Neuko

neuko

This article is the second in a three part series. If you want to read the first one you can do here . Spending Christmas on the beach in Australia was the perfect way to celebrate surviving a year of together. traveling James’ childhood friend emigrated to Australia a few years ago and had been badgering us to visit ever since. We kept telling him it was too expensive, but since our Estonian e-residency cards were there we ended up with no choice but to hop on the cheapest flight we could find. I guess he was pretty happy that we’d finally made it halfway around the world as he surprised us at the airport! Living and working in a campervan We were unsure if we could afford to travel Australia and weren’t particularly interested in doing so if it was going to cost a fortune. The original plan was to spend a couple of weeks with our friend Dale, visit Canberra to collect our identity cards, and then leave. At some point in the first two weeks, the constant sunshine and beach life changed our minds and we decided to buy a campervan in which we would live and work while we travelled some of the East coast. I guess it was easy to fall in love with this lifestyle! Almost as soon as we decided this we were lucky enough to land our second freelance job. We were recommended as reputable developers by a mutual friend which resulted in a contract for three months work. This contract was another perfect fit for us; the client had an idea and wanted us to architect, , and build the product. Another job meant we would need to have power and internet available (despite still living like hippies)! design We found a van with solar power so we could charge our laptops (and a fridge to keep the beer cold) and solved the internet problem by splashing out on a SIM card with 40GB of data. Our first coffee in our home on wheels! We drove and worked our way from Sydney to Adelaide, back to Sydney, up to Brisbane, and back to Sydney again. The route was a little weird, but we didn’t want to drive all the way to Perth and our visa meant we could only stay for 3 months at a time. The wifi in Australia was not great. Outside of the big cities we struggled to find places to work but our SIM cards were fantastic. With the sun charging everything for us we were able to work from our van most days using our 4G. With the exception of the terrible wifi, the public services in Australia are incredible. Every beach and park has clean toilets and showers (some of them even have hot water but a cold shower is often welcome), BBQ’s, seating areas, and drinking water stations. I despise camping so I was surprised how much I loved living in a van — I think the facilities and weather were huge factors in this! Gotta work where you can We worked when and where we could, often sitting outside the van or using picnic tables at campsites. On long drives whoever wasn’t driving would usually try and get some work done, at least until our laptops overheated in the non air conditioned cab! Living and working in a car After 3 months our visa was up and we had to leave Australia. As we were so close to New Zealand we decided it would be the perfect time to visit. With our new found love for van life we hired a campervan. However, we didn’t have an equally amazing time… The internet was practically non-existent even with expensive local SIM cards we were without signal for days at a time. This was frustrating as we were trying to work, but luckily the project was coming to an end and we were able to put on the finishing touches without good wifi. Our van, (which was basically a family car with a mattress in the back) was one of the cheapest rentals we could find. Despite this it still put us way over budget — at the time of writing NZ is the most expensive country we’ve visited. Even though we were trying to save money our daily expenditure doubled our budget to €100 a day. A bit colder than we’d like | Queenstown was beautiful We really enjoyed visiting New Zealand and we did some amazing things; took our first helicopter ride to hike a glacier, white water rafted the highest waterfall, bathed in hot springs, and visited the wettest place on the planet. However, though the landscapes were absolutely breathtaking at every turn, we visited at the wrong time of year — it was cold and the days were short. Van life is no fun when you’re freezing, damp, and in the dark! First time in a helicopter! | First time hiking a glacier! Back to Europe Whilst we had been away our friends had been busy. We were invited to four weddings in the summer! I would never have missed my two best friends’ weddings, and luckily for us they were only a week apart (though unfortunately 850km apart too). We were also seriously starting to miss Europe after 18 months away and decided this was a perfect chance to spend the whole summer there. We spent one more month in Australia which we ended with a scuba diving liveaboard in Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef, and then started our journey back West. To round off our time in the east we spent a few last days in Bangkok, where it all began. It also meant we could avoid spending an entire 24 hours on a flight back from Sydney 😅 Berlin is one of our favourite European cities, and we have visited several times but only in winter — and Berlin winters are brutal! We wanted a travel break had some client work to finish off so we decided to spend a couple of months there. We spent a month in Neukölln and a month in Wedding — two of our favourite districts. For the first time working on the road we tried out a co-working space. It was a novelty for the first few days, but we found it too much like getting up and going to an office — we even brought our own lunch a couple of times! We confirmed our suspicions that we prefer a constant change of environment to stay productive. We have a couple of friends from the UK who live in Berlin and when we weren’t working we did a lot of eating and drinking! Berlin has a reputation for fantastic all night (or all weekend), parties, but there is also an incredible bar scene if you’re not a club person. I love the music in Berlin (mostly techno and deep house) but in our 2 months we