Ripples in space-time from a pair of merging black holes have been recorded in unprecedented detail, enabling physicists to test predictions of general relativity
Want to understand how artificial intelligence could change your job? Look to radiology as a clue.
Radiology has come up multiple times as an example of a field that’s been impacted by AI without replacing the need for human workers.
A study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers has found that certain antibodies inhibit Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the cause of tuberculosis (TB), the infectious disease that claims the most lives worldwide. Published in Cell Reports, the study identified characteristics of these antibodies and revealed insights that may lead to clinical tools that help prevent TB and other diseases.
“This data changes how we think about using the immune system against tuberculosis by showing how some antibodies activate immune cells in patients to block Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb),” said the study’s senior author, Lenette Lu, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Immunology and a member of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at UT Southwestern.
Despite widespread use of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), the only licensed TB vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 10.8 million people became ill with TB in 2023 and 1.25 million died.
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GUEST BIO:
Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and futurist.
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This is a ~57 minute talk titled “The Bioelectric Interface to the Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis: development, regeneration, cancer, and beyond” which I gave at a UCSF seminar for an audience of graduate students and post-docs in Biophysics, Bioinformatics, and Chemical Biology. I covered the role of bioelectricity as cognitive glue underlying high-level adaptive plasticity in living tissue, recent progress in exploiting that interface, and new developments in research platforms for this field.
Dr. Michael Levin is a professor in the Department of Biology at Tufts University and an associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute at Harvard. He directs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, where his team integrates biophysics, computational modeling, and behavioral science to study how cellular collectives make decisions during embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer.
Levin’s research centers on diverse forms of intelligence and unconventional embodied minds, bridging conceptual theory, experimental biology, and translational work aimed at regenerative medicine. His lab also pioneers efforts in artificial intelligence and the bioengineering of novel living machines.
Read more about Dr. Michael Levin’s work: https://drmichaellevin.org/
X: https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin.
YouTube: @drmichaellevin
John Vervaeke’s YouTube channel: @johnvervaeke
📖 Let’s take our stories back. Check out our latest book in the Tales for Now and Ever series, Rapunzel and the Evil Witch: https://rapunzelbook.com/
Join Fr. Stephen De Young in his Jubilees and the Nephilim course, now streaming live on The Symbolic World: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/cour… 00:00 — Coming up 01:14 — Intro music 01:40 — Introduction 02:23 — What Michael does 06:19 — Example experiments 07:51 — Memories outside the brain 12:46 — Terminology: memory 13:59 — Communicate to biological cells 15:54 — Limitations? 17:39 — Platonic patterns 34:06 — Incarnation and constraints 39:26 — Causes 49:28 — New beings in new spaces 52:25 — What the Enlightenment dismissed 55:32 — Molecular medicine 57:36 — Subtle bodies 01:00:45 — Ethics 01:03:37 — Medical and meaning applications 01:11:42 — Frightening 01:14:31 — Against the status quo 01:19:03 — Should we dabble in this technology? 💻 Website and blog: http://www.thesymbolicworld.com 🔗 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanpageau 🔒 BECOME A PATRON: https://thesymbolicworld.com/subscribe Our website designers: https://www.resonancehq.io/ My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/
A conversation co-published by AI House Davos and Michael Levin’s Academic Content (@drmichaellevin)
In this conversation, we explore how intelligence exists across all scales of life, from cells to collectives, and what this means for our understanding of AI, minds, and what it means to be human.
Professor Michael Levin challenges the assumption that intelligence begins with brains, revealing how biological systems improvise, adapt, and solve problems in ways that go far beyond what our computational architectures attempt. From cognitive glue to the ethics of diverse intelligence, this interview questions the categories we’ve inherited and asks what truly matters as we enter an era of radically different embodiments.
Speaker.
Michael Levin (Director at Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University)
Moderator.
Louisa Hillegaart (Founder’s Associate, AI House Davos)
© AI House Davos 2025
In this powerful opening session of the Strong AI Summit, moderator Dr. Mahault Albarracin brings together legendary thinkers redefining the boundaries between biology, cognition, active inference, and AGI.
00:00 Introduction by Dr. Mahault Albarracin.
00:42 Why study living systems when designing AI?
02:10 Dr. Michael Levin on biological intelligence and collective behavior.
04:25 Dr. Dalton on active inference foundations.
06:10 Prof. Stephen Grossberg on alignment and stable learning.
09:05 Limits of biological analogies in AI design.
11:45 Collective problem-solving and emergent goals.
13:30 Closing reflections.
Featuring:
Dr. Michael Levin, pioneer in morphogenesis, bioelectric signaling, and the xenobot project.
Prof. Stephen Grossberg, the most cited computational neuroscientist and creator of ART theory.
Dr. Dalton Sakadolsky, leading theoretician in Bayesian mechanics & active inference.
Biologist Michael Levin—creator of living robots—reveals a radical, evidence-based view of evolution driven by a fundamental mind, where agency emerges in unexpected places and what this means for humanity’s co-evolution with AI and AGI. This video is a compilation of interviews I conducted with Levin over the course of year for my Forbes reporting on his research.
▶️ Read the article on Forbes.com \.
This is an invited talk in BAMΞ’s Mathematical Phenomenology Sprint.
Cf. https://bamxi.org/research-activities/mathematical-phenomenology-sprint/
Organizing Institutions:
Bamberg Mathematical Consciousness Science Initiative (BAMΞ) https://bamxi.org.
& Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (AMCS) https://amcs-community.org