Between 1928 and 1991, the Soviet Union operated the largest biological weapons program in history. What does it look like today?
Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of biology. He is a director of the Allen Discovery Center, director at the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, and principal investigator at the Levin Lab.
0:00 intro.
1:38 bioelectricity and developmental biology.
7:56 memory and conditioning in GRNs.
11:50 is there a privileged cognitive substrate?
13:55 Godel type limits.
15:45 multi-scale competency architecture.
25:12 intelligence.
27:00 conceptual framework for cognition.
29:45 does cognition bottom out somewhere?
36:47 synthetic cognition.
39:23 sci-fi that captures this well.
45:16 consciousness, hard problem, and the consciousness of development.
51:09 where does the self come from?
54:06 how do different emergent levels interact.
56:50 top-down causality.
1:02:28 where do goals come from?
1:07:06 balancing conceptual and empirical work.
Continue reading “Michael Levin on the foundations of cognition | Thing in itself w/ Ashar Khan” »
A paradigm shift in how we think about the functions of the human brain. A long-awaited genetic sequence of Rafflesia arnoldii, the strangest flower in the world. A revelation in sleep science. These are some of the year’s biggest discoveries in neuroscience and other areas of biology. Read the articles in full at Quanta: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-year-in-biology-20211221/
Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation.
face_with_colon_three circa 2021.
Think about where our energy comes from: drilling rigs and smokestacks, windmills and solar panels. Lithium-ion battery packs might even come to mind.
We probably don’t think about the farms that comprise over one-third of Earth’s total land area. But farms can also be an energy source. Barcelona-based battery company Bioo is generating electricity from the organic matter in soil and creating biological batteries that can power agricultural sensors, a growing 1.36 billion dollar global market.
Continue reading “How biological batteries can generate renewable energy from soil” »
What we know about Venus so far has been gathered from several past probes.
With a slightly smaller diameter than Earth, Venus orbits closer to the Sun. This means that any water on the surface would have evaporated shortly after its formation, starting its greenhouse effect. Early and sustained volcanic eruptions created lava plains and increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — starting the runaway greenhouse effect, which increased the temperature from just a little higher than Earth’s to its current high value of 475°C.
While Venus’s year is shorter than ours (225 days), its rotation is very slow (243 days) and “retrograde” — the other way round to Earth. The slow rotation is related to a lack of magnetic field, resulting in a continuing loss of atmosphere. Venus’ atmosphere “super-rotates” faster than the planet itself. Images from many missions show V-shaped patterns of clouds composed of sulphuric acid droplets.
Continue reading “The clouds of Venus may be habitable — a crewed flyby could confirm the theory” »
Researchers have reported a nano-sized neuromorphic memory device that emulates neurons and synapses simultaneously in a unit cell, another step toward completing the goal of neuromorphic computing designed to rigorously mimic the human brain with semiconductor devices.
Neuromorphic computing aims to realize artificial intelligence (AI) by mimicking the mechanisms of neurons and synapses that make up the human brain. Inspired by the cognitive functions of the human brain that current computers cannot provide, neuromorphic devices have been widely investigated. However, current Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS)-based neuromorphic circuits simply connect artificial neurons and synapses without synergistic interactions, and the concomitant implementation of neurons and synapses still remains a challenge. To address these issues, a research team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering implemented the biological working mechanisms of humans by introducing the neuron-synapse interactions in a single memory cell, rather than the conventional approach of electrically connecting artificial neuronal and synaptic devices.
Similar to commercial graphics cards, the artificial synaptic devices previously studied often used to accelerate parallel computations, which shows clear differences from the operational mechanisms of the human brain. The research team implemented the synergistic interactions between neurons and synapses in the neuromorphic memory device, emulating the mechanisms of the biological neural network. In addition, the developed neuromorphic device can replace complex CMOS neuron circuits with a single device, providing high scalability and cost efficiency.
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Continue reading “BI 103 Randal Koene and Ken Hayworth: The Road to Mind Uploading” »
The oldest three-dimensional green algae fossil ever found dates back more than half a billion years and may reveal that plants are older than believed.
The future of neural network computing could be a little soggier than we were expecting.
A team of physicists has successfully developed an ionic circuit – a processor based on the movements of charged atoms and molecules in an aqueous solution, rather than electrons in a solid semiconductor.
Since this is closer to the way the brain transports information, they say, their device could be the next step forward in brain-like computing.
Juncal Arbelaiz Mugica is a native of Spain, where octopus is a common menu item. However, Arbelaiz appreciates octopus and similar creatures in a different way, with her research into soft-robotics theory.
More than half of an octopus’ nerves are distributed through its eight arms, each of which has some degree of autonomy. This distributed sensing and information processing system intrigued Arbelaiz, who is researching how to design decentralized intelligence for human-made systems with embedded sensing and computation. At MIT, Arbelaiz is an applied math student who is working on the fundamentals of optimal distributed control and estimation in the final weeks before completing her PhD this fall.
Continue reading “Wiggling toward bio-inspired machine intelligence” »
