Monday, March 31, 2025

Does It Compute


AKA All Computers All the Time

Right now a computer is a box that sits on your desk. It's plugged in. Maybe it's a little box, one you keep in your pocket. That one's not plugged in, but it does need power. Soon, the computer will not be a thing. Instead, all things will be a computer. Maybe it's better to say that all things will compute. And like instead of saying 'there's an app for that' we might hear instead 'does it compute'? Like, "Can you pass me the paper towel?" "Does it compute?" Or, "Hey I just got a new haircut." "But does it compute?" 

First - The Fiber Computer:

Fiber computer allows apparel to run apps and 'understand' the wearer
Feb 2025, phys.org

It's an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, Bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

"Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear."

via MIT, RISD, Brown, Stanford, Soldier Nanotechnologies: Yoel Fink, A single-fibre computer enables textile networks and distributed inference, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08568-6. 



Materials can remember a sequence of events in an unexpected way
Jan 202,5 phys.org

Material memory is like wrinkles on a crumpled piece of paper. These memories are stored in disordered solids in which the arrangement of particles seems random but actually contains details about past deformations. Materials should not be able to form return-point memory when the force only occurs in one direction. For example, a bridge might sag slightly as cars drive over it, but it doesn't curve upwards once the cars are gone.

The researchers boiled down the components of the system—such as the particles in a solid or the microscopic domains in a magnet—into abstract elements called hysterons. "Hysterons are elements of a system that may not immediately respond to external conditions, and can stay in a past state."

The hysterons in the model interact either in a cooperative way, where a change in one encourages a change in the other, or in a non-cooperative "frustrated" way, where a change in one discourages a change in the other. Frustrated hysterons are the key to forming and recovering a sequence in a system with asymmetric driving.

"We think this is a way to design artificial systems with this special kind of memory, starting with the simplest mechanical systems not much more complicated than a bendy straw, and hopefully working up to something like an asymmetrical combination lock."

via Penn State: Chloe Lindeman et al, Generalizing multiple memories from a single drive: The hysteron latch, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr5933


Soap's maze-solving skills could unlock secrets of the human body
Jan 2025, phys.org

"Surfactants—the molecules found in soap—can naturally find its way through a maze"

We're talking about things acting like people. Imagine discovering that chairs can figure out how to best position themselves in a theater. Or the straps on your backpack can figure out the best length for positioning the pack on your back depending on the weight and the way you walk etc. Your pencil can figure out how to write a better sentence for convincing your roommate to do the dishes. I'm just trying to imagine what this all means.  

"When we put soap into a liquid filled maze, the natural surfactants already present in the liquid interact, creating an omniscient view of the maze, so the soap can intuitively find the correct path, ignoring all other irrelevant paths. This behavior occurs due to very subtle but powerful physics where the two types of surfactants generate tension forces that guide the soap to the exit."

Yes, they called soap bubbles omniscient. 

via Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester: Richard Mcnair et al, Exogenous–Endogenous Surfactant Interaction Yields Heterogeneous Spreading in Complex Branching Networks, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.034001

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

On Language the Universal Autoencoder

 
  
The 'Arrow of Time' effect: LLMs are better at predicting what comes next than what came before
Sep 2024, phys.org

Their performance at predicting the previous word is always a few percent worse than at predicting the next word. This phenomenon is universal across languages, and can be observed with any large language model."

"In theory, there should be no difference between the forward and backward directions, but LLMs appear to be somehow sensitive to the time direction in which they process text. Interestingly, this is related to a deep property of the structure of language that could only be discovered with the emergence of large language models in the last five years."

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Vassilis Papadopoulos et al, Arrows of Time for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.17505



Ouch! Study investigates pain vocalizations and interjections across 131 languages
Nov 2024, phys.org

Each of the three emotions yielded consistent and distinct vowel signatures across cultures. Pain interjections also featured similar open vowels, such as "a," and wide falling diphthongs, such as "ai" in "Ayyy!" and "aw" in "Ouch!"

However, for disgusted and joyful emotions, in contrast to vocalizations, the interjections lacked regularities across cultures. The researchers expressed surprise at this latter finding.

