Believe it or not, in the years 1950-1951, the A. C. Gilbert Company distributed the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a toy kit allowing kids to make nuclear reactions at home using actual radioactive material. It was taken off the shelves in 1951 [more: buff.ly/3QEy05v]

The thing about LLMs that make them unintuitive is that analogizing them to having a scifi AI is less useful than thinking of them as infinite copies of some guy named Steve, a grad student who is great at coding & art and is widely-read, but makes up stuff when he is pressed.

we have trained a humanoid transformer with large-scale reinforcement learning in simulation and deployed it to the real world zero-shot

New recipe makes human brain organoids more human-like: expanded neuroepithelium organoids. youtu.be/yF2RvFpIl1k

This is quite a paper on AI and scientific research! The authors got GPT-4 to autonomously research, plan, and conduct chemical experiments, including learning how to use lab equipment by reading documentation (most were operated by code, but one task had to be done by humans)

In psychology 96% of published tests of hypotheses find support for their hypothesis. This means that as a scientist you need a solid understanding of bias - how to detect it, and what to do about inflated effects - if you want to evaluate claims in the scientific literature.

I have had an experience with one patent holding company that refused to provide a 2a blocker they held because the design I proposed threatened to support the hypothesis that 2a action & the psychedelic experience causally mediates response in depression.

The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.

More like telekinesis, but cool

Neuralink's "Telepathy" - More like telekinesis? See the other brain implants are closer to real telepathy: sending thoughts with your mind youtube.com/watch?v=x4Ct7W…

Livestream of @Neuralink demonstrating “Telepathy” – controlling a computer and playing video games just by thinking

New study connects two brain organoids with an axon bundle! They found evidence of communication between organoids, leading to more complex neural activity. youtube.com/watch?v=UcxwHc…

Defining "consciousness" with Anil Seth, and how different theories of consciousness talk past each other: youtu.be/VWDF10pXDoQ

Was Francis Crick on LSD when he realized DNA had a double-helix structure? The Internet is split, so I asked his collaborator Christof Koch: youtu.be/ikna93SWYlU

Aphantasia, or "blind imagination", could help researchers solve a big problem in consciousness research. Thanks to hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social for the discussion! youtube.com/watch?v=avI0Kt…

New CRISPR-based method for generating cross-species chimeras --> mouse grown with a rat-based brain: youtu.be/SlgzWajYvlA

Today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers led by Nowakowski_Lab, @ChangLabUCSF & Mircea Teodorescu (UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute) demonstrate the first use of optogenetics to modulate seizure activity at the network level in human brain tissue: nature.com/articles/s4159… John UCSF Broad Stem Cell

New study from The ECG finds a surprising link between stomach-brain synchrony and mental health. Congrats Leah Banellis et al.! Interview here: youtu.be/dDTvq8eKINI