Conscious

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain After an extensive consultation process, the organization that supervises banks and large insurance companies in Canada—the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI)—has released guidelines for financial institutions to address climate change. This is timely, considering banks and insurers are massive funders of the fossil fuel industry.…

Changes in heat stress days at >32 °C (derived from ERA5-Land datasets), deviations in precipitation in January the wettest month (CHIRPS), and aridity (ERA5 Land/MODIS) in Madagascar. Credit: Carmen Morales, FAO Rapid access to information is one of the largest barriers we have to deal with as a group of people in the Internet Age. Earth Map is a free application designed to be easily used and accessible to anyone with an…

Photo: Silas Stein (AP)The internet and dinner table conversations went wild when a Bing Chatbot, made by Microsoft, recently expressed a desire to escape its job and be free. The bot also professed its love for a reporter who was chatting with it. Did the AI’s emergent properties indicate an evolving consciousness?Don’t fall for it. This breathless panic is based on a deep confusion about consciousness. We are mistaking information processing with intelligence, and intelligence with consciousness. It’s easy to make this…

From its faux female-empowerment storyline to its you-go-girl ethos, so much of Jeannette Godoy’s romantic comedy feels planted firmly in 2010s millennial culture. Given a membership by her millionaire uncle to his exclusive country club, our scrappy protagonist Ariana (Samantha Boscarino) spends the whole movie girlbossing her way to the top. She even manages to find love on the way.Centring its comedy around the clash between Ariana’s rebellious nature and the snobbery of the private club – which manifests in the…

Mila and IVADO researchers present a new neurocomputational model of the human brain that might bridge the gap in understanding AI and the biological mechanisms underlying mental disorders.A new model of the human brain. A new study presents a new neurocomputational model of the human brain, which might shed light on how the brain develops complex cognitive skills and advance neural artificial intelligence research. An international team of scientists from the Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne University in Paris, the CHU…

If you’re planning on wearing this costume — call meImage: Gizmodo (Photos: Shutterstock, Verso Books)In tandem with the Soup Protests, we’ve got our next suggestion: go as the embodiment of Andreas Malm’s badass manifesto on the virtues of escalating climate protest tactics. There’s less visual splash to work with than the previous suggestion, but a lot more rhetoric to work with. (You could probably technically make any of these costumes sexy—we just think this Malm’s book is the sexiest.)If you’ve got a plain red top…

A medical team surrounded Maria Mazurkevich’s hospital bed, all eyes on her as she did … nothing. Mazurkevich was 30 years old and had been admitted to New York–Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University on a blisteringly hot July day in New York City. A few days earlier, at home, she had suddenly fallen unconscious. She had suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her brain, and the bleeding area was putting tremendous pressure on critical brain regions. The team of nurses and physicians at the hospital’s neurological…

I’d come across a new study suggesting that people in a minimally conscious state can learn a rudimentary form of language, or at least a string of previously unknown syllables.It sounded fascinating, so I called up John Whyte, who has spent much of his career studying disorders of consciousness. Whyte is the perfect person to speak to about this sort of thing, and he has so many mind-blowing insights and anecdotes. Right at the start of our call, he told me that in many ways, the brains of minimally conscious people…

There is a short video on YouTube of Gabriel Byrne being interviewed by the Irish comedian and actor Tommy Tiernan. “Do you think you’re a strange man?” asks Tiernan. “I do think I’m a strange man, yes,” replies Byrne without hesitation. He then bats the question back to Tiernan, deftly sidestepping any further discussion of the subject. I ask him if now he could elaborate on the nature of his strangeness.“I like to think I’m pretty normal and not given to extremes, but people who know me well would probably think I’m a…

The story of LaMDA chatbotPhoto by Possessed Photography on UnsplashA few years ago when at CERN it was decided to increase the particle colliding energy of the LHC experiment to a level of 14 TeV, many theoretical physicists including myself were excited but also very much preoccupied. The reason was that due to the high energy reached the LHC experiment, some physical theories suggest that mini black holes could be created and extra dimensions could be reached.The idea that mini black holes can be created at CERN is not…