Is this because disgust is cultural, or at least not entirely physical, and heavily mediated by culture, as compared to actual pain? This is commonly understood in the realm of olfactory perception, where some people think the smell of revolting, rotten fish is delicious (they're Norwegian). Or the smell of vomit (they're Italian, Parmesan to be specific), or the smell of the inside of the skin folds of a homeless person who hasn't been able to bathe in months (they're called New Yorkers, and they kind of long for the smell of the subway, which contains these volatiles). In fact, anything that's fermented is so close to rotten food, that unless you've been culturally conditioned to like it, you won't, at least not at first. Cilantro, I'm looking at you too. 

via CNRS et Université Lumière Lyon, School of Social Sciences at University of Western Australia, and Institute of Psychology at University of Wrocław: Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust and joy across languages, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2024). DOI: 10.1121/10.0032454


Words activate hidden brain processes shaping emotions, decisions and behavior
Jan 2025, phys.org

Words have meaning, but they also have emotional meaning:

"There's no single brain region handling this activity, and it's not as simple as one chemical representing one emotion."

(These studies were done thanks to the participation of patients being treated for epilepsy.)

The researchers discovered emotionally charged words - whether positive, negative, or neutral - modulate neurotransmitter release. By measuring the sub-second dynamics of the releases, they identified distinct patterns tied to emotional tone, anatomical regions, and which hemisphere of the brain was involved.

"The surprising result came from the thalamus. This region hasn't been thought to have a role in processing language or emotional content, yet we saw neurotransmitter changes in response to emotional words. This suggests that even brain regions not typically associated with emotional or linguistic processing might still be privy to that information. For instance, parts of the brain responsible for mobilizing movement might benefit from having access to emotionally significant information to guide behavior."

Note: The words used in the study were drawn from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database, which rates words by positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence.

via Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute: Seth R. Batten et al, Emotional words evoke region- and valence-specific patterns of concurrent neuromodulator release in human thalamus and cortex, Cell Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.115162

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Saturday, March 29, 2025

The Artist Within


The first tremblings of terror come from a computer program that can write a legal brief, and then argue in real time against a trained human lawyer. But that's obvious. Diagnosing cancer by looking at an x-ray? Pssh. Saw that coming. 

The way technology co-evolves with our species is by getting in the middle of the more creative processes, because that's insidious, which means we don't notice, and so we can't stop it.

The advance of creative pursuit is circuitous, it's unmeasurable, and subject to unannounced yet dramatic shifts in paradigmatic underpinnings. In fact, nobody is even arguing that it's a kind of progress. Your benchmarks, your metrics - they have no power here. A state board of medical examiners will tell you how good this year's crop of doctors perform on their exams etc. There is no national artist database counting the overall social effects of Banksy's automated self-destructive artwork, or Kehinde Wiley's painting of Barack Obama. Because that's not how that works. 

When you let the robot into the house - the temple that is your body and the mind that controls it - it does things there. And because this isn't a real place, it's hard for us to keep track of what's happening. 

These things start small, and they don't seem like a big deal, because who cares if a robot is making art, or even suggestions for making art. I mean it's not like it's making executive orders from the Presidential Office, right? And the willingness to use an automated industrial process to reproduce imagery, let's say via Japanese woodcuts or Andy Warhol's prints, vs "requiring" that a human, perhaps a shaman, maybe just an "artist", to make each image from their own hands, what did that do to us as a species? Did that change us more than allowing in-vitro fertilization for reproduction? Or birth control pills? I doubt it. Then again, maybe they're related (for example by changing the way we value and rely on "real" humans among us). 

We can't answer these questions very well, but we can probably agree that this is where shit gets weird:

Graph-based AI model finds hidden links between science and art to suggest novel materials
Nov 2024, phys.org

They analyze a collection of 1,000 scientific papers about biological materials and turn them into a knowledge map in the form of a graph, using "category theory". The graph revealed how different pieces of information are connected and was able to find groups of related ideas and key points that link many concepts together.

Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and "Symphony No. 9," suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity.

In another experiment, the graph-based AI model recommended creating a new biological material inspired by the abstract patterns found in Wassily Kandinsky's painting, "Composition VII." The AI suggested a new mycelium-based composite material. "The result of this material combines an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos and order, adjustable property, porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionality."


Above image: Mycelium-based biological material inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII - Markus Buehler at MIT - 2025 [link]

via MIT: Markus J Buehler, Accelerating scientific discovery with generative knowledge extraction, graph-based representation, and multimodal intelligent graph reasoning, Machine Learning: Science and Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1088/2632-2153/ad7228

Thumbnail image credit: Graffiti from Berlin Wall stone section - Chew Yen Fook Nikon Small World - 2024

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Thursday, March 27, 2025

Science Works in Mysterious Ways

 

I'm collecting images of the photon revolution, where all the articles about advancements in computing have rainbows in them. You're welcome. 