only went to one club and I am still not sure if I felt cool for getting home at 10am, or like an idiot. Especially after suffering through the 3-day hangover. Park BBQs, lots of kicker, and touristing! Four weddings and no funerals Our journey back to the UK for the first time in 18 months was less than smooth. Our flight was delayed by long enough that when we landed in London the car rental shop was closed and we had to sleep on the floor of their office until they opened! It took us longer to get from Germany to the UK than our flight from Bangkok to Berlin. A typical Ryanair experience, but we just can’t resist the prices! Thankfully we had finished all our client work and were free for the summer. This was perfect because it required meticulous planning (obviously by me) to ensure we could see all of our family and friends and attend all the weddings without backtracking and covering the same ground. Finding the maker community Even travelling and working as a couple can be a lonely experience. Hostels always look so amazing with a beautiful pool and cheap bar etc, but they are almost always more expensive than an entire apartment on or a local hotel. Plus, when you have to work the next day you don’t want to sleep in a bunk bed and drink shots until 5am. Airbnb Sometimes it’s difficult to find people who share the same interests as us. We are never short of backpacker friends and drinking buddies but it’s rare to find long term travellers and fellow developers. James had seen a new community on Twitter called Makerlog. He wanted to be more accountable for development tasks and needed help seeing a product through to the end rather than continually jumping between new ideas. Makerlog looked like the perfect place to do this, so he joined the Slack and our journey into the maker community had begun! Lacking fellow female developer support and communication I joined a community on Telegram I had just discovered called Women Make. Both of us found everyone super friendly and supportive and we joked that we had our own groups of online friends now. Joining these groups made us both realise how much we relied solely on each other for emotional support, encouragement, and feedback. It was suddenly really obvious that if we could get some of that support elsewhere it would benefit our business, and potentially our relationship. Being held accountable and having friends ask how we were getting on was a big motivator for building our products. It was also great to be a part of such a diverse community of people, with experience in a wide range of topics, all helping each other. James already used Twitter but we both started to become more active. I thought there were some barriers — such as unwritten rules and expected etiquette, but I soon realised that I just needed to be myself. 24 hour startup challenge There was this crazy idea circulating Twitter called the 24 hour startup challenge. was the man behind it. After he decided to encourage some other makers to do the same thing. Pat Walls building and launching a product live on stream in 24 hours As something completely out of our comfort zones we immediately . Disclaimer, I took a LOT of encouragement and secretly hoped our internet would not be good enough for me to take part. signed up Committing to the 24 hour startup challenge was a really big deal for both of us. I regularly struggle with imposter syndrome. The idea that everyone would see how little I really know and how terrible I am at coding, live on stream, was my idea of hell. James was not as stressed as me, but as an introvert, he was concerned about how he would talk through his problems and explain what he was doing while streaming to keep it interesting for viewers. Most of the time I am an extrovert, so babbling about my code was one thing I was not worried about! Our biggest challenge for the streaming was finding a good enough internet connection. We would be taking part from Salta, Argentina. We had been staying in a shared house but thought it would be best to have our own apartment and internet connection. I booked an Airbnb but I failed to notice that the property didn’t list wifi as one of the facilities… The day before the stream we went to our new place for all of 30 minutes before realising there was no wifi. Panicking about not being able to participate we spoke to our previous host and luckily we were able stay there another couple of nights. The accommodation shenanigans meant we had wasted a good chunk of our day for preparation and I was even more stressed. Stream day was incredible. There was no reason for weeks of nerves as it wasn’t at all scary and was actually really fun! With a couple of hundred other people taking part I wasn’t sure if we would get any viewers but the audience was super supportive. It was incredible to have people watch us build our product and provide help and encouragement. I am a developer who needs to talk through code problems, often known as “rubber duck debugging”, which is often frustrating for James when he’s trying to focus. Coding on stream was a perfect solution as the audience (or just the camera) made excellent rubber ducks! Our internet was not stable enough to support us two streams so we used just one laptop and sat next to each other so any viewers would be able to hear us both. We also switched laptops a few times so everyone would get to chance to see each of our faces! We managed about 18 hours of coding before our eyes started giving up on us and we crashed. