Toggle light / dark theme

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Oral vaccine strategy used modified bacterium to combat colorectal cancer

A research team investigating the use of the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes against colorectal cancer has discovered a way to build a modified version of Listeria as an oral vaccine to prime the immune system directly within the gut, where anti-tumor cells are then generated. Details of the work, led by Stony Brook immunologist Brian Sheridan, Ph.D., are published in the Journal for the ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.

Colorectal Cancer is among the most dangerous and deadly cancers worldwide. The American Cancer Society projects there will be more than 150,000 new colorectal cancer diagnoses in the U.S. in 2026 with more than 55,000 deaths. Cancer immunotherapy represents a treatment strategy that harnesses a person’s own immune system to combat cancer. Immunotherapies are used to treat a small proportion of colorectal cancers. However, most colorectal cancers are not responsive to current immunotherapies.

Listeria is a bacterium that can cause infection, but its promise as an immunotherapy for several types of cancer including colorectal cancer has reached pre-clinical and clinical trials.

Quantum entanglement could link distant telescopes for sharper images

To capture higher-definition and sharper images of cosmological objects, astronomers sometimes combine the data collected by several telescopes. This approach, known as long-baseline interferometry, entails comparing the light signals originating from distant objects and picked up by different telescopes that are at different locations, then reconstructing images using computational techniques.

Conventional long-baseline interferometry methods combine the light signals collected by different telescopes using an interferometer. To do this, however, it relies on delicate optical links that bring light beams together and that are difficult to establish when telescopes are located at long distances from each other.

Researchers at University of Arizona, University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center recently proposed an alternative approach to achieve higher resolution telescopy images that leverages a quantum effect known as entanglement. Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, allows distant entangled telescopes, which share a unified quantum state irrespective of how distant they are, to extract the same information about a given scene or cosmological image.

Hybrid Cosmopsychism: A Bold New Answer to the Mystery of Consciousness

How Exactly does Panpsychism Help Explain Consciousness?
In this episode, we explore a provocative new theory in the philosophy of mind—hybrid cosmopsy-chism. This hybrid form of panpsychism claims that conscious experience is rooted in the universe itself and distributed through emergent subjects like humans. By combining strong and weak emergence, this view promises to overcome the limitations of both physicalism and dualism, offering a radical yet elegant solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

Disclaimer:

In this video, we use Google’s NotebookLM to assist in the analysis and understanding of complex doc-uments. NotebookLM is a research and writing tool that allows us to generate summaries directly from uploaded documents. The podcast like audio overview you will hear is generated by Google’s AI based on the content of the published paper on the topic.

Please note that the interpretations and summaries generated by NotebookLM are automated and may not capture every detail or nuance. They are intended to aid in understanding but should not be consid-ered a substitute for professional advice or a legal interpretation of the documents.

What’s Wrong with Panpsychism? | Joscha Bach

Patreon: https://bit.ly/3v8OhY7

Main Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@robinsonerhardt.

Full Episode: https://youtu.be/XcNlv9gp20o.

Robinson’s Podcast #219 — Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and the Threat of AI Apocalypse.

Joscha Bach is a computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher currently working with Liquid AI. He has previously done research at Harvard, MIT, Intel, and the AI Foundation. In this episode, Joscha and Robinson discuss the nature of consciousness—both in humans and synthetic—various theories of consciousness like panpsychism, physicalism, dualism, and Roger Penrose’s, the distinction between intelligence and artificial intelligence, the next developments of ChatGPT and other LLMs, OpenAI, and whether advances in AI will spell the end of humankind.

Joscha’s X: ⁠https://twitter.com/Plinz

Galen Strawson on Panpsychism

Is there something that it is like to be an electron? That sounds implausible. Yet Galen Strawson believes this is the best explanation of how things are.

Specifically, Galen offers his view on physicalistic panpsychism (though there are non-physicalistic panpsychisms as well). He argues something like this, it seems to me:

First, Galen assumes (very plausibly) that experiential phenomena are real phenomena, opposed to illusory. Now:

1. If radical emergentism is true, then experiential phenomena emerges from wholly and utterly non-experiential phenomena.
2. But experiential phenomena cannot emerge from wholly and utterly non-experiential pheneomena.
3. So radical emergentism is false. [1, 2]
4. If radical emergentism is false, then experiential phenomena must already exist in some sense and to some extent as a feature of physical stuff to give rise to experiential phenomena in an intelligible way.
5. So experiential phenomena must already exist in some sense and to some extent as a feature of physical stuff to give rise to experiential phenomena in an intelligible way. [3, 4]

In other words, consciousness has been a feature of the universe since the Big Bang.

For sustained and scholarly treatment of panpsychism, see Galen Strawson’s paper, \.

/* */