Next, how science works:

Miniature treadmills accelerate studies of insects walking
Sep 2024, phys.org

Yes, fruit fly-sized treadmills.

via University of Washington School of Medicine: Brandon G. Pratt et al, Miniature linear and split-belt treadmills reveal mechanisms of adaptive motor control in walking Drosophila, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.006


Artificial mouth mimics human tongue movements to understand the oral processing of soft foods
Oct 2024, phys.org

Yes it is.

The device is based on anatomical data collected at the Fujita Health University and features a silicone tongue that contracts using compressed air to mimic the movements of the human tongue. 

Click the link above if you want to see a picture of the artificial tongue. But only if you want to.

via National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment: Alejandro Avila-Sierra et al, A first-of-its-kind 3D biomimetic artificial mouth capable of reproducing the oral processing of soft foods, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-73629-9


What a gut fungus reveals about symbiosis and allergy
Nov 2024, phys.org

The finding suggests that preclinical studies until now have overlooked a major influencer of mouse physiology:

In 2019, a team led by National Institutes of Health found that "wildling" lab mice raised with gut microbes like those of wild mice do a better job of modeling human immune responses than traditional lab mice. The lab, which participated in that study, found significantly higher levels of fungal DNA in the gut of these mice—magnitudes greater than previously observed in lab mice.

The team looked for evidence of the fungus in fecal samples and other material provided by pest-control companies in New York City and Los Angeles, and acquired samples from multiple research institutions that use or sell lab mice. Ultimately, they determined that K. pintolopesii is very common in wild mice, but also often present in lab mouse colonies without researchers knowing about its presence.

"K. pintolopesii can completely change the experimental outcome."

via Weill Cornell Medical College: Yun Liao et al, Fungal symbiont transmitted by free-living mice promotes type 2 immunity, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08213-2


Microplastics found in the brains of mice within hours of consumption
Jan 2025, phys.org

(Blinking guy meme)
The team installed tiny windows in their skulls, allowing them to track the movement of the plastic in their brains.

via Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Duke University, and National University of Singapore: Haipeng Huang et al, Microplastics in the bloodstream can induce cerebral thrombosis by causing cell obstruction and lead to neurobehavioral abnormalities, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr8243


Scientists discover neurons that count each bite and signal when to stop eating
Feb 2025, phys.org

via Columbia University Irving Medical Center: Brainstem Neuropeptidergic Neurons Link a Neurohumoral Axis to Satiation, Cell (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.01.018.


High-speed videos show what happens when a droplet splashes into a pool
Feb 2025, phys.org 

How are we still studying this? Yet here we are.

via MIT: R. Dandekar et al, Splash on a liquid pool: coupled cavity–sheet unsteady dynamics, Journal of Fluid Mechanics (2024). DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2024.1105


Post Script Extraordinaire:
How UFO sightings can help measure public attention and economic patterns
Dec 2024, phys.org

Now this is some actual ufo science: UAP sightings are more frequent in wealthier regions but exhibit counter-cyclical patterns within those regions over time. These findings suggest that shifts in attention to extraordinary phenomena may reflect broader fluctuations in public focus.

  • Positively correlated with economic conditions across regions but display counter-cyclical patterns within regions over time.
  • Causal link between restricted mobility (like COVID lockdowns) and increased UAP reports
  • Regions with higher sighting levels show muted responses to monetary policy shocks, suggesting that attention variations can significantly influence economic outcomes.

via Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Nathan Goldstein et al, Looking up the sky: unidentified aerial phenomena and macroeconomic attention, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-04182-z

In related news, you've never had so much fun at a science lecture:
Sasquatch Distribution Modelling: Investigating patterns of Bigfoot sightings in North America
Annual Halloween lecture by Prof Joss Wright at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oct 31 2024
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Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Sub-contracting the Subconscious

 
People just don't think like they used to!

Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills
Jan 2025, phys.org

Cognitive Offloading - where individuals rely on the tools to reduce mental effort; questions arise about long-term impacts on memory, attention, and problem-solving.

Younger participants showed higher dependence ... 

It's hard, or near impossible, not to remember that Socrates warned of the alphabet and reading as having the same effect on the youth of ancient Greece. Yet still, this is the recommendation:

The study's findings, if replicated, could have significant implications for educational policy and the integration of AI in professional settings. Schools and universities might want to emphasize critical thinking exercises and metacognitive skill development to counterbalance AI reliance and cognitive effects.

