Your Brain is a Prediction Machine

AKA Your Brain on Music

First, some sound tech:

Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-lightweight-roll-to-roll-loudspeaker-paper.html

Sonorous paper loudspeakers: "Ordinary paper or foils are printed with two layers of a conductive organic polymer as electrodes. A piezoelectric layer is sandwiched between them as the active element, which causes the paper or film to vibrate. Loud and clear sound is produced by air displacement.

via Chemnitz University of Technology: Georg C. Schmidt et al. Paper‐Embedded Roll‐to‐Roll Mass Printed Piezoelectric Transducers, Advanced Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202006437

Image credit: Center for High Entropy Alloy Catalysis - Danish National Research Foundation

Next, some music science:

Hit songs rely on increasing “harmonic surprise” to hook listeners, study finds

Aug 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/08/hit-songs-rely-on-increasing-harmonic-surprise-to-hook-listeners-study-finds/

The end result is what the authors call "Inflationary-Surprise Hypothesis," which makes music (and all art, and all culture we would assume) to have more surprise over time. And so if you're kind of old, and you think the music of today sucks, and it's annoying, stupid, and makes no sense, then you're probably right. 

In other words, when a song "constantly defies the listener's expectations throughout", that's what you want to hear. Or, from the paper itself, you could say "human perception of tonality is influenced by exposure."

We heard this a long time ago when Leonard Meyer said it --

"A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)

-Music, the Arts and Ideas. Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967

Or take a look at this infographic, titled The Anatomy of a Joke.

What to Expect When the Unexpected Becomes Expected: Harmonic Surprise and Preference Over Time in Popular Music. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 30 April 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.578644

And more of the same:

The brain's 'prediction machine' anticipates the future when listening to music

Aug 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-brain-machine-future-music.html

When a musical phrase has an unresolved or uncertain quality about it our brains automatically predict how the melody will end. ... Like a sentence, a musical phrase is a coherent and complete part of a larger whole, but it may end with some uncertainty about what comes next in the melody. The new research shows that listeners use these moments of uncertainty, or high entropy, to determine where one phrase ends and another begins. ... The participants judged melodies that ended on high-entropy tones to be more complete—and lingered on them longer.

"This study shows that humans harness the statistical properties of the world around them not only to predict what is likely to happen next, but also to parse streams of complex, continuous input into smaller, more manageable segments of information," said Hansen.

via Association for Psychological Science: Niels Chr. Hansen et al, Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception, Psychological Science (2021). DOI: 10.1177/0956797621997349

For your listening pleasure:

Music Circles: An interactive data visualization tool that helps users discover new music

Mar 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-music-circles-interactive-visualization-tool.html

It's an advanced music recommendation system. Try it out, called Music Circles:

https://musiccircles.netlify.app/

via Seoul National University: Music-Circles: can music be represented with numbers? arXiv: 2102.13350 [cs.HC]. arxiv.org/abs/2102.13350

Post Script:

Taylor Swift releases a 'perfect replica' of Fearless

Apr 2021, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56687699

Up to now, I thought Taylor Swift was a good musician but more importantly a good young female role model because she handles her celebrity status so well. Now she's in the pantheon of powerful and middle-finger-wielding artists because she straight re-mastered her master copies to fuck her record owners and take back control of her own work.  

If you're not sure why this is such a big deal, see David Byrne's How Music Works (2012) for a good intro to the world of musicians, their music and their rights. 

When you make a song, and then someone uses that song in the opening scene of their superfamous blockbuster movie, somebody gets paid, but it might not be you. It depends who owns the "master copy" of that song. Even if you play your own song live, and record that, and use that in a commercial or movie, it's still the "original" master copy that gets the credit, and the money. Somebody recorded that song in a music studio and made a physical copy of the recording. The music is ephemeral and nobody can own that. The idea for the song even moreso. But that recording, on that day, in that studio, is a physical thing, and it represents all the ephemera that come after, so whoever owns the master, owns it all. 

Swift's re-mastering makes the old master copies worthless, and puts her in full control of her own work, something that rarely happens to an artist as big as her. 

The Disease Model

That's what they call it -- Susceptible, Infected, Recovered. Disease transmission follows a fairly predictable pattern, just ask the covid epidemiologists.

Totally unrelated image credit: Marco Zoppo - Christ as the Man of Sorrows - 1470

It's about the way things spread within a network; nodes and links. Throw some complexity science in there, and you can model a pretty good simulation of waves of infection, where they spread, how fast. 

But it's not just diseases, which are spread by physical particles floating through the air. Behaviors follow the disease model too, and ideas, and preferences and tastes. They're spreading through people, just like diseases.

That's getting into the science of memetics though. For now, let's keep it more simple than that -- think about how you started using social media, what was your first account and who got you into it, what social networks were you a part of then?

You were being infected.

Honestly I won't even repaste any of this paper, because it does come from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, which seems weird for a paper about disease modeling. But it is from Princeton, and that department does cover some pretty crazy stuff, and some of it is partially related. It concluded that Facebook is going through humans like a wave of the Delta variant, but at the same time, losing the people who recover from the disease. They said there won't be anyone left by 2018, because everyone's either still infected, or been recovered. (Luckily for Facebook, bots are infinite!)

And would you look at that, here's Facebook being called out for misleading investors by blending their actual user numbers with those of their Single Users with Multiple Accounts, i.e., among other things, the botnet.

But long before this information was divulged under congressional testimony circa 2021, this paper, from 2014, and generated from even earlier discussions at a 2012 research symposium, predicted this already -- they followed the disease model on a social network. It makes you wonder why there weren't other studies like it:

Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics, John Cannarell, Joshua A. Spechler. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. arxiv:1401.4208v1 [cs.SI] 17 Jan 2014. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

 

Think about the last few songs you downloaded (do people still?). Where did you hear them, from who?

