Photonic applications harness the power of light-matter interactions to generate various intriguing phenomena. This has enabled major advances in communications, medicine, and spectroscopy, among others, and is also used in laser and quantum technologies.
Past neuroscience studies have consistently highlighted the profound changes that the human brain undergoes throughout childhood and adolescence. These efforts have uncovered various stages of development, during which the brain’s organization evolves to support increasingly complex cognitive functions, gradually shifting from a focus on somatosensory/motor and visual processing to more advanced mental capabilities.
These stages of brain development and their underlying neurobiological processes have been closely studied and are now relatively well-understood. In contrast, the contributions of specific functional networks (i.e., interconnected brain regions that collectively serve specific functions) to the brain’s maturation process remain poorly delineated.
Researchers at Yale University, National University of Singapore and Beijing Normal University carried out a study investigating the extent to which individual functional networks contribute to the maturation of the brain and the gradual acquisition of new cognitive abilities before adulthood.
With maps of the connections between neurons and artificial intelligence methods, researchers can now do what they never thought possible: predict the activity of individual neurons without making a single measurement in a living brain.
For decades, neuroscientists have spent countless hours in the lab painstakingly measuring the activity of neurons in living animals to tease out how the brain enables behavior. These experiments have yielded groundbreaking insights into how the brain works, but they have only scratched the surface, leaving much of the brain unexplored.
Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence and the connectome—a map of neurons and their connections created from brain tissue —to predict the role of neurons in the living brain. Their paper has been published in the journal Nature.
In this sense, the cemi theory incorporates Chalmers’ (Chalmers 1995) ‘double-aspect’ principle that information has both a physical, and a phenomenal or experiential aspect. At the particulate level, a molecule of the neurotransmitter glutamate encodes bond energies, angles, etc. but nothing extrinsic to itself. Awareness makes no sense for this kind matter-encoded information: what can glutamate be aware of except itself? Conversely, at the wave level, information encoded in physical fields is physically unified and can encode extrinsic information, as utilized in TV and radio signals. This EM field-based information will, according to the double-aspect principle, be a suitable substrate for experience. As proposed in my earlier paper (McFadden 2002a) ‘awareness will be a property of any system in which information is integrated into an information field that is complex enough to encode representations of real objects in the outside world (such as a face)’. Nevertheless, awareness is meaningless unless it can communicate so only fields that have access to a motor system, such as the cemi field, are candidates for any scientific notion of consciousness.
I previously proposed (McFadden 2013b), that complex information acquires its meaning, in the sense of binding of all of the varied aspects of a mental object, in the brain’s EM field. Here, I extend this idea to propose that meaning is an algorithm experienced, in its entirety from problem to its solution, as a single percept in the global workspace of brain’s EM field. This is where distributed information encoded in millions of physically separated neurons comes together. It is where Shakespeare’s words are turned into his poetry. It is also, where problems and solutions, such as how to untangle a rope from the wheels of a bicycle, are grasped in their entirety.
There are of course many unanswered questions, such as degree and extent of synchrony required to encode conscious thoughts, the influence of drugs or anaesthetics on the cemi field or whether cemi fields are causally active in animal brains. Yet the cemi theory provides a new paradigm in which consciousness is rooted in an entirely physical, measurable and artificially malleable physical structure and is amenable to experimental testing. The cemi field theory thereby delivers a kind of dualism, but it is a scientific dualism built on the distinction between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit. Consciousness is what algorithms that exist simultaneously in the space of the brain’s EM field, feel like.
Read about the importance of International Observe the Moon Night and how you can celebrate it on September 14, 2024!
Beginning in 2010, NASA began International Observe the Moon Night based on two events occurring simultaneously in 2009 during the International Year of Astronomy celebration: “We’re at the Moon!”, which was sponsored by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) teams, and “National Observe the Moon Night”, which was hosted in the United States.
This year’s International Observe the Moon Night is occurring on September 14 with the goal of sharing the incredible science and wonder of the Moon, including its observational and scientific history, why it’s so important to study, and how we’re studying it. For example, evidence has suggested that ancient humans as far back as 20,000 years ago used the Moon as a timekeeping device due to the changing phases of the Moon over the course of a month. Additionally, when observing the Moon with either the naked eye or a telescope, the Moon’s surface exhibits both bright and dark colors, which are the Moon’s lava plains and highlands, respectively.
Curve Fitting Methods v/@XKCD
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Do cities get more rainfall than rural areas?
How does an urban environment influence its rainfall? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated what is known as the urban precipitation anomaly, which is when urban environments potentially cause increases in rainfall compared to rural environments due to increased surface temperatures. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the impact that urban environments have on the climate, specifically as climate change continues to ravage the planet.
For the study, the researchers analyzed urban precipitation anomalies across 1.056 cities around the world with the goal of ascertaining the scope of these anomalies based on location and present climates and developing more accurate climatology datasets and greater resilience among cities. In the end, the researchers found that 60 percent of cities around the world have increased levels of urban precipitation anomalies, with the most extreme anomalies occurring in Africa where the surface temperatures are already high, with one factor being tall buildings result in wind being funneled into city centers.
By tapping into a decades-old mathematical principle, researchers are hoping that Kolmogorov-Arnold networks will facilitate scientific discovery.