I am not marketing for the AI takeover in any way, but how about the idea that instead of these "tools" causing a decline in critical thinking, they might be allowing us to choose where we use critical thinking...like they might be allowing us to better decide when to decide, and when to leave it to the robots. It's likely that the majority of people, no matter their age, will not ask a robot how to best take care of their mom after their dad dies. Or whether to tell their spouse they've been unfaithful.

Maybe we're actually wasting precious brainpower on stupid decision all day; maybe we're wasting our most important skill over all skills, that of critical thinking, that which sets us apart from every other organism on this planet. And maybe it's the wasted decisions, the wasted thoughts, that we're getting rid of. And maybe it's a sign that the critical thinking tests we use today are actually part of that waste, and we need to devise even more complex surveys to detect the even more complex thinking that we can attain now that we've dumped all the less important stuff. 

I mean what happened to the youth of ancient Greece? How were we measuring their intelligence and how might it have changed? Could you imagine what the test would have looked like? And what it would leave out that today we take for granted as basic thinking skills?

via Swiss Business School: Michael Gerlich, AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking, Societies (2025). DOI: 10.3390/soc15010006



Post Script:
New essay warns of dangers in measurement illiteracy
Jan 2025, phys.org

"From the American eugenics movement to the 2008 market crash, history is replete with episodes showing the adverse impact that failures of measurement literacy can exact on the enterprise of science and everyday human affairs."

This essay is a good reminder of how complicated science is. 

via City College of New York's Grove School of Engineering and several others: Arthur Paul Pedersen et al, Discourse on measurement, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401229121

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Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Transmogrify My AI


AKA I Am a Man!

Leading AI chatbots show dementia-like cognitive decline in tests, raising questions about their future in medicine
Dec 2024, phys.org

Something about anthropomorphism - saying they have dementia, like saying they hallucinate, is assigning human-like qualities to a robot:

Researchers assessed the cognitive abilities of the leading, publicly available LLMs — OpenAI's ChatGPT versions 4 and 4o, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 "Sonnet", and Google's Gemini versions 1 and 1.5 — using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, widely used to detect cognitive impairment and early signs of dementia, usually in older adults. 

ChatGPT 4o achieved the highest score (26 out of 30), followed by ChatGPT 4 and Claude (25), with Gemini 1.0 scoring lowest (16).

The uniform failure of all large language models in tasks requiring visual abstraction and executive function highlights a significant area of weakness that could impede their use in clinical settings.

"Not only are neurologists unlikely to be replaced by large language models any time soon, but our findings suggest that they may soon find themselves treating new, virtual patients - artificial intelligence models presenting with cognitive impairment."

via Department of Neurology at Hadassah Medical Center Jerusalem, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University: G Koplewitz: Age against the machine—susceptibility of large language models to cognitive impairment: cross sectional analysis, BMJ (2024). DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2024-081948



AI's next frontier: Selling your intentions before you know them
Dec 2024, phys.org

Sure it sounds scary, but isn't this what predictive analytics is all about? (And we've been doing that for years)

Forthcoming - "persuasive technologies" using "digital signals of intent" to predict your behavior in real time via Anthropomorphic AI agents. 

"We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes."

Again, "We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes."

via University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence: Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, Harvard Data Science Review (2024). DOI: 10.1162/99608f92.21e6bbaa


Condé Nast, other news orgs say AI firm stole articles, spit out “hallucinations”
Feb 2025, Ars Technica

In February 2024, [generative AI company] Cohere announced that it would provide legal protection against intellectual property claims to its paying enterprise customers. This includes "full indemnification for any third party claims that the outputs generated by our models infringe on a third party's intellectual property rights," for Cohere "enterprise customers that comply with our guidelines and do not intentionally attempt to generate infringing content." (Note this is not a ruling like the Reuters case but just the beginning of the lawsuit.)

Release the copybot trolls!


New study identifies differences between human and AI-generated text
Feb 2025, phys.org

Just the stats ma'am: 

They show how LLMs write by prompting them with extracts of writing from various genres, such as TV scripts and academic articles. 

LLMs used present participle clauses at two to five times the rate of human text, as demonstrated in this sentence written by GPT-4o: "Bryan, leaning on his agility, dances around the ring, evading Show's heavy blows."

They also used nominalizations at 1.5 to two times the rate of humans, and GPT-4o uses the agentless passive voice at half the rate as humans. This suggests that LLMs are trained to write in an informationally dense, noun-heavy style, which limits their ability to mimic other writing styles.