They infected you.

Music download patterns found to resemble infectious disease epidemic curves

Sep 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-music-download-patterns-resemble-infectious.html

"The researchers found that downloads from the site very much matched patterns of diseases spreading. With infectious diseases, one-to-one contact is needed. With songs...hundreds of people might respond by downloading it." -link

"We draw conclusions about song popularity within specific genres based on estimated SIR parameters. In particular, we argue that faster spread of preferences for Electronica songs may reflect stronger connectivity of the ‘susceptible community’, compared with the larger and broader community that listens to more common genres." -link

via McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind in Canada: Dora P. Rosati et al, Modelling song popularity asacontagious process, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2021.0457

Even ideas can be infectious. They're reproducing in our minds, after all. Memetically transmitted diseases, following the S-I-R model. Dairying was an idea that changed the genome of a lot of humans. And olfactory receptors make up the biggest family of your genome, like 2%, and they're changing all the time, and sometimes because of cultural reasons, like bacon. 

Probably the greatest example of an idea being infectious is the idea against vaccinations, because technically, under the memetic paradigm, the virus, any virus whether measles, covid, or syphilis, is figuring out how to fight the scientific advancement of vaccinations by infecting our minds with antivax thoughts -- they're evolving in more ways than one! (See below for more on this, but be careful, you may want to inoculate your brain first.)

Post Post:

If you're into this topic, prepare to go deep, very deep:

Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives

March 2020, Network Address

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2020/03/adaptive-metamemetics-infectious.html

I had no idea how prescient this would be when I wrote it, but studying Ludwig Fleck prior to a global vaccination campaign wasn't a bad idea.

Post Post Script:

They don't say it but I will, claim of memetic supremacy right here:

[I call it Memetic Supremacy] Parity and time reversal elucidate both decision-making in empirical models and attractor scaling in critical Boolean networks. via Pennsylvania State University, Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Semmelweis University, and Center for Complex Network Research. Science Advances (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf8124

 

Deep Kuhn

Research papers that omit 'mice' from titles receive misleading media coverage

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-papers-omit-mice-titles-media.html

When authors of scientific papers omit the basic fact that a study was conducted in mice (and not in humans) from the article title, journalists reporting on the paper tend to do the same.

via Public Library of Science: Triunfol M, Gouveia FC (2021) What's not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer disease articles? #InMice. PLoS Biol 19(6): e3001260. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001260

Thomas Kuhn wrote something about the progress of science, and how it changes by abrupt paradigm shifts and not as a series of incremental changes. Way before that, Ludwig Fleck wrote about the life cycle of ideas and how they are transmitted among scientists and other human brains. He created the term "thought collective" and wrote Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in 1935, although it wasn't translated to English until 1979, after Kuhn made his meteoric impact. I'm not exactly sure what any of this has to do with the way scientists title their papers, but I think it does. Language, like Science, is a lifeform, and behaves as such in the artificial arena of the human mind. 

Image credit: (This is what happens when you do an image search for "Deep Kuhn") From the company called Kuhn Farm Machinery: The 4000 Chisel Plow provides durable, economical compaction removal with a variety of shanks and point options to meet different requirements. This promotes breakdown of crop residue and allows good root development for the next crop.

Mostly Unrelated Post Script:

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Aug 2020, The Verge

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates

HUGO (Human Genome Organisation) Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), the body that names genes, has changed 27 genes to avoid being confused by Excel's default naming protocols.

For example, SEPT2 is the short name of a gene called Septin 2, but it's also the name of September 2nd, if you speak Excel. A report from 2016 found 20% of papers with these errors. Genomic data is already big data, so when you factor this erroneous name conversion, we call that dirty data.  

Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature. Mark Ziemann et al., Genome Biology, 2016. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7

What Were You Thinking

Brains are complicated, and no matter how much we think we know, there always seems to be more. 

Do we know what we want in a romantic partner - No more than a random stranger would, study says

Jul 2020, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-romantic-partner-random-stranger.html

This is similar to the horoscope joke where a sneaky professor distributes a customized personality profile to each student based on their birthdays (which he looked up and printed out in advance of this class), and then asks the students to score the profiles based on their accuracy. But then it turns out that he passed out the same profile to everyone, and it was written in a way that was  ambiguous enough to apply to everyone (and also flattering enough to disarm your bullshit detector),  so everyone scores the profile really high, like, "wow, this totally describes me perfectly!"

It's called the Barnum effect, and it was named after the circus director, by a psychologist, to describe the "pseudo-successful" effects of certain psychological tests.

Here's some examples, called Barnum statements ,and taken from Bertram Forer, the guy who made this famous. Maybe you can start your own horoscope column, or use them on your next date:

• You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
• You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
• You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
• While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
• Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
• Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
• At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
• You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
• You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
• You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
• At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
• Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
• Security is one of your major goals in life.

-From Bertram Forer

Human brain replays new memories at 20 times the speed during waking rest

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-human-brain-replays-memories-rest.html

The fact that we can see "neural replays" is nuts, no?

Also note that this 20x replay speed happens as an essential part of learning, and takes place particularly during breaks from learning. 

via National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: Cell Reports, Buch et al.: "Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay" DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109193

A redundant modular network supports proper brain communication

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-redundant-modular-network-proper-brain.html

The truth about how memory works keeps getting more and more complicated: "Li and his colleagues were able to see that each hemisphere of the brain has a separate representation of a memory."

