Tag: science

Scientists Just Taught Lab-Grown Brain Cells to Play Video Games — and People Are Freaked Out

Researchers say they have successfully trained living human brain cells to play the classic video game Doom, marking the latest experiment in so-called “biological computing.”

Australian biotech company Cortical Labs announced the development in a recent demonstration showing neurons grown in a laboratory interacting with the 1993 first-person shooter.

The experiment builds on earlier work from 2022, when the company revealed that clusters of human brain cells grown in a petri dish had learned to play the much simpler video game Pong.

Those early experiments involved “mini-brains” made up of roughly 800,000 to one million living human neurons.

According to the company, the cells demonstrated the ability to adapt and learn basic tasks in real time.

Now researchers say they have taken the technology further by teaching the neurons to interact with the far more complex environment of Doom, a three-dimensional game that requires movement, targeting, and exploration.

To make the system work, engineers translated the digital signals from the game into patterns of electrical stimulation that the neurons could interpret.

“So we showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Cortical Labs chief scientific officer Brett Kagan explained in a video announcement.

“This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning.”

“Doom was much more complex,” he added. “It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore, its an environment, and it’s hard.”

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Aliens may have been trying to contact us for DECADES, scientists claim – as they warn we’ve been ‘looking for the wrong thing’

For decades, we’ve been looking to the skies for any sign of aliens – but it turns out we may have been missing attempts at contact.

A new study has cast doubt on our radio signal detection methods, arguing that ‘space weather’ could be distorting incoming transmissions.

Until now, most experiments have focused on identifying spikes in radio frequency – signals unlikely to be produced by any other natural processes in space.

But experts have highlighted an overlooked complication.

Even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow radio signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home star’s atmosphere.

This distortion, which happens near the point of origin, can ‘smear’ the signal’s frequency, meaning it can be missed by our detectors that are primed to search for more focused radio waves.

‘Searches are often optimized for extremely narrow signals,’ Dr Vishal Gajjar, astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper, said.

‘If a signal gets broadened by its own star’s environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it’s there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we’ve seen in technosignature searches.’

For their study, the team analysed radio transmissions from our own spacecraft in the solar system.

Using measurements from probes, they worked out how turbulent plasma released from stars – such as the Sun – affects radio signals.

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They Are Experimenting on Your Dog

You read the labels. You check the ingredients. You avoid seed oils, limit sugar, and side-eye anything with a barcode longer than a haiku. You subscribe to Substacks that dissect institutional capture. You understand, probably better than most, that “the science” can be quietly purchased by the people it is supposed to regulate.

So let me ask you a question that might sting.

What did you feed your dog this morning?

If the answer is a brown pellet from a bag, you are running the same ultraprocessed food experiment on your dog that you have spent the last few years learning to reject for yourself and your family. And you are doing it for entirely understandable reasons, because the same machinery of institutional capture, industry-funded research, and reassuring pseudo-scientific language that once told you margarine was healthier than butter has been quietly operating in veterinary medicine for decades.

I am a practising veterinary surgeon in the UK. I have spent over 30 years in clinical practice, and I am the founding president of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I also lecture on canine nutrition at the University of Glasgow and around the world. I was in Florida last year and San Diego the year before. I am writing a book on ultraprocessed food for dogs, because someone needs to say plainly what the pet food industry would rather you never thought about: your dog has been subjected to the most sustained ultraprocessed feeding experiment in mammalian history, and almost nobody noticed.

The Cleverest Marketing You Never Saw

Here is how it works, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the corruption of nutritional science in human medicine.

The major pet food corporations do not merely sell food. They fund the university departments in the UK and the US where veterinary nutritional science is researched. They endow professorships. They provide free student packs and educational materials to veterinary schools. They sponsor the conferences where vets gather for continuing professional development. They supply the textbooks. They fund the bursaries. They stock the waiting room shelves and put posters on the surgery walls.

They do this so quietly and so comprehensively that most vets do not even realise they have been swimming in industry-sponsored water since the first day of vet school.