The researchers also found that instruction-tuned LLMs have distinctive vocabularies, using some words much more often than humans writing in the same genre. For example, versions of ChatGPT used "camaraderie" and "tapestry" about 150 times more often than humans do, while Llama variants used "unease" 60 to 100 times more often. Both models had strong preferences for "palpable" and "intricate."

Can we just pause for a minute and recognize that we're saying "more often than humans do" as if we knew what universal human speech was like. All this talk about bias in the algorithms, certainly important because it can be amplified, but what about the bias in the base sets? What are the base data we're using to say what a "human" is like?

Also, as a native English speaker, I do recognize that non-natives tend to overuse present participles (like words ending in -ing), which may or may not have anything to do with this and the joke that 'AI is just three [people from underdeveloped communities] in a trenchcoat'. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, go listen to an Excel tutorial for a few minutes. ...

via Carnegie Mellon University: Alex Reinhart et al, Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422455122

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Monday, March 24, 2025

Facts, Fakes, Fake Facts and Psychological Operators

 

Brainwashing an entire population is hard work!

News consumers are more influenced by political alignment than by truth, study shows
Nov 2024, phys.org

The study is based on research conducted in 2020 with a sample of the voting-age U.S. population matched to the demographics of the census, and made up news headlines whereas earlier studies relied on existing ones. They also used a cover story about memory and communication, and even included foil questions, so that participants would not be aware of the nature of the study.

Both supporters and opponents believed those that aligned with their views more than they believed true headlines that did not align with their views.

"We found that the strongest predictors of bias include extreme views of Trump, a one-sided media diet, and belief in the objectivity and lack of bias of a person's own political side relative to the other side." 

In one measure of bias, the researchers assessed people's beliefs about their political side's objectivity as compared to the other side. Ironically, those most confident in their political side's lack of bias were the most biased.

In addition, the effect of partisan bias was stronger for real news than fake news. That is, people were more likely to disbelieve true information that challenged their political worldview than to accept false information that confirmed their worldview.

"We saw it on both political sides and even among people who scored well on a reasoning test. We were a bit surprised to see how widespread this tendency was. People were engaging in a lot of resistance to inconvenient truths."

"Everyone thinks it's the other person who is the problem."

But this very important point can't be overlooked, dropped halfway through the press article:

One contributing factor for this state of affairs, the researchers suggest, is increased consumption of partisan media.

And just for good measure, let's recall that as of 2010 Citizen's United allows private industry to contribute campaign funds to those running for public office. (As in, who's paying for that partisan media? Yes, that's who.) 

via: Department of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford: Michael C. Schwalbe et al, When politics trumps truth: Political concordance versus veracity as a determinant of believing, sharing, and recalling the news., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024). DOI: 10.1037/xge0001650



Brief scientific literacy interventions may quash new conspiracy theories
Dec 2024, phys.org

Americans in states with higher scientific literacy scores were less likely to believe in conspiracies and had higher COVID-19 vaccination uptake rates over the time period.

via Penn State's Smeal College of Business: Nathan Allred et al, Conspiracy Beliefs and Consumption: The Role of Scientific Literacy, Journal of Consumer Research (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucae024


A tangled web: Social media analysis suggests coordinated messaging among fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbon industries
Jan 2025, phys.org

Power rises to the top: "Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized...these different companies in different sectors are using the same strategic messaging to promote a distorted image of their environmental responsibility."

Details: 125,300 unique tweets posted from 2008–2023 by the main Twitter accounts of nine key players in the US fossil energy/plastics/agrichemical trade: ExxonMobil, Chevron, American Petroleum Institute, Dow, Dupont de Nemours, Inc, American Chemistry Council, Corteva Agriscience, FMC Corp, American Farm Bureau

via Northeastern University: PLOS Climate (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000370


New AI tool detects fake news with 99% accuracy
Jan 2025, phys.org

The method developed by the researchers uses an "ensemble voting" technique, which combines the predictions of multiple different machine learning models to give an overall score.

(Too bad we don't actually care; see above.)

via Keele University School of Computer Science and Mathematics: Patricia Asowo et al, An Ensemble Modelling of Feature Engineering and Predictions for Enhanced Fake News Detection, Artificial Intelligence XLI (2024). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-77918-3_16


Meta-analysis uncovers public's skill in detecting fake news, but skepticism towards true news persists
Mar 2025, phys.org

While their findings suggest that most people can accurately judge the veracity of news, they also showed that people are slightly better at spotting false news than true news. In other words, most of the people who took part in the studies appeared to be better skilled at rating false news as false than rating true news as true.

