Over the past decade, Professor L. Mahadevan’s Soft Math Lab at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has helped establish how the ancient Japanese paper arts of folding or cutting can be used to inversely design structures that transform dramatically in shape and function. Now, the researchers have created a new class of shape-changing matter, based not on folds or cuts, but linkages—networks of interconnected scissor mechanisms that collapse into lines and deploy into curved surfaces.
The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by physics graduate student Noah Toyonaga, establishes a mathematical and physical framework for what the authors call collapsible scissored surfaces—deployable lattices of two-bar linkages that can transform from a one-dimensional collapsed state into two-dimensional structures with prescribed geometry.
“Origami showed how folds can encode shape,” said senior author Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics. “Kirigami showed how cuts can unlock motion and functionality. This work asks a complementary question: What can be achieved when the basic building block is not a fold or a cut, but a linkage?”
For decades, researchers have been trying to understand the biological roots of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a common neurodevelopmental condition that shapes how people communicate, learn and interact with the world. One of the major hurdles is that the brain’s neural networks are extraordinarily complex. Existing models still lack the detail needed to capture both the brain’s structure and its dynamic activity in a unified manner.
In a recent study published in PLOS Digital Health, researchers created a new system called FEDE (high FidElity Digital brain modEl) that builds a digital twin, a detailed computer replica or virtual copy of a real-world object. In this study, it was a virtual copy of the brain of a 2-year-old child with ASD.
To build FEDE, researchers combined maps of the child’s brain structure obtained using MRI with mathematical modeling to create a digital brain that can simulate both how the brain is built and how it functions.
The 23rd of June 2023 marks 30 years since Andrew Wiles delivered his first proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, right here at INI. In this article, podcast and video interview, we celebrate this tremendous milestone for one of mathematics’ most compelling stories.
Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University whose work sits at the intersection of biology, bioelectricity, artificial life, regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is known for his research on how cells communicate, make decisions, build bodies, repair tissues, and form collective intelligence through bioelectric signals. His work on Xenobots and Anthrobots has opened new questions about living robots, synthetic life forms, biological machines, morphogenesis, basal cognition, cellular intelligence, regeneration, cancer, aging, and the nature of mind beyond the brain.
In this conversation, Michael Levin and I explore whether mind and intelligence are binary or exist on a continuum, why cognition may be much older than brains, and how systems from cells to humans can pursue goals in different ways. We discuss the TAME framework, the spectrum of persuadability, cognitive light cones, bioelectricity, gap junctions, multicellular intelligence, Xenobots, Anthrobots, kinematic self-replication, neural wound healing, emergence, physicalism, mathematics, Platonic space, algorithms, bubble sort, Turing machines, evolution, human creativity, artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, and the future of biology. This episode is for anyone interested in philosophy, consciousness, mind, intelligence, synthetic biology, developmental biology, AI, complex systems, evolution, and the deeper question of what it means for matter to become alive, intelligent, or aware.
If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a like, subscribing, and leaving a review on Youtube, Spotify and Apple. #philosophy #science.