And because this is the phrase I'm looking for every day as I read these news briefs: "What they found was unexpected." (see these two other recent examples, one where they found a bacteria that eats metal, and which was accidentally left lying around during the first wave lockdown, and this other one where they found out that electromagnetic waves cure cancer and diabetes because one scientist borrowed another scientist's mice, and he was working on EMF exposure, and she was working on blood sugar.)

via Baylor College of Medicine:  Guang Chen et al, Modularity and robustness of frontal cortical networks, Cell (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.05.026

Image credit: Holocene - Paul Griffitts Fractal Forums - 2017

The Hidden Network

Study finds surprising source of social influence

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-07-source-social.html

Spreading ideas and spreading new ideas are two different things. I thought we knew this as far back as Granovetter's Weak Ties (1973). The people at the edge of the network are the ones who spread the novel information across the network, not the ones at the center of their social circles. Not trying to deflate the work of these researchers, just saying.

As prominent and revered as social influencers seem to be, in fact, they are unlikely to change a person's behavior by example—and might actually be detrimental to the cause.

[In other words, they are NOT influential? Interesting.]

"Dozens of algorithms that are currently used by enterprises seeking to spread new ideas are based on the fallacy that everything spreads virally," says Centola. "But this study shows that the ability for information to pass through a social network depends on what type of information it is."

So, if you want to spread gossip — easily digestible, uncontroversial bits of information — go ahead and tap an influencer. But if you want to transmit new ways of thinking that challenge an existing set of beliefs, seek out hidden locations in the periphery and plant the seed there.

via University of Pennsylvania: Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24704-6

In contrast to influencers, artists are known for being on the fringe of their networks, hence responsible for introducing novel information. This is also unfortunately the reason why so many artists get the socially awkward or anti-social label, and why so many need to rely on the beneficence of a Gertrude Stein or an agent or manager.

Image credit: Nanojars - Gellert Mezei - 2021

Memetic Supremacy

From genes to memes - Algorithm may help scientists demystify complex networks

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-genes-memes-algorithm-scientists-demystify.html

This is it.

I might be just now understanding that the reason we can't "do" memetics yet is because of computational power. Too many variables to model.

Keep in mind that fractals, one of the most ubiquitous phenomena there is, wasn't described mathematically until the 1980's, because that's when computers caught up to it. They needed to be able to run the same, simple algorithm hundreds of thousands of times in less than a lifetime in order to see any results, and this needed to wait for faster computers.

This time, the advancement comes in the form of Boolean networks. These networks aren't just about having lots of on/off switches, but about --networking-- all those switches. That's the hard part. Similar to fractals, which starts from a simple equation (Zn+1 = Zn2 + C), THIS is just a collection of nodes either on or off. Sounds simple, but it's what happens when it gets scaled-up to gives us the complexity of the Twittersphere, for example. A few nodes can generate millions of states.

And before we go any further, it should be noted that quantum computing will flip this entire paradigm upside down, and what today is impossible to even imagine will tomorrow be beamed to your brain via quantum cloud servers in outerspace faster than you can ask for it. 

Until then, the news here is that these networks are now being analyzed by these two methods:

1. Parity - making a mirror image of the network where all ON nodes are switched to OFF to identify critical subnetworks, and 

2. Time Reversal - to identify which network configurations precede which outcomes. 

Currently, they're working on networks of 16,000 genes, which is a lot more than we've ever done before. And currently, this work is to learn more about cancer cells, but soon enough we'll be modeling social uprisings and second-order psychological operations. 

via Pennsylvania State University, Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Semmelweis University, and Center for Complex Network Research: "Parity and time reversal elucidate both decision-making in empirical models and attractor scaling in critical Boolean networks" Science Advances (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf8124

Post Script:

A new model enables the recreation of the family tree of complex networks

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-enables-recreation-family-tree-complex.html

This new study analyzes the time evolution of the citation network in scientific journals and the international trade network over a 100-year period. According to M. Ángeles Serrano, ICREA researcher at UBICS, "What we observe in these real networks is that both grow in a self-similar way, that is, their connectivity properties remain invariable over time, so that the network structure is always the same, while the number of nodes increases."

-University of Barcelona: Muhua Zheng et al, Scaling up real networks by geometric branching growth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2018994118

Also, don't forget this one, which aged well, very, very well:

Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement; A Contagion and Ideology Report. Alex Goldberg from The Network Contagion Research Institute, Joel Finkelstein from The Network Contagion Research Institute and The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Rutgers Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience. Feb 7 2020. [pdf link]

^Published February 7, 2020, you know, almost a year before January 6, 2021.

Cryptographic Carbon Markets

Using carbon is key to decarbonizing economy

Aug 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-expert-carbon-key-decarbonizing-economy.html

Instead of burning the hydrocarbons for energy, split them into carbon nanotubes for a materials revolution, and hydrogen for a hydrogen power revolution. 

Graphene and Hydrogen factories for mining electronic money, if you don't think it's going to happen you're not trying hard enough.

(Granted, this project, at Rice University, is related to Shell, the oil company, who would really like to see a future where hydrocarbons are still really important. Then again, if carbon-based nanotubes could replace metals, which use a ton of energy to mine and process, that could be a benefit in itself?)

Post Script:

The Bitcoin saga continues to deliver:

Researchers found a seasonal movement of mining between Chinese provinces in response, it was suggested, to the availability of hydro-electric power.

Mining moved from the coal-burning northern province of Xinjiang in the dry season, to the hydro-abundant southern province of Sichuan in the rainy season.

-Cambridge data shows Bitcoin mining on the move. Jul 2021, BBC News. 

China's ban on cryptocurrency mining has forced bitcoin entrepreneurs to flee overseas. Many are heading to Texas, which is quickly becoming the next global cryptocurrency capital.

-Why China's bitcoin miners are moving to Texas. Sep 2021, BBC News.

"Bitcoin refugees" in the "Great Mining Migration" are looking for more relaxed digital currency policy, a stable regulatory environment, diverse sources of capital, and cheap electricity. (How about a reliable power grid though? Seriously?)