"A small majority of people show this trend (59%). The implication of this finding is that we should focus more on increasing the acceptance of true news. Currently, a lot of efforts are dedicated to making people skeptical of (false) news, however, our data shows that there may be more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of false news."

I also remember the study about how mainstream news being skeptical of a science fact are more influential than a fake news site spreading obvious fake shit, for example BBC saying there may be a small risk of myocarditis for example, even if they have a million other articles that say vaccines are safe. There is a risk of myocarditis, but the risk of dying, or becoming disabled, from Covid due to lack of vaccination is far, far higher. See here or here.

via Jan Pfänder et al, Spotting false news and doubting true news: a systematic review and meta-analysis of news judgements, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02086-1.

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Sunday, March 23, 2025

Digital Double Definition in Doubt


As awareness of digital twins grows, so does its definition, as well as its warnings, but so does its results. We're right here in the middle between pre-hype and post-hype:

Digital twins of the Earth: Researchers are critical of the term
Dec 2024, phys.org

FYI - The Destination Earth project was launched in 2022 as a key pillar of the European Commission's efforts towards the Green Deal, and wants a digital simulation of the Earth. The German Federal Agency for Carthography and Geodesy is working on a digital, intelligent 3D image of Germany and the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate is running a digital "hydro-twin" project.

These scientists are trying to add to the conversation:
They point out the lack of a clear definition of the term "digital twin of the Earth," which may be misleading. "All digital representations of our planet are model representations. As such, they will always be detached from reality—as a map can never fully replicate the land it depicts" and "suggests that we can create a digital representation that allows us to stress-test the structural properties of the Earth system with any desired degree of accuracy and precision" and as that is not the case, "as every model is a simplification of reality, and its creation requires simplifying assumptions that will unavoidably lead to uncertainties." Also, "the creation of new models with higher resolutions will not necessarily lead to an improvement in knowledge and results; and new complex models need new methodologies that will enable researchers to apply them."

via Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: Robert Reinecke et al, How to use the impossible map – Considerations for a rigorous exploration of Digital Twins of the Earth, Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling (2024). DOI: 10.18174/sesmo.18786

Image credit: The above image is a first, I believe, where the authors of a science paper used a generative network to make a press release thumbnail image for their article, which happens to be about the union of humans and AI. The credit is titled: "Credit: By the authors" [link] and it comes from the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.


Digital twin research finds colon cancer cells can be reverted to normal cells
Dec 2024, phys.org

Results already, so we're in the next phase of the digital twin hype, where it's not hype anymore. 

via The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology: Jeong‐Ryeol Gong et al, Control of Cellular Differentiation Trajectories for Cancer Reversion, Advanced Science (2024). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202402132

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Saturday, March 22, 2025

Automatic Updates to Your Spacetime Matrix


You would think something as universal as time would be less susceptible to major changes like revised definitions or refined measurements. But no, that's not how it works. 

Awareness without time? A deep look into timelessness in deep meditative states
Dec 2024, phys.org

Some good distinctions on "coherent conceptualization of deep meditative states, focusing in particular on phenomenal temporality during meditation", dubbed the Extended Now Interpretation.

On Duration - According to Extended Now Interpretation, deep meditation occurs over an interval that the person perceives as an extended present, with no awareness of change, succession, temporal order, beginning, or end. Thus, "timelessness" refers to a lack of temporal structure but not a lack of duration.

On Alertness - Since the option of staying alert or not presents itself anew for each passing moment, the meditator is aware of time passing, and thus aware of a period of time, Dr. Frischhut argues. This does not require the meditator to consciously keep track of a succession of moments, as maintaining alertness during meditation may be enough to give them an awareness of duration even without an awareness of succession.

On Memory - Meditators report having no access to memory during deep meditative states, which would present a problem to her argument. She proposes that the experience of being alert at any given moment has a particular phenomenological character that would be different had it not been preceded by an essentially identical experience of alertness - a second knock on a door wouldn't be experienced the same without the first knock. Thus, even without engaging memory, a meditator still experiences duration in the form of instances of momentary alertness that each flows seamlessly from a previous one.

via Akiko Frischhut at Sophia University in Japan: Akiko Frischhut, Awareness without time, The Philosophical Quarterly (2024). DOI: 10.1093/pq/pqae081



Study claims all observables in nature can be measured with a single constant: The second
Dec 2024, phys.org

The group argues that the number of fundamental constants depends on the type of space-time in which the theories are formulated; and that in a relativistic space-time, this number can be reduced to a single constant, which is used to define the standard of time.

