Wow, this is an interesting turn of events: Janelia launching a 10-year $1B effort to study the Danionella fish as a model organism for understanding the nervous system. (Note: this is different from zebrafish). I’m intrigued by the direction, but I also feel for those researchers at Janelia who had the rug pulled out from under them. It’s a tricky situation.
The Janelia Research Campus is launching two new projects: whole-brain imaging of a transparent fish called Danionella and an “AI-in-the-loop” tool to help parse all the imaging data, the facility announced last week.
As part of the change, Janelia is also shuttering two programs and plans to phase out projects that use rodent models, The Transmitter has learned. Janelia is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a private nonprofit biomedical research institution.
Investigators who run rodent labs have roughly three years to wrap up their projects and find new positions, and Janelia plans to provide each researcher with an additional $1 million in transition funding, says Gerald Rubin, head of biology and senior group leader at Janelia. The move does not affect external research funded by the HHMI, including the HHMI Investigators and Hanna H. Gray Fellows programs, Rubin adds.
Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.
This post was written by BrainGate2 clinical trial participant Casey Harrell (who gave us permission to use his name) and researcher Nicholas Card. Casey wrote his portions using the brain-computer interface described in the paper.
Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University whose work sits at the intersection of biology, bioelectricity, artificial life, regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is known for his research on how cells communicate, make decisions, build bodies, repair tissues, and form collective intelligence through bioelectric signals. His work on Xenobots and Anthrobots has opened new questions about living robots, synthetic life forms, biological machines, morphogenesis, basal cognition, cellular intelligence, regeneration, cancer, aging, and the nature of mind beyond the brain.
In this conversation, Michael Levin and I explore whether mind and intelligence are binary or exist on a continuum, why cognition may be much older than brains, and how systems from cells to humans can pursue goals in different ways. We discuss the TAME framework, the spectrum of persuadability, cognitive light cones, bioelectricity, gap junctions, multicellular intelligence, Xenobots, Anthrobots, kinematic self-replication, neural wound healing, emergence, physicalism, mathematics, Platonic space, algorithms, bubble sort, Turing machines, evolution, human creativity, artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, and the future of biology. This episode is for anyone interested in philosophy, consciousness, mind, intelligence, synthetic biology, developmental biology, AI, complex systems, evolution, and the deeper question of what it means for matter to become alive, intelligent, or aware.
If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a like, subscribing, and leaving a review on Youtube, Spotify and Apple. #philosophy #science.
Socials: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/46hnFSg… Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Linkedin: / masud-gaziyev Instagram (public): / philosophy.everyday Instagram (private): / masud.gaziyev Support the work: https://buymeacoffee.com/philosophy.e… Get new episodes, guest announcements, reading notes, and ideas worth thinking about. Subscribe here: https://philosophyeveryday.beehiiv.com/ Chapters: 00:00 Mind Beyond the Brain 01:19 Is Mind Older Than the Brain? 04:06 Why Intelligence Is Not All-or-Nothing 06:58 How to Interact With Different Kinds of Minds 09:54 From Single Cells to Collective Intelligence 13:17 How Cells Build Bigger Goals 16:05 Life Recreated — Xenobots and Anthrobots 18:54 Where Do New Behaviours Come From? 21:57 Synthetic Life and the Limits of Evolution 35:01 What Happens When Biology Is Freed? 43:00 Why Biology Eventually Leads to Mathematics 46:07 Is “Emergence” Just a Fancy Word for Surprise? 53:11 Platonic Space: A Strange New Map of Reality 01:03:21 What We Received from Platonic Space 01:11:24 Human Evolution, Technology, and the Patterns Behind Progress 01:16:43 Regeneration, Cancer, and Aging. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Linkedin: / masud-gaziyev. Instagram (public): / philosophy.everyday. Instagram (private): / masud.gaziyev. Support the work: https://buymeacoffee.com/philosophy.e…
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A clinical trial is exploring whether high doses of vitamin B3 could give patients with glioblastoma a better chance against the aggressive brain cancer. Scientists found that niacin may help revive immune cells that tumors shut down, allowing them to attack cancer more effectively. Early results have been promising, with patients showing significantly better progression-free survival than expected.
Two cups of warm water don’t make one cup of boiling water. But in the quantum world, multiple low-energy photons can combine to produce a single, higher-energy photon.
A research team at Kyushu University has developed a solid-state molecular material that “upgrades” visible light into ultraviolet (UV) light under ordinary outdoor sunlight, achieving a conversion efficiency of 1.9%. The study is published in Nature Communications.
Harsh UV light is something most people try to avoid in summer, yet it is indispensable in fields ranging from air purification and resin curing in 3D printing to gel hardening in dental fillings and nail art. Despite its importance, UV accounts for only about 6% of the sunlight reaching Earth’s surface, with only a fraction of that being practically usable.
A groundbreaking study reveals that OLE, a newly discovered molecule, can restore the protective functions of brain immune cells in Alzheimer’s disease, reducing toxic plaque accumulation and enhancing memory. This research could pave the way for new therapeutic approaches to combat Alzheimer’s.
The headset transmits the player’s brain activity data to the app, which responds by changing the color of the water around the jellyfish, providing the player with real-time feedback on their mental state. Image: Elva Darnell
Developing new medicines can require thousands of chemistry experiments to identify the right recipe for a safe, effective and ideally affordable drug.
The process is slow and labor-intensive, and many of the reactions depend on hard-to-source metals that act as essential catalysts.
While artificial intelligence is helping speed up the process of drug discovery, it can only learn from the data available, and when it comes to chemical reactions, the large, high-quality data sets needed to train powerful AI tools aren’t there.
Our body contains an intricate system of tiny vessels through which blood, water and other molecules flow. When the size of the pipes shrinks to the nanoscale, where only a few molecules can fit side by side, the classical laws of physics governing the behavior of water are influenced by the atomic structure of the walls. “It’s not that classical hydrodynamics breaks down, but rather that it gets mixed with the condensed matter physics of the solid walls,” says Nikita Kavokine, tenure-track assistant professor and leader of the EPFL Quantum Plumbing Lab.
How liquids, and water in particular, behave at scales of a few nanometers is one of the big gaps in modern physics. For example, in some experiments, it has been observed that water flows through carbon nanotubes orders of magnitude faster than expected. Scientists are trying to understand phenomena that biology has mastered after millions of years of evolution.
“At the nanometer scale, our body leverages specific properties of water to filter molecules with high energy efficiency,” explains Kavokine. Aquaporins, for example, are protein channels embedded in cell membranes that use these molecular-scale interactions to let water pass while blocking ions and other molecules.