Socials: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/46hnFSg… Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Linkedin: / masud-gaziyev Instagram (public): / philosophy.everyday Instagram (private): / masud.gaziyev Support the work: https://buymeacoffee.com/philosophy.e… Get new episodes, guest announcements, reading notes, and ideas worth thinking about. Subscribe here: https://philosophyeveryday.beehiiv.com/ Chapters: 00:00 Mind Beyond the Brain 01:19 Is Mind Older Than the Brain? 04:06 Why Intelligence Is Not All-or-Nothing 06:58 How to Interact With Different Kinds of Minds 09:54 From Single Cells to Collective Intelligence 13:17 How Cells Build Bigger Goals 16:05 Life Recreated — Xenobots and Anthrobots 18:54 Where Do New Behaviours Come From? 21:57 Synthetic Life and the Limits of Evolution 35:01 What Happens When Biology Is Freed? 43:00 Why Biology Eventually Leads to Mathematics 46:07 Is “Emergence” Just a Fancy Word for Surprise? 53:11 Platonic Space: A Strange New Map of Reality 01:03:21 What We Received from Platonic Space 01:11:24 Human Evolution, Technology, and the Patterns Behind Progress 01:16:43 Regeneration, Cancer, and Aging. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Linkedin: / masud-gaziyev. Instagram (public): / philosophy.everyday. Instagram (private): / masud.gaziyev. Support the work: https://buymeacoffee.com/philosophy.e…
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Scientists have identified a reversal of the long-standing Flynn effect—the roughly 200-year trend of rising average intelligence (measured via IQ and cognitive tests) across generations. For the first time in modern recorded history, Generation Z (born roughly 1997–2012) shows lower performance than previous generations in key cognitive domains, including attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, problem-solving, and general IQ—despite spending more years in formal education than ever before. Neuroscientist and educator Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on January 15, 2026, highlighting this shift. In his written testimony, he stated that cognitive development in children across much of the developed world has stalled or reversed over the past two decades, with declines evident in international assessments (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) and other large-scale data starting around the mid-2000s and accelerating post-2010. Horvath attributes the primary driver not to reduced schooling, but to the widespread integration of digital screens and educational technology (EdTech) in classrooms. He argues that human brains evolved for deep, focused learning through face-to-face interaction and sustained attention, not fragmented skimming or constant task-switching encouraged by devices. Key points from his testimony include: — Teens now spend over half their waking hours on screens, with significant portions in school involving computers or tablets—often leading to off-task behavior and shallower processing. — Evidence from meta-analyses and national/international studies shows a consistent pattern: higher classroom screen exposure correlates with weaker outcomes in reading, math, science, and higher-order reasoning. — Digital tools may aid narrow, repetitive skill practice in controlled settings, but in core academic contexts, they tend to reduce depth of understanding, retention, and critical thinking. Horvath describes this as a “structural mismatch” between human cognition and how digital platforms are designed (to capture and fragment attention), warning that unchecked EdTech adoption risks long-term harm to workforce skills, innovation, and societal reasoning. [Horvath, J. C. (2026). Written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. U.S. Senate]
A massive new meta-analysis reveals that individual cognitive abilities, like reading and math, rely on inherited DNA just as much as overall intelligence, suggesting people possess heavily customized genetic cognitive profiles independent of general smarts.
Clarkson University researchers have developed a new mathematical tool that could make artificial intelligence systems more accurate, controllable and useful across applications ranging from image editing to drug discovery.
Clarkson University postdoctoral researcher Zander Blasingame and Chen Liu, professor of electrical and computer engineering, created a new family of numerical solvers called Rex that improves how generative AI models move between random noise and meaningful data. Their work, “Rex: A Family of Reversible Exponential (Stochastic) Runge-Kutta Solvers,” will be presented this summer at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), and an earlier version of the paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.
Diffusion and flow-matching models are the foundation of many modern generative AI systems, including image generators, molecular design tools and scientific simulators. They work by gradually transforming random noise into useful outputs. While that process is effective for creating new content, many important applications require running it in reverse. Existing methods often introduce errors that make it difficult to accurately recover the original information.
In this era of Big Data, the prevailing wisdom is that more information leads to better answers. However, a new Canadian study shows that in the hunt for life’s ancient ancestors, more data can actually lead to less truth. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research by UdeM associate professor of computer science Miklós Csűrös reveals that standard methods for reconstructing the genomes of ancient microbes are being overwhelmed by an explosion of information.
This paradox causes current models to “hallucinate” evolutionary events—specifically, an implausibly high number of horizontal gene transfers—that are actually just statistical ghosts, the study shows.
In it, Csűrös identifies a crisis point in evolutionary biology: As researchers try to reconcile thousands of gene sequences across the entire tree of life, the actual evolutionary signal begins to vanish, replaced by mathematical noise.
By exploiting a physically motivated principle, rather than a mathematical postulate, researchers offer a new perspective on how a real-valued quantum theory can be constructed.