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to finish or launch our startup, our idea was incredibly ambitious to build in 24 hours, but we were very happy with the results! Imposter syndrome Taking part in that challenge was so far out of my comfort zone it could have been on another planet. I attempted to lower my stress levels by preparing as much as I could (as much as was allowed in the rules). I researched the tools we would be using, estimated the core tasks, and planned what we would be doing each hour. In the first few hours the app took shape relatively quickly which helped push the imposter syndrome out of the way as I was able to see results. This is a theme I see in my everyday coding — if I am unable to complete a task within my time estimate then this is when the doubt about my abilities starts creeping in. I am attempting to solve this by measuring how much I get done in a larger period of time, such as a week, rather than agonising over a 2 hour task taking 4 hours — I’ll let you know how this goes! James managed to talk a lot more than he expected while coding, but this contributed a lot to his tiredness and fatigue. If there was a particularly difficult problem he did tend to go quiet for an hour or so while he worked through it. I don’t think this is necessarily an introvert issue, but something which would become easier to do with more live streaming practice. Self-improvement cannot be made without action. A lot has changed in a year and I am continuously working on pushing myself out of my comfort zone every day. Currently, I am trying to say yes to podcasts and interviews, because “doing it live” is something which scares me. Participating in the 24 hour startup challenge would not have happened if we hadn’t found the maker community. We are incredibly thankful to have discovered a group of such friendly, supportive, and wonderful friends all around the world. Making our first $5 After the failure of our first startup, we had been sustaining our travels with client work but we hadn’t given up making stuff! We launched our first native Mac app — a menu bar app to get notifications when your websites go down. People bought it! When we made that first $5 it was such an incredible feeling. We felt like we were finally on the right path. UptimeBar UptimeBar wasn’t super successful but we made a couple of hundred dollars and learned a lot of important lessons; build products which solve your own problems, build and ship an MVP for validation, and be open. This was the first of our products to be an open startup with a super basic and we got a lot of positive feedback about sharing these stats. open page This small success gave us the motivation to keep on building and we decided we wanted to be even more open and share more stats than just revenue (if we had any!) for our next startup. A possible winner Sticking to solving our own problems our next project was — a service to easily unsubscribe from spam emails with a focus on privacy. We were both spending so much time sorting through our emails we went searching for a service which would help us find and unsubscribe from ones we didn’t want. Leave Me Alone We found a few which would help us for free, but a closer look revealed that they didn’t charge for their service because they were selling all of your data for marketing. Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of our data being exploited, we decided to build our own solution, and Leave Me Alone was born! We took a new approach to building this startup by and were delighted to start seeing some success. We released to beta users first, who gave us lots of great feedback and within a few iterations, we had something ready for the wild. being completely open Just before Christmas we soft launched Leave Me Alone on social media and to the maker community. The feedback was incredibly positive. It had taken us nearly 2 years but we hoped we had finally built something that people wanted and were willing to pay for. Side project side projects With a long stay booked in Cusco for Christmas and New Year we had a bunch of free time. James built — an unobtrusive ad network for makers. There were discussions in the maker community about wanting to monetise their products with advertising, but not wanting to show visitors irrelevant or ugly ads served from big bad corporations. MakerAds MakerAds is a network of adverts by makers, and free for makers. James offers sponsored ad spots and plans to add categories in the future to allow sites to further specify what type of advert they want to show. Inspired by a I built my first Chrome extension — to fix accidental clicks on #hashtags in the Twitter search results. I had a great evening learning something new and I even added support for Firefox! Tweet from Ben Tossell Twitter Search Fixer Sadly Twitter recently updated their web app and my extension no longer works on the new version. They are slowly inviting people to try it but neither of us have been able to yet so I can’t fix it. Twitter Search Fixer is completely free and so if you have the new Twitter and want to help out please feel free! open source A new client for the New Year We were starting to run low on money. When we flew to South America in October we agreed that if we dipped below €5,000 without having client work we would fly have to back to Europe and contract or find a job. Obviously, we didn’t want to do this but historically neither of us has had much success finding work on freelance websites such as Freelancer and Upwork. Applying is a big time investment and the competition for job postings is too high and the quality of clients is too low. We looked for better places to find work and found . The quality of developers and clients is much higher. The platform is built by two nomads Emma and Philip who encountered the same problems as us when they were trying to find work while travelling. We love their approach of getting to know their customers and they have reached out to us several times for feedback or to recommend jobs specific to our skills. Moonlight It was a dream to apply to jobs with proper specifications and upfront expectations. It wasn’t long before we found a great client and project which set us up with 3 months work and meant we could keep travelling for a while longer yet — phew! After spending Christmas in the cold and at altitude we were in desperate need of sun, sea, and sand… Onwards to the equator! Merry Christmas… and a Happy New year from Cusco! Our 2018 in review Disclaimer: Some of the links are affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, I might earn commission if you click through and signup or make a purchase. This article is the second in a three part series. Find the first one . The final part will be linked here when published. here Originally published at makermag.com on February 19, 2019.

