Saverio Cinti
Nov 1, 2005; 46:2347-2355
Research Articles

Sara Giusto is a talent manager, but not in the sense you might imagine. Her biggest client is imma, an influencer with pink hair ... who isn't human. Giusto discusses what the rise of "virtual humans" means for the real world — and invites imma onstage to explore an important question: In an increasingly digital world, what's really real?

Marloes J. A. G. Henckens
Aug 12, 2009; 29:10111-10119
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Emerging research in nonhuman animals implicates cerebellar projections to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in appetitive behaviors, but these circuits have not been characterized in humans. Here, we mapped cerebello-VTA white matter connectivity in a cohort of men and women using probabilistic tractography on diffusion imaging data from the Human Connectome Project. We uncovered the topographical organization of these connections by separately tracking from parcels of cerebellar lobule VI, crus I/II, vermis, paravermis, and cerebrocerebellum. Results revealed that connections between the cerebellum and VTA predominantly originate in the right cerebellar hemisphere, interposed nucleus, and paravermal cortex and terminate mostly ipsilaterally. Paravermal crus I sends the most connections to the VTA compared with other lobules. We discovered a mediolateral gradient of connectivity, such that the medial cerebellum has the highest connectivity with the VTA. Individual differences in microstructure were associated with measures of negative affect and social functioning. By splitting the tracts into quarters, we found that the socioaffective effects were driven by the third quarter of the tract, corresponding to the point at which the fibers leave the deep nuclei. Taken together, we produced detailed maps of cerebello-VTA structural connectivity for the first time in humans and established their relevance for trait differences in socioaffective regulation.

Low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS) is a novel technique for noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS). TUS delivered in a theta (5 Hz) burst pattern (tbTUS) induces plasticity in the human primary motor cortex (M1) for 30–60 min, showing promise for therapeutic development. Metaplasticity refers to activity-dependent changes in neural functions governing synaptic plasticity; depotentiation is the reversal of long-term potentiation (LTP) by a subsequent protocol with no effect alone. Metaplasticity can enhance plasticity induction and clinical efficacy of NIBS protocols. In our study, we compared four NIBS protocol combinations to investigate metaplasticity on tbTUS in humans of either sex. We delivered four interventions: (1) sham continuous theta burst stimulation with 150 pulses (cTBS150) followed by real tbTUS (tbTUS only), (2) real cTBS150 followed by sham tbTUS (cTBS only), (3) real cTBS150 followed by real tbTUS (metaplasticity), and (4) real tbTUS followed by real cTBS150 (depotentiation). We measured motor-evoked potential amplitude, short-interval intracortical inhibition, long-interval intracortical inhibition, intracortical facilitation (ICF), and short-interval intracortical facilitation before and up to 90 min after plasticity intervention. Plasticity effects lasted at least 60 min longer when tbTUS was primed with cTBS150 compared with tbTUS alone. Plasticity was abolished when cTBS150 was delivered after tbTUS. cTBS150 alone had no significant effect. No changes in M1 intracortical circuits were observed. Plasticity induction by tbTUS can be modified in manners consistent with homeostatic metaplasticity and depotentiation. This substantiates evidence that tbTUS induces LTP-like processes and suggests that metaplasticity can be harnessed in the therapeutic development of TUS.

Yet another reason to fight light pollution

Human beings and chimps share as much as 98 percent of their DNA. If our species are so similar, can chimps be genetically engineered to be more like us?

Humans don't just impact the interconnected web of life—we depend on it.

Scientists have created "a form of information immortality" meant to instruct future species on how to recreate humans. But who, or what, will find it?

Mica Pollack and her colleagues from UCSD share new research about the importance of teachers in blended learning environments that highlights the strengths and limits of online tools.

Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan asserted that "we are at the cusp of a major change in warfare".

Climate change means extreme heat will become the norm for millions across the world. We joined an experiment in the Saudi Arabian desert designed to find out what that means for our brains and bodies

Recent fossil finds suggest that big brains weren't an evolutionary asset to our ancestors but evolved by accident – and are likely to shrink again in the near future

Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth's poles drift by 80 centimetres

A bird flu virus that has been circulating in dairy cattle for months has now been found in a pig in the US for the first time, raising the risk of the virus evolving to become more dangerous to people

DNA from bones found in a cave in Germany has been identified as from Homo sapiens, showing that our species endured frigid conditions there as they expanded across the continent

Korolevo, a site in Ukraine where early humans made stone tools, has been dated to 1.4 million years ago, suggesting early humans moved from Ukraine into the rest of Europe

A southern mammoth skeleton found in Spain bears cut marks from stone tools and bite marks from carnivore teeth, suggesting that both hominins and felids feasted on its meat

Evidence from an archaeological site in Ethiopia suggests ancient humans adapted their diet during a dry spell after the Toba volcano eruption 74,000 years ago

A site in Siberia has evidence of human presence 417,000 years ago, raising the possibility that hominins could have reached North America much earlier than we thought

