Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The AI revolution, which has begun to transform our lives over the past three years, is built on a fundamental linguistic principle that lies at the base of large language models such as ChatGPT. Words in a natural language are not strung together in random patterns; rather, there is a statistical structure that allows the model to guess the next word based on what came before. Yet these models overlook a crucial dimension of human communication: content that is not conveyed by words.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Prof. Elisha Moses’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science reveal that the melody of speech in spontaneous conversations in English functions as a distinct language, with a “vocabulary” of hundreds of basic melodies and even rules of syntax that can be used to predict the next melody in the sequence. The study lays the foundation for an artificial intelligence that will understand language beyond words.

The melody, or music, of speech, referred to by the linguistic term “,” encompasses variations in pitch (intonation), loudness (for example, for emphasis), tempo and sound quality (such as a whisper or creaky voice). This form of expression predates words in evolution: Recent studies reveal that both chimpanzees and whales incorporate complex prosodic structures in their communication.

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There’s no replacement for displacement. An adage that’s been around as long as the combustion engine, really. But these age-old sayings don’t really apply anymore when it comes to electric motors.

Earlier this year, we talked about Koenigsegg’s Light Speed Tourbillon Transmission (LSTT). We explored how it couples the 5-liter, 1,500 horsepower (1,119 kW), 1,106 lb-ft (1,500 Nm) of torque, “Hot V8” engine shoed into the rear of the Gemera hypercar and the 850-volt Dark Matter electric motor mounted in the front – but we never got into the specifics of this insane electric powerplant and what makes it so remarkable.

Unveiled in 2023 and stuffed into the Koenigsegg Gemera, the Dark Matter motor created an entirely new league of high-performance electric motor that didn’t quite exist before. Most of its details are still hidden away in a secret Koenigsegg vault while awaiting patent protection.

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The study is “really pretty remarkable,” said Christopher Whyte at the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the work, to Nature. One of the first to simultaneously record activity in both deep and surface brain regions in humans, it reveals how signals travel across the brain to support consciousness.

Consciousness has teased the minds of philosophers and scientists for centuries. Thanks to modern brain mapping technologies, researchers are beginning to hunt down its neural underpinnings.

At least half a dozen theories now exist, two of which are going head-to-head in a global research effort using standardized tests to probe how awareness emerges in the human brain. The results, alongside other work, could potentially build a unified theory of consciousness.

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A perfect storm of range restrictions and suboptimal weather seems to finally be clearing for Firefly Aerospace. After delaying the flight of their sixth Alpha rocket for more than a month, the company announced a new launch window, which opens on Sunday.

Onboard the rocket, designated FLTA006 by Firefly Aerospace, is a technology demonstration for Lockheed Martin’s LM400 satellite bus. The mission, dubbed ‘Message in a Booster,’ has its first launch opportunity during a window that runs from 6:37–7:29 a.m. PDT (9:37–10:29 a.m. EDT, 1337–1429 UTC).

That roughly one-hour window is the first opportunity in a five-day stretch approved by the Western Range. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 2 West (SLC-2W) at Vandenberg Space Force Base is contingent upon good weather and Firefly Aerospace said it will “continue to evaluate wind conditions” as the planned launch day approaches.

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“When weather conditions become more favorable, collection of new gas data will help us improve this assessment,” it added.

Cloudy weather has rendered AVO planes, helicopters and satellites useless for data collection since March 21, the agency said.

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Certain DNA sequences can form structures other than the canonical double helix. These alternative DNA conformations—referred to as non-B DNA—have been implicated as regulators of cellular processes and of genome evolution, but their DNA tends to be repetitive, which until recently made reliably reading and assembling their sequences difficult.

Now, a team of researchers, led by Penn State biologists, has comprehensively predicted the location of non-B DNA structures in great apes. It’s the first step in understanding the functions and evolution of such structures, known to contribute to genetic diseases and cancer, the team said.

The work depends on newly available telomere-to-telomere (T2T), or end-to-end, genomes of humans and other great apes that overcame sequencing and assembly difficulties associated with repetitive DNA to fill in any remaining gaps in the genomes. A paper describing the study, which shows that non-B DNA is enriched in the newly sequenced segments of the genomes and suggests potential new functions, was published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

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Patients in the early stages of psychosis respond to treatments differently than those who have developed a chronic version of the disorder. Understanding the neurobiological changes from early to chronic stages is essential for developing targeted prevention and treatment strategies. But how symptoms change during this transition—and what role the brain plays—is unclear.

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) have now examined patients with early and chronic forms of psychosis to map symptom evolution and identify relevant brain networks. They published their findings in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

“We are interested in how psychosis and psychiatric disorders develop,” says Maya Foster, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the lab of Dustin Scheinost, Ph.D., associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at YSM.

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