A Couple of Nomad Makers: finding friends and side project profits

The healthcare systems across the globe are now gradually embracing the much-needed shift toward personalized medicine. In this emerging industry landscape, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) has become extremely important in supporting patient-centric care.  An expert in healthcare logistics and generative AI, Karthik Chava recommends that many long-standing challenges in precision medicine can be addressed by integrating neuro-symbolic platforms with dynamic neural architectures. Chava has over a decade of experience in AI-driven healthcare transformation. His impressive research portfolio spans AI-augmented logistics, intelligent pharmaceutical distribution, and sample management. His research paper titled “Dynamic Neural Architectures and AI-Augmented Platforms for Personalized Direct-to Practitioner Healthcare Engagements” provides a comprehensive framework that drives smarter and adaptive care by combining computational intelligence with real-time health data. AI Integration for Precision Medicine The aim of personal medicine is to customize healthcare with treatments and decisions tailored as per the3 characteristics of individual patients, such as lifestyle, environment, and genetics. However, it is not easy to achieve individualized care at scale because of factors such as fragmented data, constraints in current healthcare infrastructure, and limited integration of AI in clinical settings. In his recent publication, Chava has tried to address these limitations by a hybrid approach known as neuro-symbolic AI, involving a fusion of symbolic reasoning and neural learning. This research introduces AI platforms designed to enhance diagnostic precision, treatment personalization, and patient engagement. “Personalized medicine demands systems that are not only intelligent but also interpretable and adaptive,” Chava explains. “Neuro-symbolic platforms offer the ability to integrate logic-driven clinical pathways with data-driven learning, enabling transparent, context-aware, and personalized healthcare delivery.” Dynamic Healthcare Systems with Neuro-Symbolic AI Advanced AI models capable of continuously adapting to new health inputs and learning from patient-specific contexts form the core of Chava’s research.  By incorporating both neural networks and symbolic AI paradigms, these models allow systems to reason through complex medical scenarios while processing real-time biomedical signals from diagnostics, EHRs, and wearables. Unlike traditional AI systems, the neuro-symbolic platforms proposed by Chava emphasize interpretability, which can be a very important feature for healthcare practitioners looking for justifiable treatment pathways and actionable insights. The design by Chava incorporates multimodal input handling, which allows AI platforms to analyze data from EEG signals, browser activity, CT scans, genetic sequences, and even circadian rhythms. By learning continuously, these systems support physicians in tailoring interventions reflecting the most current patient realities. Addressing Fragmented Engagement and Static Systems The lack of continuity in practitioner-patient engagement is one of the persistent gaps in precision healthcare. Reactive traditional models often depend on infrequent in-person appointments and delayed feedback cycles. Also, static AI tools trained on generic datasets have limited adaptability to psychosocial contexts or individual patient histories. To address this gap, Chava proposes real-time, direct-to-practitioner engagement systems mediated by AI.  Through continuous feedback loops, these platforms support mental health tracking, enable proactive communication, and optimize therapeutic alignment. In his study, Chava has detailed a flagship implementation for the Health Guardian platform. This implementation demonstrates how clinical engagement can be transformed into an ongoing, personalized dialogue with the help of embedded AI-driven components such as neural feedback models, generative dialogue systems, and wearable sensors. Patients can interact with intuitive, voice-assisted interfaces capable of contextualizing medical advice based on predicted outcomes and historical data. On the other hand, practitioners receive real-time updates from patient biosignals. Real-World Applications and Case Studies In Chava’s paper, Health Guardian and its companion platform Medical Guardian have been discussed in detail as case studies. Utilizing deep learning models, these platforms derive insights from digital biomarkers and biosignals to offer real-time feedback as well as long-term prognostic guidance. His systems demonstrated the following capabilities in trials involving remote patient monitoring: Personalized therapeutic interventions in neurology and psychiatry.
Early detection of sleep disorders and circadian disruption using wearable data.
Proactive mental health support through AI-mediated dialogue and biofeedback. Conclusion Karthik Chava’s research provides a practical roadmap at the intersection of AI, personalized medicine, and ethical clinical engagement. At a time when healthcare systems are struggling to deal with rising chronic diseases, aging populations, and increasing patient expectations, this research presents a timely and actionable model. By combining symbolic logic and neural learning, his proposed neuro-symbolic platforms pave the way for truly personalized, scalable, and interpretable healthcare solutions. “To bridge the gap between data and diagnosis, between personalization and scale, we need systems that are both intelligent and understandable. Neuro-symbolic AI offers that bridge-where the science of computing meets the art of healing. These platforms do more than process information; they interpret meaning, contextualize care, and align with the practitioner’s reasoning. In doing so, they empower healthcare professionals to deliver not only faster and more accurate treatment, but care that is humane, transparent, and deeply personal. It is this fusion of logic and learning that will define the next era of precision medicine,” Chava concludes. The healthcare systems across the globe are now gradually embracing the much-needed shift toward personalized medicine. In this emerging industry landscape, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) has become extremely important in supporting patient-centric care.  