The result is predictable. Almost all large-scale nutrition studies published over the past 50 years have been conducted on extruded, grain-based diets produced by the very companies that funded the research. That research became what vets are taught. 

Raw and fresh diets, by contrast, have received almost no industry funding, which means almost no large-scale trials. Vets are then honestly told there is “no evidence” for raw, because nobody with money has paid for that evidence to exist.

It is rather like sponsoring every study on buses and then declaring there is “no evidence” that bicycles work.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association’s Global Nutrition Committee now explicitly warns that most pet nutrition studies are industry-funded and says conflicts of interest should always be declared. RCVS Knowledge, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, which runs the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Network, notes that funding source is one of the strongest predictors of outcome in nutrition trials. JAVMA News has run pieces on corporate influence in veterinary education.

This is in the official documents. It is no longer fringe grumbling.

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Renowned scientist who discovered water on distant planet shot dead on front porch of California home

A renowned scientist who contributed to the discovery of water on a distant planet was mysteriously shot and killed on the front porch of his desert California home. 

Carl Grillmair, 67, was identified as the victim of a fatal shooting in Llano, a rural area of northern Los Angeles, on Monday morning. 

Colleagues called Grillmair’s research ‘ingenious’ and said that discovering water ‘is a telltale sign the conditions of the planet are auspicious for life.’

The astrophysicist was found with a gunshot wound on his front porch after detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide responded to reports of an assault with a deadly weapon just after 6am. 

Emergency responders attempted life-saving measures, but he was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. 

While investigating the shooting call, the Palmdale Sheriff’s Station responded to a carjacking in the same area and arrested a man named Freddy Snyder, 29, who was named as a person of interest in Grillmair’s homicide case. 

Snyder was arrested for murder, carjacking, and burglary on Wednesday. He is in custody with a $2 million bail. 

Law enforcement has not released a motive in the alleged homicide. It’s unclear if the two men knew one another or whether the shooting was targeted. 

The LACSD hasn’t released Snyder’s booking photo or any further information on the case. 

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EXPOSED: Taxpayer-Funded Horror at University of Chicago – NSF Pours Millions into Inducing Severe Strokes in Dogs Before Killing Them

In a shocking new exposé highlighting the grotesque waste and cruelty involved in federal science funding, watchdog White Coat Waste (WCW) has uncovered documents revealing how the University of Chicago is using millions in taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to deliberately inflict the “most severe” strokes on dozens of dogs, only to kill them shortly after.

This barbaric practice, which involves blocking the animals’ brain arteries and subjecting them to immense suffering, comes as the NSF is already under fire for a litany of wasteful and inhumane animal experiments.

According to WCW’s investigation, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the lab at the University of Chicago has conducted these experiments on at least 64 dogs, inducing what researchers themselves describe as the “most severe stroke” possible.

The process is cold and methodical, spanning three days:

  • Day 1: The dogs undergo imaging scans and blood draws to establish baselines.
  • Day 2: Experimenters block the animals’ middle cerebral arteries using coils, triggering massive strokes. The dogs are then assessed using a “stroke scale” to measure the damage.
  • Day 3: The suffering ends – not with treatment or mercy, but with euthanasia. Lab documents admit that if the dogs were allowed to survive, they would endure “significant suffering” due to the lack of round-the-clock care equivalent to what human stroke patients receive.

These experiments are purportedly testing a stroke treatment that has already been proven safe and effective in human clinical trials, raising serious questions about why innocent dogs are being tortured and killed for redundant research.

WCW notes that this continues despite NIH’s pledges to phase out dog testing, led by figures such as Fauci-fan girl Nicole Kleinstreuer, who heads the agency’s efforts to promote non-animal alternatives.

While the NIH has wasted $4.9 million on these dog experiments, including a new $596,000 grant awarded in June with three more years of funding secured, the NSF’s involvement is even more egregious.

Portions of two massive NSF grants, totaling a staggering $40.5 million, are supporting the University of Chicago lab. The current active grant alone is worth $24.7 million and runs through August.

