Universal computation has significant real-world implications in fields such as computer science, physics, biology, and beyond. It is highly relevant to simulation metaphysics and its idea that the physical world could be a type of computer simulation.
Why do some people live lawful lives, while others gravitate toward repeated criminal behavior? Do people choose to be moral or immoral, or is morality simply a genetically inherited function of the brain? Research suggests that psychopathy as a biological condition explained by defective neural circuits that mediate empathy, but what does that mean when neuroscience is used as evidence in criminal court? How can understanding neuroscience give us an insight into the actions and behaviors of our political leaders?
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Octavio Choi https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/ochoi will explore how emerging neuroscience challenges long-held assumptions underlying the basis—and punishment—of criminal behavior.
Neuroscientists have uncovered how exploratory actions enable animals to learn their spatial environment more efficiently. Their findings could help build better AI agents that can learn faster and require less experience.
Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL found the instinctual exploratory runs that animals carry out are not random. These purposeful actions allow mice to learn a map of the world efficiently. The study, published today, April 28, in Neuron, describes how neuroscientists tested their hypothesis that the specific exploratory actions that animals undertake, such as darting quickly towards objects, are important in helping them learn how to navigate their environment.
“There are a lot of theories in psychology about how performing certain actions facilitates learning. In this study, we tested whether simply observing obstacles in an environment was enough to learn about them, or if purposeful, sensory-guided actions help animals build a cognitive map of the world,” said Professor Tiago Branco, Group Leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center and corresponding author on the paper.
A fighting faction in Sudan has occupied the country’s main public health lab, putting pathogen collections at risk, the WHO said.
Scientists have demonstrated that nanowire networks can exhibit short-and long-term memory, similar to the human brain. These networks, comprised of highly conductive silver wires covered in plastic and arranged in a mesh-like pattern, mimic the physical structure of the human brain. The team successfully tested the nanowire network’s memory capabilities using a task similar to human psychology experiments. This breakthrough in nanotechnology suggests that non-biological hardware systems could potentially replicate brain-like learning and memory, and has numerous real-world applications, such as improving robotics and sensor devices in unpredictable environments.
In a groundbreaking study, an international team has shown that nanowire networks can mimic the short-and long-term memory functions of the human brain. This breakthrough paves the way for replicating brain-like learning and memory in non-biological systems, with potential applications in robotics and sensor devices.
Continue reading “Neural Nanotechnology: Nanowire Networks Learn and Remember Like a Human Brain” »
In today’s well-researched world, death is one of those unknown barriers. It was pursued by British scientists… The color of death is a faint blue.
British scientists got a firsthand look at what it’s like to die. They took a close look at the worm in the experiment. During this stage of passage, cells will perish. It starts a chain reaction that leads to the creature’s extinction and destroys cell connections.
Scientists have created two-dimensional photonic time crystals that amplify light, with potential applications in improving wireless communications and laser technology.
Researchers have developed a way to create photonic time crystals and shown that these bizarre, artificial materials amplify the light that shines on them. These findings, described in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.
This clip is from the Before Skool Podcast ep. # 4 with Rupert Sheldrake. Full podcast can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68fjlUuvOGM&t=3784s.
Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge. Sheldrake has published a number of books — A New Science of Life (1981), The Presence of the Past (1988), The Rebirth of Nature (1991), Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994), Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999), The Sense of Being Stared At (2003), The Science Delusion (Science Set Free) (2012), Science and Spiritual Practices (2017), Ways of Going Beyond and Why They Work (2019).
Continue reading “AI will Not Become Conscious — Rupert Sheldrake” »
A new study published in Ecology and Evolution by Henrik Svensmark of DTU Space has shown that the explosion of stars, also known as supernovae, has greatly impacted the diversity of marine life over the past 500 million years.
The fossil record has been extensively studied, revealing significant variations in the diversity of life forms throughout geological history. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is identifying the processes responsible for these fluctuations.