Underground tunnels created by lava flows provided humans with shelter for thousands of years beneath the hot desert landscape of Saudi Arabia

Outrunning prey over long distances is an efficient method of hunting for humans, and it was widely used until recently, according to an analysis of ethnographic accounts

An excavation on Timor reveals humans first settled on the island 44,000 years ago, long after the earliest occupation of Australia – suggesting migration to the latter took another route

Highland and lowland populations in Papua New Guinea have different gene variants derived from Denisovan archaic humans, indicating possible adaptations for lower oxygen levels and higher malaria risk

Recent fossil finds suggest that big brains weren't an evolutionary asset to our ancestors but evolved by accident – and are likely to shrink again in the near future

Prehistoric mammal bones found at a construction site in Argentina appear to have been cut with stone tools, suggesting that humans lived in the region much earlier than previously thought

Ancient humans are said to have evolved to leave the trees, where our primate ancestors lived, in favour of open grassy savannahs – but we may have this idea wrong

Title: Ancient Genome Appears to Have Links to Modern Humans
Category: Health News
Created: 8/30/2012 4:05:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 8/31/2012 12:00:00 AM

Title: Humans Hardwired to Feel Others' Pain, Study Finds
Category: Health News
Created: 8/28/2013 5:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 8/29/2013 12:00:00 AM

After their initial training phase, AI algorithms can’t update and learn from new data, meaning tech companies have to keep training new models from scratch

Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking

It is thought that humans can only maintain relationships with around 150 people, a figure known as Dunbar's number, but it seems that AI models can outstrip this and reach consensus in far bigger groups

A type of mathematical problem that was previously impossible to solve can now be successfully analysed with artificial intelligence

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

Swiss-Mile’s robot (which is really any robot that meets the hardware requirement to run their software) is faster than “most humans.” So what does that mean, exactly?

The winner here is Riccardo Rancan, who doesn’t look like he was trying especially hard—he’s the world champion in high-speed urban orienteering, which is a sport that I did not know existed but sounds pretty awesome.

[ Swiss-Mile ]

Thanks, Marko!

Oh good, we’re building giant fruit fly robots now.

But seriously, this is useful and important research because understanding the relationship between a nervous system and a bunch of legs can only be helpful as we ask more and more of legged robotic platforms.

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Clarus!

Watching humanoids get up off the ground will never not be fascinating.

[ Fourier ]

The Kepler Forerunner K2 represents the Gen 5.0 robot model, showcasing a seamless integration of the humanoid robot’s cerebral, cerebellar, and high-load body functions.

[ Kepler ]

Diffusion Forcing combines the strength of full-sequence diffusion models (like SORA) and next-token models (like LLMs), acting as either or a mix at sampling time for different applications without retraining.

[ MIT ]

Testing robot arms for space is no joke.

[ GITAI ]

Welcome to the Modular Robotics Lab (ModLab), a subgroup of the GRASP Lab and the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Prof. Mark Yim.

[ ModLab ]

This is much more amusing than it has any right to be.

[ Westwood Robotics ]

Let’s go for a walk with Adam at IROS’24!

[ PNDbotics ]

From Reachy 1 in 2023 to our newly launched Reachy 2, our grippers have been designed to enhance precision and dexterity in object manipulation. Some of the models featured in the video are prototypes used for various tests, showing the innovation behind the scenes.

[ Pollen ]

I’m not sure how else you’d efficiently spray the tops of trees? Drones seem like a no-brainer here.

[ SUIND ]

Presented at ICRA40 in Rotterdam, we show the challenges faced by mobile manipulation platforms in the field. We at CSIRO Robotics are working steadily towards a collaborative approach to tackle such challenging technical problems.

[ CSIRO ]

ABB is best known for arms, but it looks like they’re exploring AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) for warehouse operations now.

[ ABB ]

Howie Choset, Lu Li, and Victoria Webster-Wood of the Manufacturing Futures Institute explain their work to create specialized sensors that allow robots to “feel” the world around them.

[ CMU ]

Columbia Engineering Lecture Series in AI: “How Could Machines Reach Human-Level Intelligence?” by Yann LeCun.

Animals and humans understand the physical world, have common sense, possess a persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex sequences of subgoals and actions. These essential characteristics of intelligent behavior are still beyond the capabilities of today’s most powerful AI architectures, such as Auto-Regressive LLMs.
I will present a cognitive architecture that may constitute a path towards human-level AI. The centerpiece of the architecture is a predictive world model that allows the system to predict the consequences of its actions. and to plan sequences of actions that that fulfill a set of objectives. The objectives may include guardrails that guarantee the system’s controllability and safety. The world model employs a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) trained with self-supervised learning, largely by observation.

[ Columbia ]

The identification of a new hominin group called Denisovans was one of the most exciting discoveries in human evolution in the last decade.