An expert in healthcare logistics and generative AI, Karthik Chava recommends that many long-standing challenges in precision medicine can be addressed by integrating neuro-symbolic platforms with dynamic neural architectures. Chava has over a decade of experience in AI-driven healthcare transformation. His impressive research portfolio spans AI-augmented logistics, intelligent pharmaceutical distribution, and sample management. His research paper titled “Dynamic Neural Architectures and AI-Augmented Platforms for Personalized Direct-to Practitioner Healthcare Engagements” provides a comprehensive framework that drives smarter and adaptive care by combining computational intelligence with real-time health data. AI Integration for Precision Medicine AI Integration for Precision Medicine The aim of personal medicine is to customize healthcare with treatments and decisions tailored as per the3 characteristics of individual patients, such as lifestyle, environment, and genetics. However, it is not easy to achieve individualized care at scale because of factors such as fragmented data, constraints in current healthcare infrastructure, and limited integration of AI in clinical settings. In his recent publication, Chava has tried to address these limitations by a hybrid approach known as neuro-symbolic AI , involving a fusion of symbolic reasoning and neural learning. This research introduces AI platforms designed to enhance diagnostic precision, treatment personalization, and patient engagement. neuro-symbolic AI neuro-symbolic AI “Personalized medicine demands systems that are not only intelligent but also interpretable and adaptive,” Chava explains. “Neuro-symbolic platforms offer the ability to integrate logic-driven clinical pathways with data-driven learning, enabling transparent, context-aware, and personalized healthcare delivery.” Dynamic Healthcare Systems with Neuro-Symbolic AI Dynamic Healthcare Systems with Neuro-Symbolic AI Advanced AI models capable of continuously adapting to new health inputs and learning from patient-specific contexts form the core of Chava’s research.  By incorporating both neural networks and symbolic AI paradigms, these models allow systems to reason through complex medical scenarios while processing real-time biomedical signals from diagnostics, EHRs, and wearables. Unlike traditional AI systems, the neuro-symbolic platforms proposed by Chava emphasize interpretability, which can be a very important feature for healthcare practitioners looking for justifiable treatment pathways and actionable insights. The design by Chava incorporates multimodal input handling, which allows AI platforms to analyze data from EEG signals, browser activity, CT scans, genetic sequences, and even circadian rhythms. By learning continuously, these systems support physicians in tailoring interventions reflecting the most current patient realities. Addressing Fragmented Engagement and Static Systems Addressing Fragmented Engagement and Static Systems The lack of continuity in practitioner-patient engagement is one of the persistent gaps in precision healthcare. Reactive traditional models often depend on infrequent in-person appointments and delayed feedback cycles. Also, static AI tools trained on generic datasets have limited adaptability to psychosocial contexts or individual patient histories. To address this gap, Chava proposes real-time, direct-to-practitioner engagement systems mediated by AI.  Through continuous feedback loops, these platforms support mental health tracking, enable proactive communication, and optimize therapeutic alignment. In his study, Chava has detailed a flagship implementation for the Health Guardian platform. This implementation demonstrates how clinical engagement can be transformed into an ongoing, personalized dialogue with the help of embedded AI-driven components such as neural feedback models, generative dialogue systems, and wearable sensors. Patients can interact with intuitive, voice-assisted interfaces capable of contextualizing medical advice based on predicted outcomes and historical data. On the other hand, practitioners receive real-time updates from patient biosignals. Real-World Applications and Case Studies Real-World Applications and Case Studies In Chava’s paper, Health Guardian and its companion platform Medical Guardian have been discussed in detail as case studies. Utilizing deep learning models, these platforms derive insights from digital biomarkers and biosignals to offer real-time feedback as well as long-term prognostic guidance. His systems demonstrated the following capabilities in trials involving remote patient monitoring: Personalized therapeutic interventions in neurology and psychiatry. Early detection of sleep disorders and circadian disruption using wearable data. Proactive mental health support through AI-mediated dialogue and biofeedback. Personalized therapeutic interventions in neurology and psychiatry. Early detection of sleep disorders and circadian disruption using wearable data. Proactive mental health support through AI-mediated dialogue and biofeedback. Conclusion Conclusion Karthik Chava’s research provides a practical roadmap at the intersection of AI, personalized medicine, and ethical clinical engagement. At a time when healthcare systems are struggling to deal with rising chronic diseases, aging populations, and increasing patient expectations, this research presents a timely and actionable model. By combining symbolic logic and neural learning, his proposed neuro-symbolic platforms pave the way for truly personalized, scalable, and interpretable healthcare solutions. neuro-symbolic platforms neuro-symbolic platforms “To bridge the gap between data and diagnosis, between personalization and scale, we need systems that are both intelligent and understandable. Neuro-symbolic AI offers that bridge-where the science of computing meets the art of healing. These platforms do more than process information; they interpret meaning, contextualize care, and align with the practitioner’s reasoning. In doing so, they empower healthcare professionals to deliver not only faster and more accurate treatment, but care that is humane, transparent, and deeply personal. It is this fusion of logic and learning that will define the next era of precision medicine,” Chava concludes.

