By Sieglinde Pfaendler, Omar Costa Hamido, Eduardo Reck Miranda
Science and the arts have increasingly inspired each other. In the 20th century, this has led to new innovations in music composition, new musical instruments, and changes to the way that the music industry does business to day. In turn, art has helped scientists think in new ways, and make advances of their own.
An emerging community leveraging quantum computing in music and the music industry has inspired us to organize the “1st International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity.” This symposium will bring together pioneering individuals from academia, industry, and music. They will present research, new works, share ideas, and learn new tools for incorporating quantum computation into music and the music industry. This symposium was made possible through the funding of the QuTune Project kindly provided by the United Kingdom National Quantum Technologies Programme’s Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub (QCS Hub).
Science fiction has repeatedly promised a future filled with holographic 3D displays, but that fantasy has always eluded reality — until now. A startup says it has created a new “solid light” display that renders photos and videos in three dimensions.
In this video Dr. Lustgarten goes into more detail on what he tracks and how he does the analysis of the results. He emphasizes the importance of running your own tests, to not only look at one biomarker but to then combine that marker with other biomarkers, looking for what is optimal for you.
One of the reasons branching identity is being accepted more seriously these days.
Beginning in the 1950s, experiments with split-brain patients revealed that consciousness could be divided between the two hemispheres of the brain. A surprising implication was that if consciousness could be divided, then it could also be combined. Evidence of this came in 2006, when conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan were born. The Hogan sisters were born with their brains connected by a thalamic bridge, which allowed a unique mental connection between them. We explore this surprising mental connection, and the possibility that we may one day connect our own minds with other conscious beings, together with what this might mean for our concept of self, identity, and the future of mind.
In this video Dr. Lustgarten introduces his N of 1 experiment and gives an overview of the processes that he follows. He also discusses why he thinks it is important to track your own markers and not just rely on published trials.
Dr. Michael Lustgarten is a scientist at the Tufts University Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston, Massachusetts. His research currently focuses on the role of the gut microbiome and serum metabolome on muscle mass and function in older adults. In this series of interviews Dr Lustgarten shares his experience with his rigorous n of 1 experiment over the last 7 years and shows how we or anyone can conduct a similar trial by tracking food, exercise and sleep, measure results and derive relationships between them, with a goal of extending our healthspan.
Daniel Ek, CEO of popular commercial music streaming platform Spotify, invests over $133 million in artificial intelligence-powered defense technology startup Helsing. Daniel made the investment through his funding company named Prima Materia during the Series A funding round of Helsing.
Additionally, Daniel Ek will join Helsing’s board of directors as a part of the investment. Helsing plans to use the newly raised funds to integrate artificial intelligence technology in military equipment and weapons to expand their capabilities.
According to the company, the developed AI-powered equipment will first be made available to French, German, and British militaries. Helsing aims to provide an information advantage to armies of democratic countries with the use of artificial intelligence.
Tens of thousands of years ago, on the territory of the uninhabited Sahara Desert, gardens flourished, rivers flowed, ancient people cultivated fertile lands. However, we know how it all ended — today in this place is a desert scorched by the blazing sun with an area 38 times the size of Great Britain. However, humanity has a chance to return life to these lands again, and as a bonus to receive free electricity for all inhabitants of the planet. The installation of wind and solar farms could radically change the climate in this region: more rainfall, which will lead to a revival of vegetation and a drop in temperature. At least that’s what Yang Li, the study’s author and senior researcher at the University of Illinois, says. No mystery! Wind turbines facilitate the diffusion of hot and cool air. This, in turn, will raise the average rainfall by 50%, and solar panels absorb most of the solar energy, preventing it from overheating the earth. All this will be effective only with the global development of a lifeless desert. The process has already begun. But they tried repeatedly to tame the cruel and hot sun of the Sahara.
AI artist Botto has just made over a million dollars for NFTs of its work.
Botto, which works in collaboration with a human community, hit the million dollar mark within five weeks of putting a batch of NFT-backed artwork up for auction, Euronews reported.
The haul elevates the AI artist into a small-but-growing cohort of synthetic creators, and the designer behind Botto, German artist Mario Klingemann, told Euronews that he believes Botto’s practice could eventually extend to books and music.
Right after the Big Bang, in the Planck epoch, the Universe occupied a space region with a radius of 1.4 × 10-13 cm – remarkably, equal to the fundamental length characterizing elementary particles. Analogue to the way nearly all cells contain the DNA information required to build the entire organism, every region the size of an elementary particle had then the energy necessary for the Universe’s creation.
As the Universe cooled down, electrons and quarks were the first to appear, the latter forming protons and neutrons, combining into nuclei in a mere matter of minutes. During its expansion, processes started happening slower and slower: it took 380,000 years for electrons to start orbiting around the nuclei, and 100 million years for hydrogen and helium to form the first stars. Even more, it wasn’t until 4.5 billion years ago that our young Earth was born, with its oceans emerging shortly after, and the first microbes to call them home for the first time. Life took over our planet in what seems, on the scale of the Universe, a sheer instant, and turned this world into its playground. There came butterflies and tricked the non-existence of natural blue pigment by creating Christmas tree-shaped nanometric structures in their wings to reflect blue’s wavelength only; fireflies and lanternfish which use the chemical reaction between oxygen and luciferin for bioluminescence; and it all goes all the way up to the butterfly effect leading to the unpredictability of the weather forecasts, commonly known as the reason why a pair of wings flapping in Brazil can lead to a typhoon in Texas. The world as we know it now developed slowly, and with the help of continuous evolution and natural selection, the first humans came to life.
Without any doubt, we are the earthly species never ceasing to surprise. We developed rationality, logic, strategic and critical thinking, yet human nature cannot be essentially defined without bringing into the equation our remarkable appetite for art and beauty. In the intricate puzzle human existence represents, this particular piece has given it valences no other known being possesses. Not all beauty is art, but many artworks both in the past, as well as today, embody some understanding of beauty.
To define is to limit, as Oscar Wilde stated, and even though we cannot establish clear definitions of art and beauty. Yet, great works of art manage to establish a strong thread between the creator and receptor. In contrast to this byproduct of human self-expression that encapsulates unique creative behaviour, beauty has existed long before our emergence as a species and isn’t bound to it in any way. It is omnipresent, a metaphorical Higgs field that can be observed by the ones who wish to open their eyes thoroughly. From the formation of Earth’s oceans and butterflies’ blue wings to Euler’s identity and rococo architecture, beauty is a subjective ubiquity. Though a question remains – why does it evoke such pleasure in our minds? What happens in our brains when we see something beautiful? The question is the subject of an entire field, named neuroaesthetics, which identified an intricate whole-brain response to artistic stimuli. As such, our puzzling reactions to art can be explained by these responses similar to “mind wandering”, involving “thoughts about the self, memory, and future”– in other words, art seems to evoke our past experiences, present conscious self, and imagination about the future. There needs to be noted that critics of the field draw attention to the superficiality and oversimplification that may characterize our attempts to view art through the lenses of neuroscience.