Okun stated that three basic units—meter (length), kilogram (mass), and second (time)—were necessary to measure all physical quantities. In other words, he reaffirmed the so-called MKS system (M, for meter; K, for kilogram; S, for second), which was later incorporated into the International System of Units (SI). Veneziano, for his part, argued that in certain contexts two units would suffice: one for time and one for length. Duff was equivocal, stating that the number of constants could vary depending on the theory in question.

According to their criteria, the number of fundamental constants is related to the minimum number of independent standards needed to express all physical quantities. To repeat, in Galileo's space-time, all observables can be expressed in terms of units of time and space, which are usually the "second" and the "meter." In relativistic space-time, the unit of time—that is, the "second"—is sufficient to express any observable.

And the definition of "second" is currently based on a natural constant: the energy difference between two specific levels of the electronic layer of caesium-133. One second (1s) corresponds to the time of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the radiation emitted when an electron passes between these two states of caesium-133.

via Institute of Theoretical Physics at São Paulo State University, Institute of Mathematics Statistics and Scientific Computing at the State University of Campinas, São Carlos Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo: George E. A. Matsas et al, The number of fundamental constants from a spacetime-based perspective, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-71907-0


Scientists observe 'negative time' in quantum experiments
Dec 2024, phys.org

Don't get too excited: The researchers emphasize that these perplexing results highlight a peculiar quirk of quantum mechanics rather than a radical shift in our understanding of time.

via University of Toronto: Daniela Angulo et al, Experimental evidence that a photon can spend a negative amount of time in an atom cloud, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.03680 , arxiv.org/abs/2409.03680

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Friday, March 21, 2025

Levy Things and Data Management

 

There's a whole bag of words referring to this one phenomenon we call foraging behavior. Animals poke around for food, poke, poke, poke, and then move to another spot, and poke, poke, poke. A big jump followed by a bunch of little jumps, followed by a big jump, etc. The explore-exploit heuristic it's also called. This behavior is found in many other places, from the way people look for a job to the way atoms move. That's called Brownian motion, or the Drunkard's Walk. It's found in the unconscious  uncontrollable way our eyes move when we look at things, and it's kind of even related to the way we choose baby names over decades. 

The following articles are mostly tangentially related to this phenomenon; they're about navigation and vision, and information theory in general. 
 
A new mechanism for animal food caching behavior discovered
Aug 2024, phys.org

Contrary to the long-held belief that scatter-hoarding animals rely on memory to retrieve cached food items, the researchers propose a static mechanism similar to hash functions used in computing. Hash functions in computing are algorithms that convert input data of any size into a fixed-size string of characters, which typically represents the data in a unique and efficient manner.

The researchers' mathematical model aligns with the activity of hippocampal spatial cells, which respond to an animal's positional attention. The remapping ensures that these cells activate consistently across subsequent visits to the same area but differ between areas.

This remapping, combined with unique cognitive maps, generates persistent hash functions that can aid both food caching and retrieval.

In other words: Both layers are arranged in a two-dimensional grid, with each cell corresponding to a specific location. The cache site is determined by the activity level of the output neurons, known as the cache score.

via Department of Cognition and Brain Sciences and The Department of Animal Sciences at Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Sharon Mordechay et al, A non-memory-based functional neural framework for animal caching behavior, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-68003-8



Grid cells' rhythmic sweeps reshape understanding of brain's spatial navigation
Feb 2025, phys.org

Grid cells alternate between tracking an animal's real-time position and scanning the environment ahead in a highly regular pattern—sweeping 30 degrees to the right, then 30 degrees to the left—at a rapid pace of ten times per second.

These rhythmic sweeps create a more efficient way to anchor locations relative to one another, providing a richer and more adaptable navigation system than previously imagined.

So it's not exactly the eyes sweeping but the brain?

via Kavli Institute at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology: Abraham Z. Vollan et al, Left–right-alternating theta sweeps in entorhinal–hippocampal maps of space, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08527-1


How eye saccades enable mammals to simultaneously chase prey and navigate through complex environments
Feb 2025, phys.org

It's almost like we're not designed to look at static images:

Researchers reconstructed the visual fields of freely moving ferrets that were chasing a fleeing target and discovered that eye saccades (very rapid coordinated eye movements) align the world motion—and not the actual thing they are chasing—to the retina and retinal specializations used for high-acuity vision.