Those are your hard-earned tax dollars, part of the NSF’s bloated $9 billion annual budget, going straight to needlessly torturing man’s best friend.

This isn’t an isolated incident.

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Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”

In the decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia were engaged in high-stakes exchanges of advanced technology involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Skolkovo Innovation Center—a Russian government-backed technology hub that aimed to jump-start a “venture” innovation ecosystem in Moscow.

Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.

In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.

Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank.

Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.”

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Epstein files reveal deeper ties to scientists than previously known

Newly released files from the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reveal that his ties to the scientific community were deeper than previously known.

Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 after being arrested and charged with sex trafficking, was a wealthy financier who invested millions in science projects and socialized with researchers. It was already known that, after Epstein’s initial conviction for sex crimes in 2008, some scientists continued to associate with and take money from him, prompting fallout at top research institutions. For instance, Epstein gave US$800,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, which led two scientists to resign and the university to suspend another.

But last Friday’s release of more than three million files linked to Epstein — including e-mails, photographs and financial documents — has unveiled even more scientists in his orbit. Mentions of the researchers do not indicate wrongdoing or involvement in Epstein’s criminal activity, but they do shed light on how deeply he was involved in some of the science he funded. This is the largest batch of files made public by the US Department of Justice since Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act late last year, mandating that the federal government release all documents pertaining to the financier.

Science stars

The files include new information about interactions between Epstein and scientists whose links to him were already known. For example, the documents contain correspondence from theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, whose science-outreach organization received $250,000 from Epstein. “I thought we agreed no comment !!!!!,” Epstein wrote in 2018, as Krauss responded to media inquiries about an investigation of sexual misconduct that led to Krauss’s ousting from Arizona State University in Tempe.

Krauss explained his interaction with Epstein in an e-mail to Nature: “I sought out advice from essentially everyone I knew when false allegations about me were circulated.” He added that he had no knowledge of the “horrendous crimes” — the sex trafficking — that Epstein was later accused of. “I was as shocked as the rest of the world when he was arrested.”

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Did Scientists Just Achieve “Inception”? Experiments Show “Dream Engineering” May Be a Reality

Northwestern University scientists exploring the possibility of programming your brain to solve problems during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep have found compelling evidence that this type of “dream engineering” is not only possible, but potentially valuable as well.

The team behind the sci-fi-sounding research suggests that the ability to engineer dreams for problem-solving could motivate other researchers to “take dreams more seriously” as a tool for improved mental health and well-being.

They also suggest that their findings offer a crucial step toward proving the theory that REM sleep “may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem.”

Dream Engineering with Music During REM Sleep

Although there is anecdotal evidence that people may have greater success at solving a problem after they “sleep on it,” in the past, there has been little scientific support for the role of sleep in such Eureka moments. Studying the role our dreams might play in problem-solving has also proven elusive because it is difficult to systematically manipulate what a sleeper is dreaming about.

To investigate the possibility of a higher level of “dream engineering,” the researchers examined what is known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), where subjects are presented with sounds during sleep that remind them of a prior experience of trying to solve a specific puzzle. The research team then recruited 20 individuals who reported previous experience with lucid dreaming, a state where the dreamer has some level of conscious awareness in their dream.

During the first phase of the experiments, the subjects were presented with complex brain-teaser puzzles and given a 3-minute time limit to solve them. Significantly, each puzzle was accompanied by its own musical soundtrack. The team notes that difficult puzzles, combined with the short test duration, left most volunteers unable to find the solution.

Next, the researchers set up polysomnographic recordings to measure and document the subjects’ physiology while they slept overnight in the lab. Notably, they used electrophysical verification to confirm each subject was asleep before progressing to the next phase.

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America’s Vaunted “Experts”: Often Wrong but Never in Doubt?

In our time we’ve traded wise men for experts — Confucius for the credentialed, Aquinas for academicians, Democritus for the degreed. Consequently, we don’t make our ancestors’ bush-league mistakes, such as the Romans using lead pipes, drilling holes in people’s heads to treat mental derangement, or selling radium-laced candy and water.

