Society For Neuroscience Assists Scientists Denied U.S. Visas : Shots — Health News Scientists from nations including Iran, Mexico, and India were refused visas to attend this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. Some researchers got stand-ins to present their work.
On the outskirts of Colorado Springs, researchers have uncovered thousands of fossils showing how life on Earth revived in the aftermath of an asteroid impact 66 million years or so ago that killed most dinosaurs and other life on land and sea.
Taken together, the fossil trove documents an era when evolution, in essence, hit the reset button. While countless species vanished forever, some plants and animals rebounded relatively quickly in the first million years after the devastation, including the mammals ancestral to humankind, the scientists said in research published Thursday in Science.
Gene-Edited Bulls
Although GMO wheat, corn, and other crops are frequently used in the US, scientists and farmers have begun shifting their focus to a far more accurate, cheaper, and potentially acceptable way of tinkering with the genome: genetic editing.
We’ve spilled plenty of ink on the merits of CRISPR and older-generation genetic editors such as TALEN. Rather than blindly sticking additional genes into a genome, these are guided approaches that surgically snip out or insert additional genetic material, and as such, are far more precise and predictable. Rather than inserting alien genes into our foods, scientists can now cut out genes detrimental to crop growth, or mimic mutations that provide advantages—a sort of “gene therapy” for food, but for enhancement rather than treatment.
If this newfound galaxy is just the tip of the iceberg, the entire Universe may fall into place.
‘Spacetime foam’ might just be the wildest thing in the known universe, and we’re just starting to understand it.
Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project to do just that.
So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed. That effort has shifted to look more like a similar but less ambitious project in the U.S., developing new software tools for researchers to study brain data, rather than simulating a brain.
Some researchers continue to insist that simulating neuroscience with computers is the way to go. Others, like me, view these efforts as doomed to failure because we do not believe consciousness is computable. Our basic argument is that brains integrate and compress multiple components of an experience, including sight and smell – which simply can’t be handled in the way today’s computers sense, process and store data.
MINIATURE brains which have been grown in the lab could have some form of consciousness and could be suffering as a result, scientists have worryingly claimed.