Saccades achieve this by countering head rotations to align the area of the sharpest vision with the direction of intended travel and the area of the least motion-induced blur. 

via Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior and Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience: Eye saccades align optic flow with retinal specializations during object pursuit in freely moving ferrets, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.032.


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Thursday, March 20, 2025

Hide Your Brains


The era of the omnicortex is upon us, and by upon us I mean it's coming for you, and your brain.
 
Mini-brains reveal how mitochondrial mutations affect brain cells
Dec 2024, phys.org

Mini-brains, aka Brain Organoids. That is all.

via University of Bergen: Anbin Chen et al, Hallmark Molecular and Pathological Features of POLG Disease are Recapitulated in Cerebral Organoids, Advanced Science (2024). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202307136



Researchers achieve success in allowing a patient to 'speak' using only the power of thought
Jul 2024, phys.org

(Epilepsy patients) In the first stage of the experiment, with the depth electrodes already implanted in the patient's brain, researchers asked him to say two syllables out loud: /a/ and /e/ while they recorded brain activity. Researchers then trained AI models to identify the specific brain cells whose electrical activity indicated the desire to say /a/ or /e/. Once the computer learned, he was asked to only imagine... The computer then translated the electrical signals...

via Tel-Aviv University Sourasky Medical Center, Ichilov Hospital: Ariel Tankus et al, A Speech Neuroprosthesis in the Frontal Lobe and Hippocampus: Decoding High-Frequency Activity into Phonemes, Neurosurgery (2024). DOI: 10.1227/neu.0000000000003068


Artificial imagination with the 'exocortex:' Researcher proposes software to aid scientific inspiration and imagination
Jan 2025, phys.org

The conceptualized exocortex will be an extension of a scientist's brain.

Maybe you just want to know that Brookhaven is doing this, that's all.

via U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Electronic Nanomaterials Group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials: Kevin G. Yager, Towards a science exocortex, Digital Discovery (2024). DOI: 10.1039/D4DD00178H


'DeepFocus' offers minimally invasive brain stimulation through the nose
Feb 2025, phys.org

"By going through the nose, we can place electrodes as close to the brain as possible without opening the skull."

And that's all you need to know.

via Carnegie Mellon University Electrical and Computer Engineering: Yuxin Guo et al, DeepFocus: a transnasal approach for optimized deep brain stimulation of reward circuit nodes, Journal of Neural Engineering (2025). DOI: 10.1088/1741-2552/adac0c


Direct translation of brain imaging to text with MindLLM
Feb 2025, phys.org

fMRI to text. You're fucked. 

  • AKA decoding brain activity into natural language
  • Improves on prior models like UMBRAE, BrainChat, and UniBrain

via Yale University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Cambridge: Weikang Qiu et al, MindLLM: A Subject-Agnostic and Versatile Model for fMRI-to-Text Decoding, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.15786

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Who Am I


You may need to channel you inner Dan Dennett for this one:

Navigating space: Dual maps discovered in the brain
Sep 2024, phys.org

Multidimensional navigation - basically you have two navigation centers, one of them in an area called the secondary motor cortex.

"Imagine being asked where the nearest coffee shop is. You could say 'walk forward and turn left' (self-centered directions) or 'walk north, then east' (world-centered directions). We want to understand how the brain transitions between these reference frames and transforms them into action."

via Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University of College London: Liujunli Li et al, Encoding of 2D Self-Centered Plans and World-Centered Positions in the Rat Frontal Orienting Field, The Journal of Neuroscience (2024). DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0018-24.2024



Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds
Nov 2024, phys.org

Isn't this embodied cognition?

"In the future, we will need to treat our body more like the brain - for example, consider what our pancreas remembers about the pattern of our past meals to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose or consider what a cancer cell remembers about the pattern of chemotherapy."

In the research, the scientists replicated learning over time by studying two types of non-brain human cells in a laboratory (one from nerve tissue and one from kidney tissue) and exposing them to different patterns of chemical signals - just like brain cells are exposed to patterns of neurotransmitters when we learn new information.

In response, the non-brain cells turned on a "memory gene" - the same gene that brain cells turn on when they detect a pattern in the information and restructure their connections in order to form memories.

via New York University Center for Neural Science: N. V. Kukushkin et al, The massed-spaced learning effect in non-neural human cells, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-53922-x


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