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No current theory of consciousness is scientific

A letter by distinguished scientists directed at Integrated Information Theory sought to discredit a leading theory of consciousness as pseudoscience. That, argues Erik Hoel, was a mistake.

Hoel contends that as no theory of consciousness is currently empirically testable, it’s impossible for any of these theories to be scientific.

Hoel is a neuroscientist, neurophilosopher, and fiction writer. He’s been a close collaborator of Giulio Tononi, and a Forbes 30 under 30 in science.

“Consciousness, according to IIT, might be more widespread than we think, but it is neither universal nor arbitrary,” writes Hoel.

Tap the link to read more now.

The Wnt–NAD+ axis in cancer, aging, and tissue regeneration

Wnt–NAD+ axis in stem cell function.

The Wnt–NAD+ axis is a fundamental regulatory hub in which metabolic state meets developmental signaling and it acts as a metabolic sensor that coordinates tissue regeneration with cellular energy status through compartment specific NAD+ pools.

Wnt signaling regulates NAD+ metabolism by controlling the expression of key biosynthetic enzymes and NAD+ consumers, while NAD+-dependent proteins modulate Wnt activity through direct interactions and epigenetic modifications.

Sirtuins exhibit tissue-specific and subcellular compartment-dependent roles in Wnt regulation where they function as activators or suppressors depending on the cellular bioenergetic state.

The Wnt–NAD+ axis maintains stem cell function and self-renewal capacity through metabolic/signaling integration, and its disruption during aging leads to declining regenerative capacity.

The progressive dysregulation of compartment-specific Wnt–NAD+ coordination contributes to stem cell exhaustion and multiple pathological conditions, indicating that therapeutic strategies must consider tissue-specific and subcellular targeting. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission https://sciencemission.com/Wnt%E2%80%93NAD-axis

Continue reading “The Wnt–NAD+ axis in cancer, aging, and tissue regeneration” | >

Predicting Return Home After Moderate-to-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Background and ObjectivesDays alive and at home (DAH) is a validated outcome measure that captures health care transitions between time spent at home vs various nonhome care settings, offering a more nuanced patient-centered understanding of recovery. We…

This C Engine’s ECS Reportedly Outperforms Unity’s DOTS

Gabriel Dechichi, a developer you might remember from his challenge of making an Unreal Engine game in 4 weeks, has demonstrated his ECS system in C, claiming it runs roughly 17 times faster than Unity’s DOTS.

According to Gabriel, the simulation runs 100,000 boids, rendering around 31 million triangles per frame. The average simulation time is about 2.4 ms in the C engine, compared to around 44.4 ms in Unity’s ECS. The test was conducted on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8 cores, 16 threads) with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3,060 Laptop GPU and 32 GB of RAM, running in Chrome with force-high-performance-GPU enabled.

“Frame time difference is about 5 times, as the demo is GPU-bound. The ECS simulation runs at roughly 2.4ms on my C engine, vs roughly 44.4 ms for Unity ECS. Time is measured equally on both demos by sampling how long the ECS world takes to update,” shared the developer.

MIT’s new brain tool could finally explain consciousness

Although the technology has been around for several years, it has not yet become a standard tool in neuroscience research. Now, two researchers at MIT are preparing new experiments using the technique and have published a paper that serves as a detailed guide, or “roadmap,” for applying it to the study of consciousness.

“Transcranial focused ultrasound will let you stimulate different parts of the brain in healthy subjects, in ways you just couldn’t before,” says Daniel Freeman, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “This is a tool that’s not just useful for medicine or even basic science, but could also help address the hard problem of consciousness. It can probe where in the brain are the neural circuits that generate a sense of pain, a sense of vision, or even something as complex as human thought.”

Unlike other brain stimulation methods, transcranial focused ultrasound does not require surgery. It can reach deeper areas of the brain with greater precision than techniques such as transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation.

World Modeling Workshop — Day 1

A fundamental desideratum of AI is the ability to model environment dynamics and transitions in response to both their own actions and external control signals. This capability, commonly referred to as world modeling (WM), is essential for prediction, planning, and generalization. Learning world models using deep learning has been an active area of research for nearly a decade. In recent years, the field has witnessed significant breakthroughs driven by advances in deep neural architectures and scalable learning paradigms. Multiple subfields, including self-supervised learning (SSL), generative modeling, reinforcement learning (RL), robotics, and large language models (LLMs), have tackled aspects of world modeling, often with different tools and methodologies. While these communities address overlapping challenges, they frequently operate in isolation. As a result, insights and progress in one area may go unnoticed in another, limiting opportunities for synthesis and collaboration. This workshop aims to bridge this gap between subfields of world modeling by fostering open dialogue, critical discussion, and cross-disciplinary exchange. By bringing together researchers from diverse backgrounds, from early-career researchers to established experts, we hope to establish a shared vocabulary, identify common challenges, and surface synergies that can move the field of world modeling forward.

Meditation Can Reshape Your Brain Activity, Study Reveals

Meditation may calm the mind, but a recent study suggests it can also reshape brain activity by profoundly altering brain dynamics and increasing neural connections – somewhat similar to psychedelic substances.

As a result, meditation may help practitioners achieve a hypothesized state known as “brain criticality”, in which neural connections are neither too weak nor too strong, but at an optimal level for mental agility and function.

In the study, led by neurophysiologist Annalisa Pascarella of the Italian National Research Council, researchers used high-resolution brain scans and machine learning to examine how meditation can alter brain activity to achieve an equilibrium between neural chaos and order.

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