Karthik Chava Proposes Neuro-Symbolic Platforms for Personalized Healthcare

Karthik Chava ለደንበኛ ሕክምና የ Neuro-Simbolic Platforms ይሰጣል

Karthik Chava прапануе нейро-символічныя платформы для індывідуальнай аховы здароўя

Karthik Chava propone plataformas neuro-simbólicas para la atención médica personalizada

Karthik Chava propón plataformas neuro-simbólicas para a atención sanitaria personalizada

Karthik Chava、人格化医療のための神経象徴的プラットフォームを提案

Karthik Chava ផ្តល់ជូននូវប្លាស្ទិច Neuro-Symbolic សម្រាប់សេវាកម្មសុខភាពផ្ទាល់ខ្លួន

Karthik Chava Tango Neuro-Symbolic Platforms

Karthik Chava siūlo asmeninės sveikatos priežiūros neuro-simbolines platformas

Karthik Chava propõe plataformas neuro-simbólicas para cuidados de saúde personalizados

Karthik Chava පෞද්ගලික සෞඛ් ය සේවා සඳහා neurosymbolic පද්ධති යෝජනා

Karthik Chava neuro-simbolik platformlarni qoysan

Karthik Chava 提出个性化医疗保健的神经象征平台

As neuroscience research and adjacent programs grapple with funding and staff cuts, the question is this: Where did neuroscience research falter in the last few years? The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA] is losing funding and headcount. The National Institutes of Health [NIH] is undergoing a major surgery. There are high-level questions against psychiatric medications. Universities are cutting down on graduate admissions for several biomedical programs. losing funding and headcount undergoing a major surgery What were the major events in the mainstream, in the last few years, that neuroscience research did not show its might or importance, resulting in gaps that may have contributed to its current fate? Mental health was on the headlines, yet with all the talk of therapy, policy, and so forth, the field of neuroscience could not define what mental health is, or is not, or why some therapies work, or do not, at least conceptually—within the mechanisms of the relevant components in the cranium. Addiction was in the news with major reports on overdose deaths. Although reversal medications were useful, some of the answers about what addiction might beand how to prevent it, that would have percolated into prevention messages, were not available from neuroscience. define what mental health is, or is not, or why some therapies work what addiction might be However, there was one major situation where it appeared that neuroscience self-subverted. It was in the aftermath of the report of Special Counsel Robert Hur on then-President Joe Biden's possession of classified documents post-vice-presidency. There were several news stories with quotes from experts about memory and aging. There were opinion articles as well. While some of them noted that it was possible for memory not to be as efficient in old age, there was a generalized theme of better judgment, wisdom, proper memory tests, impulse control, knowledge, and several other points. The problem is not that some of the points may not be accurate. But, if a neuroscience expert were asked about memory and there was talk of wisdom, what is the difference between how the brain mechanizes memory and how it mechanizes wisdom—or judgment? The question is beyond the use of common terms for descriptions because of the general news audience since what is called memory is a label—not a mechanism within the cranium. mechanism within the cranium How does human memory work? This is different from stating that the unit of memory is an engram, or that there is long-term memory, or working memory, or that there is memory consolidation, encoding, retrieval, interference, central executive, default mode, and other terms that are used to describe observations about the human memory. It is possible to be articulate in all these expressions and not be describing the mechanisms of the human memory. The labels are not the actual science of human memory. It would be like saying that velocity is the engineering of automobiles. The question is that if an individual sees a chair, what is the configuration or representationof that chair in the mind [as a memory]? How is it possible to identify that a remote control in the room is misplaced and to correct it? what is the configuration or representation