Shelly Fan

1 week ago | singularityhub.com | Shelly Fan

Let a mouse nose around a house, and it will rapidly find food and form a strategy to return to it without getting caught. Given the same task, an AI would require millions of training examples and consume a boatload of energy and time. Evolution has crafted the brain to quickly learn and adapt to an ever-changing world. Detailing its algorithms—the ways it processes information as revealed by its structure and wiring—could inspire more advanced AI.

2 weeks ago | singularityhub.com | Shelly Fan

My nephew couldn’t stop playing Minecraft when he was seven years old. One of the most popular games ever, Minecraft is an open world in which players build terrain and craft various items and tools. No one showed him how to navigate the game. But over time, he learned the basics through trial and error, eventually figuring out how to craft intricate designs, such as theme parks and entire working cities and towns.

2 weeks ago | singularityhub.com | Shelly Fan

How consciousness emerges in the brain is the ultimate mystery. Scientists generally agree that consciousness relies on multiple brain regions working in tandem. But the areas and neural connections supporting our perception of the world have remained their grasp. A new study, published in Science, offers a potential answer. A Chinese team recorded the neural activity of people with electrodes implanted deep in their brains as they performed a visual task.

2 weeks ago | singularityhub.com | Shelly Fan

Scientists just unveiled the world’s tiniest pacemaker. Smaller than a grain of rice and controlled by light shone through the skin, the pacemaker generates power and squeezes the heart’s muscles after injection through a stint. The device showed it could steadily orchestrate healthy heart rhythms in rat, dog, and human hearts in a newly published study. It’s also biocompatible and eventually broken down by the body after temporary use.

3 weeks ago | singularityhub.com | Shelly Fan

A paralyzed woman can again communicate with the outside world thanks to a wafer-thin disk capturing speech signals in her brain. An AI translates these electrical buzzes into text and, using recordings taken before she lost the ability to speak, synthesizes speech with her own voice. It’s not the first brain implant to give a paralyzed person their voice back. But previous setups had long lag times. Some required as much as 20 seconds to translate thoughts into speech.