I hope people are taking notes, because the crypto saga is a playbook for the way things are going to be. Bitcoin is doing to the future of energy production and computation what the pandemic did to all things "remote" -- the work-from-home revolution would take another 10 years without the pandemic. 

With or without the climate apocalypse to speed things up, not only will renewable energy production decentralize and redistribute into a splintered scattering of nodes, but those nodes move with the weather. 

On Memory in Times Past

Ancient Australian Aboriginal memory tool superior to 'memory palace' learning

May 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-ancient-australian-aboriginal-memory-tool.html

Imagine that.

Although this article is about how the Memory Palace technique of memorization is second place to the Aboriginal technique of attaching facts to the landscape, via a narrative, I found this passage interesting: "The memory palace technique dates back to the early Greeks and was further utilized by Jesuit priests. Handwritten books were scarce and valuable, and one reading would have to last a person's lifetime, so ways to remember the contents were developed."

via Monash University: PLOS One (2021)

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251710

The Fingerbot

Using the human hand as a powerless infrared radiation source

Apr 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-human-powerless-infrared-source.html

The future is so obvious once it happens.

The idea of your fingers manipulating computer screens floating in mid air seems pretty natural. I never thought of my finger as a remote control, but it does make perfect sense. This also reminds me of the Nintendo Wii hack from many years ago, where you place the Wii controller in a stationary position, and have it read an IR light pen as you draw on a surface with it. The light-point is followed by the Wii, and translated into lines on a projected screen. You use the Wii backwards to write on the projected surface in real time. Graffiti Research Labs took this a step further with their Laser Tag project. Now we can imagine doing that with our fingers. No Wii necessary, only some basic intelligence in your camera, and it will be able to learn how to see your fingers and take direction from them. 

via Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Shun An et al. Human hand as a powerless and multiplexed infrared light source for information decryption and complex signal generation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2021077118

Image credit: It's a fingerbot, so you can inject an analog loop into your IoT wifi smart home mesh network. But they changed the name to switchbot; probably a good idea. 

Post Script:

Speaking of Laser Tag...

This is the EyeWriter, which allows paralyzed graffiti artists to write graffiti with their eyeballs.

And this is his graffiti, TEMPT circa 2009.

Artificial Intuition - It's What Computers Crave

AKA The Pendulum of the Anthropocene

Ten years ago I recall myself meta-presenting to my high school class Iain McGilchrist on the TED stage, via RSA Animate. He wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, about the left brain right brain dichotomy and about how the history of humans since the Enlightenment is a story of the shift from right-brained religious order to left-brained scientific discovery.

But I being an art teacher, and they being young people who had no reason to believe that the entire history of humankind is any indication of human futures, I speculated aloud, for their sake -- are we really destined to continue on this trajectory forever? What if the pendulum were to swing in the other direction? Could there be a world where the Right brain of feelings and emotions are more important than facts and data?

I didn't think what I was speculating could actually be true. My job was to ask the craziest questions imaginable, in the hopes of stretching the most malleable material on Earth -- the minds of young people. I myself could never imagine a world where the right brain became the dominant force. But I always held back my own biases, because one thing I was certain about was that the world these kids would grow up in would be very different from the world I grew up in, and they only way to prepare them was to forget everything I knew, and say nothing else but "what if".

And then it happened. Facts became optional. Computers became creative. Only 500 years after its appearance, Reason has begun to lose its appeal, and its utility. 

First, we see algorithms generating theories without any data:

The Ramanujan Machine - Researchers have developed a 'conjecture generator' that creates mathematical conjectures

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-ramanujan-machine-conjecture-mathematical-conjectures.html

"The Ramanujan Machine" generates conjectures without proving them, by "imitating" intuition using AI and considerable computer automation.

via Israel Institute of Technology: Gal Raayoni et al. Generating conjectures on fundamental constants with the Ramanujan Machine, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03229-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03229-4

And then, we see algorithms generating data without any theories:

New machine learning theory raises questions about nature of science

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-machine-theory-nature-science.html

Instead of teaching the program the laws of physics, he just shows it all the orbits of all the planets until it can produce its own orbits. No more rules baby:

And he goes on: "I would argue that the ultimate goal of any scientist is prediction. You might not necessarily need a law. For example, if I can perfectly predict a planetary orbit, I don't need to know Newton's laws of gravitation and motion. I go directly from data to data.

-Hong Qin, physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

via Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory: Hong Qin, Machine learning and serving of discrete field theories, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-76301-0

Another one, we let the algorithms imagine, just to see what they come up with:

Enabling the 'imagination' of artificial intelligence

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-enabling-artificial-intelligence.html

They're really good at synthesizing, but not at creating imagery from scratch. Here, "controllable disentangled representation learning" or what the article calls "imagination".

via University of Southern California: Yunhao Ge et al, Zero-shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning. Open Review. https://openreview.net/forum?id=8wqCDnBmnrT

Becoming the Artificial Unconscious

Yves Tanguy – Indefinite Divisibility – 1942

The first step to becoming a computer is to think like a computer. The next step to becoming a computer is to materialize those thoughts, perhaps in the form of pictures. 

The Surrealists did this with our collective unconscious. At a time in history when humans were becoming "modern", they took the dark mess of confusion that was our subconscious and made it visible. They used automatic artmaking, dream recall, and mind games like Exquisite Corpse to hack through our subconscious and bring back precious material to help us understand ourselves and what we were becoming. 

The above image is an example of the unconscious mind made visible by Yves Tanguy from 1942.

Today, we are again becoming new kinds of human. Our minds are merging with the computer algorithms we have created, so they in turn create us, in a never-ending feedback loop of evolution. 