The post Several Denisovan Populations Introgressed into Modern Humans Multiple Times: Study appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

A bird flu virus that has been circulating in dairy cattle for months has now been found in a pig in the US for the first time, raising the risk of the virus evolving to become more dangerous to people

The decade following passage of FDAAA has been one of easing standards for drug approvals in the US, most notably with the advent of “breakthrough” designation created by FDASIA in 2012 and the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016.

Although, as of this writing, there is no nominee for FDA Commissioner, it appears to be safe to say that the current administration intends to accelerate the pace of deregulation, mostly through further lowering of approval requirements. In fact, some of the leading contenders for the position are on record as supporting a return to pre-Kefauver-Harris days, when drug efficacy was not even considered for approval.

Build a better mouse model, and pharma will beat a path to your door - no laws needed.

In this context, it is at least refreshing to read a proposal to increase efficacy standards. This comes from two bioethicists at McGill University, who make the somewhat-startling case for a higher degree of efficacy evaluation before a drug begins any testing in humans.

We contend that a lack of emphasis on evidence for the efficacy of drug candidates is all too common in decisions about whether an experimental medicine can be tested in humans. We call for infrastructure, resources and better methods to rigorously evaluate the clinical promise of new interventions before testing them on humans for the first time.

The author propose some sort of centralized clearinghouse to evaluate efficacy more rigorously. It is unclear what they envision this new multispecialty review body’s standards for green-lighting a drug to enter human testing. Instead they propose three questions:

• What is the likelihood that the drug will prove clinically useful?
• Assume the drug works in humans. What is the likelihood of observing the preclinical results?
• Assume the drug does not work in humans. What is the likelihood of observing the preclinical results?

These seem like reasonable questions, I suppose – and are likely questions that are already being asked of preclinical data. They certainly do not rise to the level of providing a clear standard for regulatory approval, though perhaps it’s a reasonable place to start.

The most obvious counterargument here is one that the authors curiously don’t pick up on at all: if we had the ability to accurately (or even semiaccurately) predict efficacy preclinically, pharma sponsors would already be doing it. The comment notes: “More-thorough assessments of clinical potential before trials begin could lower failure rates and drug-development costs.” And it’s hard not to agree: every pharmaceutical company would love to have even an incrementally-better sense of whether their early pipeline drugs will be shown to work as hoped.

The authors note

Commercial interests cannot be trusted to ensure that human trials are launched only when the case for clinical potential is robust. We believe that many FIH studies are launched on the basis of flimsy, underscrutinized evidence.

However, they do not produce any evidence that industry is in any way deliberately underperforming their preclinical work, merely that preclinical efficacy is often difficult to reproduce and is poorly correlated with drug performance in humans.

Pharmaceutical companies have many times more candidate compounds than they can possibly afford to put into clinical trials. Figuring out how to lower failure rates – or at least the total cost of failure - is a prominent industry obsession, and efficacy remains the largest source of late-stage trial failure. This quest to “fail faster” has resulted in larger and more expensive phase 2 trials, and even to increased efficacy testing in some phase 1 trials. And we do this not because of regulatory pressure, but because of hopes that these efforts will save overall costs. So it seems beyond probable that companies would immediately invest more in preclinical efficacy testing, if such testing could be shown to have any real predictive power. But generally speaking, it does not.

As a general rule, we don’t need regulations that are firmly aligned with market incentives, we need regulations if and when we think those incentives might run counter to the general good. In this case, there are already incredibly strong market incentives to improve preclinical assessments. Where companies have attempted to do something with limited success, it would seem quixotic to think that regulatory fiat will accomplish more.

(One further point. The authors try to link the need for preclinical efficacy testing to the 2016 Bial tragedy. This seems incredibly tenuous: the authors speculate that perhaps trial participants would not have been harmed and killed if Bial had been required to produce more evidence of BIA102474’s clinical efficacy before embarking on their phase 1 trials. But that would have been entirely coincidental in this case: if the drug had in fact more evidence of therapeutic promise, the tragedy still would have happened, because it had nothing at all to do with the drug’s efficacy.

This is to some extent a minor nitpick, since the argument in favor of earlier efficacy testing does not depend on a link to Bial. However, I bring it up because a) the authors dedicate the first four paragraphs of their comment to the link, and b) there appears to be a minor trend of using the death and injuries of that trial to justify an array of otherwise-unrelated initiatives. This seems like a trend we should discourage.)

[Update 2/23: I posted this last night, not realizing that only a few hours earlier, John LaMattina had published on this same article. His take is similar to mine, in that he is suspicious of the idea that pharmaceutical companies would knowingly push ineffective drugs up their pipeline.]

Kimmelman, J., & Federico, C. (2017). Consider drug efficacy before first-in-human trials Nature, 542 (7639), 25-27 DOI: 10.1038/542025a

A type of mathematical problem that was previously impossible to solve can now be successfully analysed with artificial intelligence

A bird flu virus that has been circulating in dairy cattle for months has now been found in a pig in the US for the first time, raising the risk of the virus evolving to become more dangerous to people

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