Artificial Intelligence and the Brain: A Challenge in the Age of AI and Humans, says Dr. Thomas Hartung, an environmental health and engineering professor

The use of brain Organoids to create intelligence is still in its infancy. Developing OI comparable to a computer with the brain power of a mouse could take decades, Hartung said.

Organoids are lab-grown tissues that resemble organs. These stem cell derived structures, called stand-ins, have been used for nearly two decades in labs to experiment on different types of organs and to avoid unnecessary testing on humans or animals.

Scientists could use brain organoids from skin samples to find out how different therapies affect patients with neural disorders.

Dr. Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering in Baltimore, began growing brain organoids by altering human skin samples in 2012.

The plan for intelligence laid out by Hartung and his colleagues was described in the research.

The senior study author said that artificial intelligence and computing have been driving the revolution but they are reaching a ceiling. Computational power is being reduced and its efficiency increased in order to push past current technological limits.

Artificial intelligence can be inspired by human thought processes, but it cannot completely duplicate the capabilities of the human brain. This gap is why humans can use an image or text-based CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, as an online security measure to prove they aren’t bots.

Alan Turing created the Turing test in 1950, which is known as the imitation game, to test how machines show intelligent behavior similar to humans.

“For example, AlphaGo (the AI that beat the world’s No. 1 Go player in 2017) was trained on data from 160,000 games,” Hartung said. “A person would have to play five hours a day for more than 175 years to experience these many games.”

Frontier, a human brain supercomputer that weighs twice as much as two pickup trucks: AI and OI can mimic living brains and mimic Alzheimer’s disease

A human brain is better at learning and making complex decisions because they are more energy efficient. Being able to tell one animal from another is a basic process that the human brain can do.

Frontier, a $600 million supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, weighs a hefty 8,000 pounds (3,629 kilograms), with each cabinet weighing the equivalent of two standard pickup trucks. The machine was more powerful than a single human brain in June but it used a million times more energy.

“Brains also have an amazing capacity to store information, estimated at 2,500 (terabytes),” he added. “We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon computers because we cannot pack more transistors into a tiny chip.”

Stem cell pioneers John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka received a Nobel Prize in 2012 for developing a technique that allowed cells to be generated from fully developed tissues like skin. The research allowed scientists such as Hartung to create brain organoids that could be used to mimic living brains, and to test and identify potential risks to brain health.

“This opens up research on how the human brain works,” said Hartung, who is also the codirector of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Europe. You can start manipulating the system if you do things you can’t ethically do with human brains.

The brain-Computer interface device was presented in August of last year in an article. “It is a flexible shell that is densely covered with tiny electrodes that can both pick up signals from the organoid, and transmit signals to it.”

Hartung hopes one day there will be a beneficial communication channel between AI and OI “that would allow the two to explore each other’s capabilities.”

Hartung claimed that with OI we could study the cognitive aspects of neurological conditions. “For example, we could compare memory formation in organoids derived from healthy people and from Alzheimer’s patients, and try to repair relative deficits. We could use OI to test pesticides, for instance, for their effects on memory or learning.

“We want to compare brain organoids from typically developed donors versus brain organoids from donors with autism,” said study coauthor and co-investigator Lena Smirnova, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of environmental health and engineering, in a statement.

“The tools we are developing towards biological computing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in neuronal networks specific for autism, without having to use animals or to access patients, so we can understand the underlying mechanisms of why patients have these cognition issues and impairments,” she said.

There are promising results that demonstrate what is possible. The chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs recently showed that brain cells can be trained to play the video game.

The ethicists have to be included in the robust examination of the ethical implications of technology. We must ensure that each step of the process is conducted with scientific integrity, while acknowledging that the larger issue is the potential impact on society. OI blurs the line between machine intelligence and human intelligence, and technology and biology are rapidly progressing, which could make it harder for ethical and moral discussions to occur. This emerging field must take a vigorous approach to addressing the ethical and moral issues that come with this type of scientific advancement and must do so before the technology crashes into the moral abyss.”

The public’s understanding and development of organoid intelligence is critical, according to the policy outlook written by a professor at the University of Cape Town. Kinderlerer was not involved in the new OI study.

Gary Miller, vice dean of research strategy and innovation and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, wrote an article for ViewPoint about how artificial intelligence has caused some people to question how close computers are to passing the Turing test. Miller was not involved in the Johns Hopkins study.

The cultured cellular system can change in temperature like a computer can on the internet, he wrote.

We can have days where our minds aren’t as sharp. But the extraordinary 3-pound organ is still capable of things that supercomputers and robots can’t do.

Some wondered when computers would be able to cross the line that separates humans from technology, like in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which features the sentient computer HAL 9000.

The First Supernova Observed in the Sky: Emirati astronauts arrive in space to help save a critically endangered species of camel

A Russian rescue spacecraft intended to return cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio to Earth has successfully docked outside the International Space Station.

The trio traveled to the space station in September, but they became stranded without a way home after their original capsule sprang a coolant leak. The crew will head back to Earth later this year.

Meanwhile, Crew-6, including two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, arrived at the orbiting lab on Friday.

Sultan Alneyadi, who will become the first Emirati astronaut to complete a long-duration stay in space, said he brought a special treat to share with his ISS crew members.

The clones are replicated from camel “beauty queens,” known for their signature drooping lips and long necks, and elite racers. But scientists might also use technology to save a critically endangered species of wild camel.

Dr. Nisar Ahmad Wani, who in 2009 created the world’s first camel clone, is the scientific director at the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre, where dozens of camel clones are produced each year.

There is an unusual hummingbird with gold throat feathers in the park. But what the researchers thought was a new species has a complicated family history.

The unlikely chromatic evolution likely took place over millions of years — and the researchers happened to be in the right place at the right time to see it.

A bright light appeared in the sky more than 800 years ago. Chinese astronomers recorded their observations of the “guest star,” which lingered for about eight months before fading from view.

The event is widely considered to be the first supernova in human history. A telescope image has captured the remnants of the stellar explosion against a glowing backdrop of stars.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/04/world/brain-computers-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html

Detection and recovery of an insect that seemed like a John Wick in the movie “The Matrix”, by a Draper-Doe-Skyrmion

Meanwhile, as the sun becomes more active, skygazers have been spotting an uptick in breathtaking light shows like the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere and the aurora australis in the Southern Hemisphere.

A scientist ran errand and saw a flying bug on the side of a store. He found a type of insect that was incredibly rare.

— The Hubble Space Telescope captured a movie of what happened after the DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos, revealing how the space rock formed a tail after the September collision.

According to researchers, new chemicals discovered are so dangerous to the fungi that they were named after the actor who played JohnWick in the movie “The Matrix.”