Art has lots of purposes, but I like to think the most important purpose of all is to teach us how to be human. And today, being human has a lot do with being a computer. This is what computer-brains look like on the inside:

BigGAN-generated image by Mario Klingemann - 2019

They're also calling it social media performance art. But I think artists have been doing this for quite a while, under the name generative digital art, or algorithmic art. I just wonder what the Surrealists would say if they could see this stuff.

Post Script:

Melbourne artist and coder Sam Hains created Zero Likes, an AI trained to respond only to those lost and lonely images that miss out on attention.

Dog layers on a bed with a blanket - Sam Hains Zero Likes - 2017

Post Post Script:

First of all, the MIT Press has a journal called Leonardo. Next, here is a nice explanation of the artistic process by neuroscience researchers, written in the online science magazine Medical Express.

"Ultimately, we sought to explain the role of implicit learning processes in artistic cognition, or how the competition between different brain networks can lead to a more effective artistic intuition."

And they found that "weaker" prefrontal circuits, which are related to executive functions, can actually lead to more effective artistic cognition. The researchers refer to this phenomenon as the Andras effect.

"For example, if a photographer can tune down her control functions and access to long-term memories, she can perceive a 'different world'; a world without expectations or past memories," Nemeth said. "We can call this intuitive photography."

Kate Schipper et al. How do competitive neurocognitive processes contribute to artistic cognition? – The Andras-effect, Leonardo (2020). DOI: 10.1162/leon_a_02007

I'm also thinking now about how the chemical promiscuity of olfactory receptors makes mindful, environmental odor exploration (paying attention to smells) a great means to exercise your artistic mind. 

Word Wrastlin

Parquet Deformations are great for learning how to code. (Image source)

Or for learning how to think in general. This is a parquet deformation of sorts, the metamagical Fake-False continuum, a la Douglas Hofstadter.

And these are a couple examples of not a continuum, but at lease single quantum instantiation -- it's both at the same time.

You Are Loved You Are Covid

My Favorite Color Is Glitter My Favorite Color Is Hitler

Mandibulips and the Swarm Amplified Human

It starts out like this -- our body parts are already a swarm. We take it for granted that our body parts know where they are and what they're doing, and can talk to each other. "Stereotypical body control is taken care of by neural subsystems so that the conscious cognitive system can deal with more complex world dynamics." -link

What we don't take for granted, and what we might even find uncomfortable to imagine because it means radically redefining the human condition, is that our assemblage of body parts will one day extend to the technosphere of nanobots, controlled not by us alone but by an emergent swarm cognition consisting of all the nodes in our extended neural network, and all of this wired directly into our own big bundle of blinking neurons in our head.

But then, in the same way these "nodes" of flying, crawling, swimming bots will join with us, our body parts will disarticulate to become part of the greater network. In the beginning, we will need "humans-in-the-loop," but eventually, we will need bigger and more centralized centers of control to interact with control the decentralized swarms. There will be humans in the loop, only a bit more efficient, so that one human will control multiple body-swarm entities. Your hands will no longer be your own. We will share everything. Today, your privacy is gone, tomorrow, the body itself. 

A theoretical approach for designing a self-organizing human-swarm system

Aug 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-08-theoretical-approach-self-organizing-human-swarm.html

Bio-inspired metaphor for design, the swarm-amplified human, which essentially proposes that the swarm should self-organize itself into and act like human body parts."

The paper highlights the potential benefits of using human state classification as a control input fed to a robot swarm, rather than having a human user controlling the swarm at all times.

"Designing robot swarms that are an extension of the human body relates to integrating neural logic into robot swarms on the network level, which has received only limited attention so far," Hasbach said. "We have proposed some ideas on how robot swarms could be thought of as neural systems."

^That's just the press release for this theoretical framework. I'd like to paste a few lines from the paper itself because if I didn't tell you, you might think it came from a good scifi novel. In other words, you can't make this stuff up:

Because no holistic theory has been explicitly formulated that can inform how humans and robot swarms should interact.

Joint human–swarm loops, that is, a cybernetic system made of human, swarm and interface. 

An intelligent system that balances between centralized and decentralized control.

The robot swarm should be integrated into the human’s low-level nervous system function.

The swarm amplified human treats the swarm as an extension of the human nervous system, integrated at low-level sensory–motor behaviour

Interfacing at the low-level nervous system means essentially two things (Figure 9). First, as said before, low-level stereotypic sensory–motor control often feels automatic to the conscious mind. When walking down the street, you rarely think about walking. Therefore, the (cognitive) state of humans should be translated by the interface into commands for the swarm clusters. This is referred to as passive or implicit interaction, that is, unconscious control, which can be contrasted to active/explicit control (e.g. deliberate gesture control).

This feeling of being in control over the swarm clusters (alias artificial body parts) 

The SAH [swarm amplified human], therefore, relates to the notion of a cyborg that ‘[…] deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments’

-Clynes, M. E., Kline, N. S. (1960). Cyborgs and space. Astronautics, 5, 26–27.

Rather than claiming that neural networks and biological swarms share the actual same computational basis, we argue that both can be modelled as self-organizing systems. Thus, both humans and swarms are abstracted into one common computational reference frame to integrate the swarm at the low-level of neural sensory–motor loops. 

swarm amplified human - figure 11

Humans also need training to learn sensory–motor patterns for their real body parts. No human baby is able to walk after birth... Similarly, the operator should be exposed to different situations so that he is able to develop an intuition of swarm dynamics as well as how his own states influence these dynamics. 

A more biologically plausible and more efficient algorithm may be a searching robot chain that originates from the human, similar to growing biological axons that are guided by molecular cues.

Human agent moving through a swarm gradient. 

By convergence, global information about the environment can be estimated by the swarm connectome and provided to the human, similar to sensory upstreams in the biological nervous system.