The new research uncovers a surprising finding: the fluctuation in the number of nearby supernovae closely corresponds to changes in biodiversity of marine genera over the last 500 million years. This correlation becomes apparent when the marine diversity curve is adjusted to account for changes in shallow coastal marine regions, which are significant as they provide habitat for most marine life and offer new opportunities for evolution as they expand or shrink. Thus, alterations in available shallow marine regions play a role in shaping biodiversity.
Cameras for machine vision and robotics are essentially bionic devices mimicking human eyes. These applications require advanced color imaging systems to possess a number of attributes such as high resolution, large FoV, compact design, light-weight and low energy consumption, etc1. Conventional imaging systems based on CCD/CMOS image sensors suffer from relatively low FoV, bulkiness, high complexity, and power consumption issues, especially with mechanically tunable optics. Recently, spherical bionic eyes with curved image sensor retinas have triggered enormous research interest1,2,3,4,5,6,7. This type of devices possess several appealing features such as simplified lens design, low image aberration, wide FoV, and appearance similar to that of the biological eyes rendering them suitable for humanoid robots8,9,10,11,12,13. However, the existing spherical bionic eyes with curved retinas typically only have fixed lens and can only acquire mono color images. Fixed lenses cannot image objects with varying distances. On the other hand, conventional color imaging function of CCD/CMOS image sensors are achieved by using color filter arrays, which add complexity to the device fabrication and cause optical loss14,15,16,17,18,19. Typical absorptive organic dye filters suffer from poor UV and high-temperature stabilities, and plasmonic color filters suffer from low transmission20,21,22. And it is even more challenging to fabricate color filter arrays on hemispherical geometry where most traditional microelectronic fabrication methods are not applicable.
Herein, we demonstrate a novel bionic eye design that possesses adaptive optics and a hemispherical nanowire array retina with filter-free color imaging and neuromorphic preprocessing abilities. The primary optical sensing function of the artificial retina is realized by using a hemispherical all-inorganic CsPbI3 nanowire array that can produce photocurrent without external bias leading to a self-powered working mode. Intriguingly, an electrolyte-assisted color-dependent bidirectional synaptic photo-response is discovered in a well-engineered hybrid nanostructure. Inspired by the vertical alignment of a color-sensitive cone cell and following neurons, the device structure vertically integrates a SnO2/NiO double-shell nanotube filled with ionic liquid in the core on top of a CsPbI3/NiO core-shell nanowire. It is found that the positive surrounding gate effect of NiO due to photo hole injection can be partially or fully balanced by electrolyte under shorter (blue) or longer (green and red) wavelength illuminations, respectively. Thus, the device can yield either positive or negative photocurrent under shorter or longer wavelength illumination, respectively. The carriers can be accumulated in SnO2/NiO structure, giving rise to the bidirectional synaptic photo-response. This color-sensitive bidirectional photo-response instills a unique filter-free color imaging function to the retina. The synaptic behavior-based neuromorphic preprocessing ability, along with the self-powered feature, effectively reduce the energy consumption of the system23,24,25,26,27,28. Moreover, the color selectivity of each pixel can be tuned by a small external bias to detect more accurate color information. We demonstrate that the device can reconstruct color images with high fidelity for convolutional neural network (CNN) classifications. In addition, our bionic eye integrates adaptive optics in the device, by integrating an artificial crystalline lens and an electronic iris based on liquid crystals. The artificial crystalline lens can switch focal length to detect objects from different distances, and the electronic iris can control the amount of light reaching the retina which enhances the dynamic range. Both of the optical components can be easily tuned by the electric field, which are fast, compact, and much more energy efficient compared to the conventional mechanically controlled optics reported hitherto. (Supplementary Table 1 compares our system with some commercial zoom lenses.) The combination of all these unique features makes the bionic eye structurally and functionally equivalent to its biological counterpart.