We make different bush-league mistakes. In fact, says Rob Long, pondering all the recent decades’ blunders, “you might start to wonder if anyone knows anything.”

“Here’s what I mean,” explains Long, a television writer and producer opining at the Washington Examiner:

COVID masks, mortgage-backed securities, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, carbs, red wine, voter turnout, lard, phonics, and Pluto. (Among others.) Smart people — and I knew some of the folks who were involved in the home finance catastrophe of 2007, and let me assure you that they were smart — seem to be making a lot of costly and dangerous mistakes. It often seems like we’re living through an Age of Blunder.

Here’s a noncontroversial example from history: say what you like about the brutal Stalinist regime of the (thankfully late) German Democratic Republic, but they were pretty good about spying on their own citizens. … They knew everything there was to know about the German Democratic Republic except that it was about to collapse. Which was the one thing they really needed to know. Talk about the Age of Blunder!

How Expert Are They?

After providing a few more examples, Long discussed the recent blizzard that struck New York and elsewhere. He said that he and some friends were discussing beforehand whether it would materialize. “Experts,” ya know? But they were right on this occasion, he stated.

Short-term weather, however, can be predicted with decent accuracy. But on a related note, there’s the following.

A generation ago, in 2000, climate scientist Dr. David Viner stated that within just a handful of years, snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Now, Viner was talking about Great Britain — which was hit by a “devastating snowstorm” just last year. But then there’s the reality here in the Colonies. Only a week ago, parts of my southern N.Y. county got buried under 17 inches of global warming.

Oh, and if you think nothing could be finer than poking fun at Viner, know that he’s hardly alone. The late Professor Walter E. Williams illustrated this beautifully in his 2017 piece “Environmentalists’ Wild Predictions.”

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Scientists Have Developed a Laser-Controlled Magnet With No Heating Required

Swiss researchers have developed a new technique that enables magnetic polarity changes using only a laser beam, an advancement with major potential for creating adaptable electronic circuits.

Using a special ferromagnet, researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich were able to manipulate magnetic polarity using laser light, without any additional heating. The results were reported in a recent paper published in Nature, showcasing a major advancement that can produce different magnetic polarities at separate points within a single piece of material.

Ferromagnets Explained

Ferromagnets are the most common types of magnets used in our everyday world. They operate on the synchronized spin of electrons, all rotating in the same direction. That unanimous spin direction generates their magnetic power, allowing magnets to stick to metal and compasses to point toward the Earth’s magnetic poles.

However, this is only true below a certain temperature threshold. Inside magnets is also a chaotic thermal motion that remains ever-present. When the magnets are relatively cool, this motion is weak, allowing the electron interactions to overcome it and generate the synchronized spin. By contrast, above a certain temperature, the thermal motion becomes so powerful that it overrides the electrons’ synchronization, introducing larger-scale chaos that causes the material to lose its ferromagnetism.

That threshold is typically used to intentionally alter the polarity of a ferromagnetic material. Once the heated magnet begins to cool, its electrons again order themselves into a synchronized spin, typically in a different direction.

The new research by researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich changes all of this, altering the polarity without applying any heat.

Constructing a Laser Switchable Magnet

“What’s exciting about our work is that we combine the three big topics in modern condensed matter physics in a single experiment: strong interactions between the electrons, topology and dynamical control,” said co-author Prof. Dr. Ataç Imamoğlu of ETH in Zurich.

The researchers built their laser switchable magnet from two thin, but slightly twisted layers of the organic semiconductor molybdenum ditelluride. Their two-layer material allowed topological states to form—that is, quantum states that are permanently defined and cannot be altered by small local disturbances.

Experiments revealed that the material’s electrons existed in tunable topological states that could be manipulated from insulating to conducting. More intriguingly, both states feature parallel aligned electron spins, turning the material into a ferromagnet.

“Our main result is that we can use a laser pulse to change the collective orientation of the spins,” says Olivier Huber, a PhD candidate at ETH.

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