Delft have combined superconductors and quantum dots to observe and manipulate so-called Majorana bound states, which have properties that could enable stable quantum computation. By building a chain of three coupled quantum dots in a two-dimensional electron gas, they were able to demonstrate properties of Majoranas that are essential for the study of Majorana-based quantum bits.
The results are published in Nature.
One of the key issues in quantum computing remains the inherent instability of quantum bits. In the quest for fault-tolerant quantum computers, topological quantum bits are expected to be significantly less prone to errors. Key to these qubits are quasiparticles called Majorana bound states, which have been predicted to appear on opposite edges of one-dimensional superconducting systems.
A watched pot never boils, goes the old saying, but many of us have at least kept an eye on the pot, waiting for the bubbling to start. It’s satisfying to finally see the rolling boil, behind which complex physical mechanisms are at play.
When this happens, the bubbles that form continuously change in shape and size. These dynamic movements influence the surrounding fluid flow, thereby affecting the efficiency of heat transfer from the heat source to the water.
Manipulating small amounts of liquid at high speeds and frequencies is essential for processing large numbers of samples in medical and chemical fields, such as in cell sorting. Microbubble vibrations can create flows and sound waves, aiding in liquid manipulation. However, the collective behavior and interactions of multiple bubbles is poorly understood, so their applications have been limited.
A research team has developed a “next-generation AI electronic nose” capable of distinguishing scents like the human olfactory system does and analyzing them using artificial intelligence. This technology converts scent molecules into electrical signals and trains AI models on their unique patterns. It holds great promise for applications in personalized health care, the cosmetics industry, and environmental monitoring.
The study is published in the journal ACS Nano. The team was led by Professor Hyuk-jun Kwon of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST, with integrated master’s and Ph.D. student Hyungtae Lim as first author.
While conventional electronic noses (e-noses) have already been deployed in areas such as food safety and gas detection in industrial settings, they struggle to distinguish subtle differences between similar smells or analyze complex scent compositions. For instance, distinguishing among floral perfumes with similar notes or detecting the faint odor of fruit approaching spoilage remains challenging for current systems. This gap has driven demand for next-generation e-nose technologies with greater precision, sensitivity, and adaptability.
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are tackling one of the most complex challenges in the world of quantum information—how to create reliable, scalable networks that can connect quantum systems over distances.
Their work has resulted in two publications in Physical Review Letters and Science Advances, bringing us one step closer to realizing large-scale networked quantum systems, or even the quantum internet.
The research team, which includes faculty members from the RPI Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, and the Department of Computer Science, is led by Assistant Professor Xiangyi Meng, Ph.D. Their research focuses on designing quantum networks that use entanglement—a phenomenon where quantum particles become mysteriously correlated.