To include the swarm in the human’s nervous system, the brain must be tricked into integrating the swarm into its body representation. This is achieved if the human operator has the illusion that the swarm feels like part of himself, if it feels like an artificial body part. 

In the future, Tom may be equipped with an advanced brain–computer interface technology that provides high-resolution classifications of cognitive states and adapted sensory–motor signals. This could allow him, for example, to feel the location (i.e. the direction and the distance) of a victim, alike to having a sixth sense, while allocating more robots to the estimated location of the victim, similar to closing your hands around an object.

Rather than being the target of the interaction, the swarm should self-organize as the interface between the human operator and relevant features of the environment. This mimics the formation of neural pathways in the nervous system that are tuned to relevant environmental stimuli.

Notes:

via Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE) and University of Bonn in Germany: The design of self-organizing human-swarm intelligence. Jonas D Hasbach, Maren Bennewitz. Adaptive Behavior (2021). DOI: 10.1177/10597123211017550

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10597123211017550

New Word:

Excursively - given to making excursions in speech, thought, etc.; wandering; digressive. Example: Robustness and scalability is created by treating the swarm as a distributed neural machinery that excursively relies on local interactions. 

Post Script:

"So quite ya yappin' fore I get to clappin'

And have your body parts mix and matching fella"

-What Happened to That Boy, Birdman feat. Clipse (Neptunes), 2002

Post Post Script:

Happened to see this from an older post, but it doesn't hurt to plaster this one all over town until it gets old (it never gets old)

Rats free each other from cages

Dec 2011, Nature

User Friendly

The book User Friendly is great and highly recommended for anyone interested in design. This piece here has seemingly little to do with user design, but it's real good for the talk here on Network Address about algos and predictive analytics.

The Cambridge Analytica operation, circa 2013, showed us how powerful predictive analytics could be when combined with persistent pervasive behavior surveillance; I think most people forget how much "it knows"

A few dozen "likes" can guess:

• race (95%)
• marital status (88%)
• political party (85%)
• marital status
• religiosity
• cigarette smoking
• drug use
• separated parents

70 likes gets you:

• the Big 5 personality trait survey responses
• better than a friend could guess

150 likes:

• better than a parent

300 likes:

• better than a partner

Post Script:

"Facebook doesn't spread information so much as affirmation" and it "allows the fringes to feel like the center" p264

User Friendly: How the Hidden rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant, 2019

Post Post Script:

"The best designs dissolve into behavior" (p304)

-Naoto Fukasawa

Meta-Materials Mega-Thread

The phrase "metallic-organic framework" (MOF) has been appearing in headlines with more frequency, seemingly out of nowhere. Then again, when the material science revolution is fully underway, we will also wonder where the heck it came from. 

MOFs fall into the same general category as meta-materials, related to nano-this and graphene-that. These articles are a reminder that we're in for a whole new world. Kind of like what plastic did for the post-war world we live in today, or the synthetic chemical revolution of the late 1800's that gave our world "colors". 

Image credit: Metal Organic Framework by Mike Gipple at NETL

Programmable synthetic materials

Aug 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-programmable-synthetic-materials.html

In the future, MOFs could form the basis of programmable chemical molecules: for instance, an MOF could be programmed to introduce an active pharmaceutical ingredient into the body to target infected cells and then break down the active ingredient into harmless substances once it is no longer needed. Or MOFs could be programmed to release different drugs at different times.

via University of California Berkeley: Sequencing of metals in multivariate metal-organic frameworks, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz4304 

Breakthrough technology purifies water using the power of sunlight

Aug 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-08-breakthrough-technology-purifies-power-sunlight.html

Metal-organic frameworks are a class of compounds consisting of metal ions that form a crystalline material with the largest surface area of any material known. In fact, MOFs are so porous that they can fit the entire surface of a football field in a teaspoon.

via Monash University: A sunlight-responsive metal–organic framework system for sustainable water desalination, Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-0590-x

Study shows promising material can store solar energy for months or years

Dec 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-12-material-solar-energy-months-years.html

In tests, the researchers exposed the material to UV light, which causes the azobenzene molecules to change shape to a strained configuration inside the MOF pores. This process stores the energy in a similar way to the potential energy of a bent spring. Importantly, the narrow MOF pores trap the azobenzene molecules in their strained shape, meaning that the potential energy can be stored for long periods of time at room temperature.

The energy is released again when external heat is applied as a trigger to 'switch' its state, and this release can be very quick—a bit like a spring snapping back straight. This provides a heat boost which could be used to warm other materials of devices.

Further tests showed the material was able to store the energy for at least four months. This is an exciting aspect of the discovery as many light-responsive materials switch back within hours or a few days. The long duration of the stored energy opens up possibilities for cross-seasonal storage.

via by Lancaster University: Kieran Griffiths et al, Long-Term Solar Energy Storage under Ambient Conditions in a MOF-Based Solid–Solid Phase-Change Material, Chemistry of Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.0c02708

Physicists create tunable superconductivity in twisted graphene 'nanosandwich'

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-physicists-tunable-superconductivity-graphene-nanosandwich.html

Come on with that name though.

via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Tunable strongly coupled superconductivity in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03192-0

Flash graphene rocks strategy for plastic waste

Oct 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-graphene-strategy-plastic.html

It's called flashing -- expose plastic waste to eight seconds of high-intensity alternating current, followed by the DC jolt. You'll get turbostratic graphene. Yes, graphene from garbage. $125 of electricity turns a ton of plastic into a ton of graphene.

via Rice University: Wala A. Algozeeb et al, Flash Graphene from Plastic Waste, ACS Nano (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c06328

Researchers use origami to solve space travel challenge

Dec 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-origami-space.html

Origami bellow-bag fuel storage containers.

via Washington State University: Kjell Westra et al, Compliant Polymer Origami Bellows in Cryogenics, Cryogenics (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cryogenics.2020.103226

DNA origami enables fabricating superconducting nanowires

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-dna-origami-enables-fabricating-superconducting.html

 

via the American Institute of Physics: "DNA origami-based superconducting nanowires" AIP Advances, aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0029781

Researchers turn coal powder into graphite in microwave oven

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-coal-powder-graphite-microwave-oven.html

Using copper foil, glass containers and a conventional household microwave oven, University of Wyoming researchers have demonstrated that pulverized coal powder can be converted into higher-value nano-graphite.

