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Gary Marcus on AI: How do we bridge the mind with the brain?

Gary Marcus is now one of the loudest skeptics of the AI boom. In 2012, almost nobody was listening.

I have the tape.

That year, I sat down with him for Singularity. FM, right after he published a sharp critique of Ray Kurzweil’s theory of mind in The New Yorker. Marcus was already making the argument that would define his career. Intelligence is not just pattern-matching. The mind is a kluge, a messy evolutionary patch job. And scale alone will not get you to real #AI.

More than a decade later, that argument is everywhere. Labs are chasing the hybrid and neurosymbolic approaches he pointed to back then. The field finally caught up to the conversation.

But here is what makes the interview worth revisiting. He also bet big on neuroscience as the road forward, on projects like Blue Brain and Whole Brain Emulation. The breakthroughs came from somewhere else entirely.

So was he the prophet, or just early on some calls and wrong on others? Watch it and decide for yourself.

Continue reading “Gary Marcus on AI: How do we bridge the mind with the brain?” | >

Cancer cells co-opt nociceptive nerves to thrive in nutrient-poor environments and upon nutrient-starvation therapies

(Cell Metabolism 34, 1999–2017.e1–e10; December 6, 2022)

We recently identified several errors during a routine review of the data associated with the published article.

In Figure 2A, the dataset corresponding to the Boyden chamber co-culture condition was inadvertently duplicated from the conditioned media dataset during the preparation of the source data files. The figure itself was generated using the correct raw experimental datasets at the time of analysis and plotting. Therefore, the quantitative results shown in the published figure remain accurate. We have now corrected the source data files by restoring the appropriate raw dataset for the Boyden chamber co-culture condition. The corrected source data are consistent with the originally reported results and do not affect the conclusions of the study.

A renewable cell source for cancer immunotherapy could make off-the-shelf treatments possible

In a paper published in Cell, a USC Stem Cell-led team reports a new way of generating a renewable and expandable supply of the progenitor cells that give rise to macrophages. These immune cells help drive the body’s response against pathogens, and they hold strong promise as the basis for immunotherapies against cancer and other diseases.

The paper, “Expansion and CAR Engineering of Granulocyte-Monocyte Progenitors for Cellular Immunotherapy,” demonstrates that progenitor cells known as granulocyte-monocyte progenitors (GMPs), which give rise to macrophages and other immune cells, can be extensively expanded in the laboratory and engineered both to target specific cancer markers and to help stimulate broader immune responses.

“The study establishes a scalable and engineerable GMP platform for cellular immunotherapy and introduces concepts that we believe could have broad implications for both cancer immunotherapy and stem cell biology,” said the paper’s corresponding author Qi-Long Ying, MD, Ph.D., professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Tiny objects swimming in a superfluid of light move against the flow

Superfluids are intriguing states of matter in which particles behave like a giant collective wave, allowing them to flow without any friction. When this fluid flows past a fixed obstacle at a velocity below a specific threshold, it moves around it without slowing down or exerting any drag. Above this critical velocity, however, the superfluid state starts to break down, and the energy from the flow dissipates in the form of ripples and vortices in the fluid.

Researchers at Sorbonne University, the University of Porto, Côte d’Azur University and Paris-Saclay University recently investigated this phenomenon in a superfluid of light, a system in which light behaves like a superfluid. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that under specific conditions, a mobile obstacle in a superfluid of light can start swimming against the flow.

“Our project naturally came about as a collaborative effort to bridge theory and experiment, sparked during joint discussions when Pierre-Élie Larré, now at LPTMS in Paris-Saclay, visited our lab in 2022,” Quentin Glorieux, co-senior author of the paper, told Phys.org.

Five phases of localization physics observed in a single quantum system

Physicists in China have observed five phases in localization physics within a single quantum system. Using an advanced photonic platform, the team, led by Yucheng Wang and Jingyun Fan at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, has demonstrated that localization physics is likely far richer than physicists anticipated. Their results have been published in Physical Review Letters.

In 1958, American physicist Philip Anderson made the foundational discovery that disordered media are better at trapping waves than orderly lattice structures. Described mathematically by “localization phases,” this phenomenon now underpins our understanding of both condensed matter and wave physics.

So far, theory has distinguished between two distinct localization phases: one exhibiting “extended” states, which support wave transport, and the other associated with “localized” states, which suppress it. Yet through recent theoretical work, physicists uncovered a third distinct phase, named the “critical phase.”

How a brainless sea blob still ‘feels’ touch and crawls away in seconds without nerves or muscles

For a flat sea creature just a few millimeters across, a gentle poke is instantly recognized as danger. Trichoplax adhaerens—a translucent blob with no head, brain or muscles—scuttles away in seconds when touched. Imagine a flattened multicellular amoeba moving as a single unit: Trichoplax is only ~20 microns thick and a few millimeters wide. It glides on surfaces by beating tens of thousands of cilia on its lower epithelium (the underside), like microscopic oars dragging against the water.

Yet unlike most animals, Trichoplax has no obvious front or back end, no nerves or muscles at all. How can such a simple “crawling carpet” steer or change direction without a brain?

A new study reveals the remarkable flexibility of this pinhead-sized animal. While in most creatures, the orientation of each cilium is fixed early in development and locked to the body’s axes, Trichoplax achieves its swift escape by reorienting its thousands of hairlike cilia.

15-atom Iridium Nanoclusters Stay Stable 20 Hours, Outperform Commercial Catalysts

An international research team from Tohoku University, Tokyo University of Science, Vanderbilt University and the University of Adelaide has discovered a novel, exceptionally simple method to precisely synthesize extremely small iridium nanoclusters in ambient air. Such a feat was previously considered highly challenging. In addition, the nanoclusters outperform conventional, commercially available iridium catalysts by 1.5 times in mass activity, while maintaining sustained operational stability without degradation for more than 20 hours.

This breakthrough could result in improved production of green hydrogen, which is considered the ultimate clean fuel. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) can create green hydrogen, but the reaction requires so much energy that producing green hydrogen efficiently is a huge challenge. Furthermore, because the reaction takes place in a highly corrosive, strongly acidic environment, iridium (Ir) is virtually the only rare and expensive catalyst capable of enduring it.

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