The Vivid Dreams Stage of REM Sleep Is Linked With a Lower Risk of 83 Diseases - ScienceAlert

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:For years, scientists have trained AI to read fMRI scans to accurately reconstruct visual information. A new tool, known as Brain-IT, uses a Brain Interaction Transformer (BIT) to decode and encode fMRI scans, and it can reconstruct images with stunning clarity using a relatively small training set. This tool could help those with severe paralysis communicate, and give scientists new insight into the inner workings of the brain’s visual processing system. While debates rage on various podcasts, in hand-wringing online essays, and even in the halls of Congress as to whether AI has surpassed human intelligence—a threshold of no-return known as the AI Singularity—there’s one skill where AI algorithms have long trounced the human competition: pattern recognition. Because of modern AI engines’ impressive abilities to sift through large datasets and recognize patterns, they can accurately detect developing cancers and even create entirely new viruses not seen in nature. When trained on the brain, this AI pattern recognition can gain almost supernatural powers.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.