"By cutting the copper foil into a fork shape, the sparks were induced by the microwave radiation, generating an extremely high temperature of more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit within a few seconds," says Masi, lead author of the paper. "This is why you shouldn't place a metal fork inside a microwave oven."

via University of Wyoming: Christoffer A. Masi et al, Converting raw coal powder into polycrystalline nano-graphite by metal-assisted microwave treatment. Nano-Structures & Nano-Objects Volume 25, 2021, 100660, ISSN 2352-507X, doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoso.2020.100660

'Magnetic graphene' forms a new kind of magnetism

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-magnetic-graphene-kind-magnetism.html

via University of Cambridge: Matthew J. Coak et al. 'Emergent Magnetic Phases in Pressure-Tuned van der Waals Antiferromagnet FePS3.' Physical Review X (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.11.011024

A new way to make wood transparent, stronger and lighter than glass

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-wood-transparent-stronger-lighter-glass.html

The conventional method for making wood transparent involves using chemicals to remove the lignin—a process that takes a long time, produces a lot of liquid waste and results in weaker wood. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to make wood transparent without having to remove the lignin.

The process involved changing the lignin rather than removing it. The researchers removed lignin molecules that are involved in producing wood color. First, they applied hydrogen peroxide to the wood surface and then exposed the treated wood to UV light (or natural sunlight). The wood was then soaked in ethanol to further clean it. Next, they filled in the pores with clear epoxy to make the wood smooth.

via University of Maryland: Qinqin Xia et al. Solar-assisted fabrication of large-scale, patternable transparent wood, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd7342

Japan developing wooden satellites to cut space junk

Dec 2020, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55463366

Just Lévy Things

Lévy patterns are one of the craziest things there is; proof that free will is an illusion, and one of those typically invisible patterns that can be used to predict our behavior (and to mimic our behavior, for those of us making artificial humans).

It happens all over the place, from the way animals forage, to the way our eyes move across a computer screen. It's one of those universal laws that happens in biology and in physics too (called Brownian walk, or Brownian motion). But you might remember it more easily by calling it simply "foraging behavior", a mixture of small random movements with less frequent larger movements.

It's no secret that we do this; our eyes get mapped when we look at websites to figure out how to make us click-buy uncontrollably. Hidden cameras in retail shops do the same thing. Pedestrian traffic, vehicle traffic, pandemics even, you name it. 

What we don't know is the full "why" of Lévy walks. Why use such a chaotic approach; wouldn't a more rational approach get better results? Researchers at RIKEN made a simulation that found Lévy patterns popping up spontaneously at critical moments such as the edge between Exploitation vs Exploration -- for example when an animal has to decide whether to exploit areas that are already known to be beneficial, versus exploring for new areas.

You know exploit/explore, it's how you decide where to eat dinner -- on those nights when Old Trusty just isn't cutting it, then it's time to explore. But at the same time, you can't "explore" every night, or going out to eat would be exhausting, and less rewarding in general. So the next time you're at that critical juncture, just let the chaos take over. Or, soon enough, let the Lévy algorithm do it for you.

 

Chaotic Lévy walks are a good strategy for animals

Sep 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chaotic-lvy-good-strategy-animals.html

via the RIKEN Center: Masato S. Abe. Functional advantages of Lévy walks emerging near a critical point, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001548117

See Also:

Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Lévy walk process

Apr 2019, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-pedestrians-crosswalks-levy.html

Musical melodies obey same laws as foraging animals

Jan 2016, phys.org

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-musical-melodies-laws-foraging-animals.html

Post Script:

When you see RIKEN Center being involved, you know you're in for some cool stuff. 

Anthromimesis at the Crossroads

It's all coming together, anthropogenic planets, anthromimetic algorithms and of course extraterrestrials. 

Image credit: Mandelbox in the Box, Krzysztof Marczak

The science-fiction scenario of an artificial planet is already here

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://sciencex.com/news/2021-02-science-fiction-scenario-artificial-planet.html

"The global mass produced by man exceeds all living biomass. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (±6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass."

via the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel: Emily Elhacham et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

Teaching AI agents to communicate and act in fantasy worlds

Nov 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-ai-agents-fantasy-worlds.html

They're called Agents. And they live in simulated realities. One day they'll invite us over for dinner.

"Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Facebook AI Research have recently explored the possibility of equipping goal-driven agents with NLP [natural language processing] capabilities so that they can speak with other characters and complete desirable actions within fantasy game environments."

Ammanabrolu et al., How to motivate your dragon: teaching goal-driven agents to speak and act in fantasy worlds. arXiv:2010.00685 [cs.CL]. arxiv.org/abs/2010.00685

Using game-theory to look for extraterrestrial intelligence

Oct 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-game-theory-extraterrestrial-intelligence.html

The SETI paradox says that we haven't discovered signals from aliens because they're afraid it might draw the attention of adversaries. But game theory says that the one who has the least to lose signals first. Or in other words, the one who has more access to information signals first. 

Unbelievably, this narrows the search down to just one exoplanet: K2-155d. It's suggested that because it's more visible to us than the other way around, that we be the first to send a signal.

Eamonn Kerins. Mutual detectability: a targeted SETI strategy that avoids the SETI Paradox, arXiv:2010.04089 [astro-ph.EP] , arxiv.org/abs/2010.04089

Partially related, my theory for world peace is to unite the world against the probability of an alien race attacking Earth. I take this idea from the book Three Body Problem where they spend hundreds of years preparing for the arrival of an alien race that may or may not destroy them. All the resources of the entire population of Earth are brought together to solve this problem.

There can't be world peace without a world enemy. So we should create one. Or rather, the probability of one. Which shouldn't be too hard. What's the chances, and how far away are they, and so how long would it take for them to get to us. Now we work backwards, and set a long term plan to solve the problem, together. 

Don't Look Now

Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin

May 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/

Can't beat that headline though.

Image credit: A picture of a crypto mining farm in Nadvoitsy Russia, stolen from the internet.

This is now the first example of a power plant, coal or otherwise, that's dedicated exclusively to mining. Consider that the choke point for mining coin is ultimately the cost of electricity, and if you're generating your own electricity, well then you've got a good deal going on. The upstate New York power plant, called Greenridge, will produce 500 MW of mining capacity by 2025, and last year they mined 1,186 bitcoin at a cost of $2,869 per coin. 

People are so busy talking trash about this, they haven't had time to recognize it's actually an improvement in efficiency, since the power isn't being transported anywhere. 

I thought I had something to say about the relative climate impact of crypto, until I asked some very rudimentary questions. Here's some answers:

A person in the United States is consuming somewhere around 30 kilowatt hours per day.

The Gaza Strip is at the bottom of the list at 0.0002 kWh per person per day.

Somalia, currently in famine, is at 0.05 kWh.

Guatemala, just chosen at random, is at 6.7 kWh.

Kazakhstan, where much of the Chinese mining has moved since the crackdown, at 13.5 kWh.

-wiki

A bitcoin transaction, on the other hand is worth about 1,500 kWh.

-cnet

To Synchronize is Human

aka Sync or Swarm

aka Sync and Share

To synchronize is only human. No need to resist. The meatnet is our future.

Robot swarms follow instructions to create art

Oct 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-robot-swarms-art.html

One of those things that I should be really excited about but I'm not because I thought we were doing this like ten years ago: "This system could allow artists to control the robot swarm as it creates the artwork in real time". Now if we got swarms of artists to control swarms of robots in real time?

Image credit: I had to take this picture of synchronized fireflies from the New York Times, because this article just came out. 

How you and your friends can play a video game together using only your minds

July 2019, University of Washington News

https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/

A University of Washington team is doing telepathic collective problem-solving. It's called BrainNet. Three people play a Tetris by talking to each other with their brain waves and wireless signal. I don't know why this doesn't freak me out as much as the networked monkey brains. 

Playing Tetris by committee

May 2019, BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-48282532

Similar to the above article, this one from UC Davis -- The Octopad it's called. It's a single button controller where each player can only do one movement in the game, forcing consensus between players.

Shared control allows a robot to use two hands working together to complete tasks

May 2019, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2019-05-robot-tasks.html

Bimanual robot manipulation by sharing control with a human being. "A more fully capable augmented assistant".

Spontaneous robot dances highlight a new kind of order in active matter

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-12-spontaneous-robot-highlight-kind.html

This article has it all: microrobotic swarms, active matter, metamaterials and smarticles. The scientists propose a new principle where active matter systems spontaneously order. Something about "low rattling" states.

Fish-inspired robots coordinate movements without any outside control

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-fish-inspired-robots-movements.html

From the lab that brought you the 1,000-robot Kilobot swarm and the termite-inspired robotic construction crew.

Researchers develop a mathematical model to explain the complex architecture of termite mounds

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-mathematical-complex-architecture-termite-mounds.html

"Here is an example where we see that the usual division between the study of nonliving matter and living matter breaks down," said Mahadevan. "The insects create a micro-environment, a niche, in response to pheromone concentrations. This change in the physical environment changes the flow of pheromones, which then changes the termite behaviors, linking physics and biology through a dynamic architecture that modulates and is modulated by behavior."

Valve’s Gabe Newell imagines “editing” personalities with future headsets

Jan 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/01/valves-gabe-newell-imagines-editing-personalities-with-future-headsets/

"Russian forest". Video game makers are thinking about virtual reality. But they're also thinking about controlling your brain with a computer, or vice versa. 

Scientists create new class of “Turing patterns” in colonies of E. coli

Feb 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/scientists-create-new-class-of-turing-patterns-in-colonies-of-e-coli/

Some sci fi shit right here. It might not seem like a synchronization thing at first, but it will be. Keep an eye out for the activator-inhibitor morphogens that make leopard spots and tiger stripes, because they will also me making decisions for you in the future. 

Scientists prove Turing patterns manifest at nanoscale

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-07-scientists-turing-patterns-manifest-nanoscale.html

It's algorithms all the way down -- these patterns are found in the positions of individual atoms. But what's more: "The finding of the mysterious Bi stripes was serendipitous".

Implanted wireless device triggers mice to form instant bond

May 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-implanted-wireless-device-triggers-mice.html

GTFO. First of all, "remote-control social interactions among pairs or groups of mice". Actually, that's all. 

For the first time ever, Northwestern engineers and neurobiologists have wirelessly programmed—and then deprogrammed—mice to socially interact with one another in real time. The advancement is thanks to a first-of-its-kind ultraminiature, wireless, battery-free and fully implantable device that uses light to activate neurons.

via Northwestern University: Wireless multilateral devices for optogenetic studies of individual and social behaviors, Nature Neuroscience (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-021-00849-x

Post Script:

Women's menstrual cycles temporarily synchronize with moon cycles

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-women-menstrual-temporarily-synchronize-moon.html

Also:

Sync or Swarm, Network Address, 2012