If the consensus is that there is no clear understanding of how the human memory works or how the brain organizes information, it, maybe, would have been better to state that and then explain up to the current evidence in neuroscience, as simple [and as balanced] as possible for the general audience. how the brain organizes information While an expert [who needs federal funding for research] could be cautious in discussing the memory of an incumbent [who might win reelection] in the press, it would have been better, so to speak, to find a way to strike a balance, because even if the present was scary, the future, being unknown, should have been a cautionary tale. It would have been better to stay within neuroscience in explanations—discussing neurons and their signals. Then, stating that these signals are also involved in all functions, including wisdom, judgment, emotions, feelings, intelligence, [regulation or control of] digestion, muscles, and so forth. All functions are within the mechanisms of electrical and chemical signals—conceptually and—up to the current evidence in neuroscience. A simple way to put it is that electrical signals have intensity, and chemical signals have volume. A reason, conceptually, that digestion regulation for digestion capacity or efficiency might wane with age could also be due to electrical signals’ lower intensity or chemical signals’ lower volume—as a rough example. that electrical signals have intensity, and chemical signals have volume This means that it could be possible that memory too, might be affected with age. While life experiences may inform judgment and wisdom, effectiveness may not be as rounded or regular, per se, with senescence. Offering explanations that are nearer to how the brain works, while using [non-cranium components or] labels cautiously, as well as from not just a few experts, but say from some major associations for neuroscience, neurology or others, could have ensured the possibility to be careful about directly correlating advanced age with memory decline or offering why that might be possible, without muddling memory [a label] with [other labels like] wisdom, judgment, knowledge and impulse control—charging instead, at philosophy. No one knows if grievance, in part, may be responsible for some of the cataclysmic airstrikes—currently—on neuroscience, but it may have been a lost opportunity to have the field, appear to describe aging and memory vaguely, without actually discussing the brain, and then the presidential debate struck, discrediting the subtlety of the experts while making the field of neuroscience [and its research] a collateral damage. There is an analysis [July 7, 2024] in The Washington Post, Debate brings scrutiny of whether aides shielded signs of Biden’s agingstating that, “When special counsel Robert K. Hur concluded in a February report that President Biden should not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents in part because a jury would view the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden and his aides hit back hard. Now, after his halting performance at a debate against Trump brought questions about Biden’s mental sharpness and physical stamina to the forefront, Biden’s senior aides face worries among fellow Democrats and sharp accusations from Republicans that they took steps to conceal the effect the president’s aging has had on his ability to carry out his duties.” The Washington Post Debate brings scrutiny of whether aides shielded signs of Biden’s aging There is a recent [March 19, 2025] report in Axios, Fallout from Trump research cuts expands across academia, stating that, “Trump administration spending cuts and freezes to federal grants are roiling major academic medical research programs, prompting layoffs, and leading administrators to abandon studies and rescind admissions offers to graduate students. The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School rescinded provisional offers to dozens of biomedical Ph.D. students this month. Johns Hopkins University last week moved to eliminate more than 2,200 staff positions, including 247 in the U.S., following the termination of more than $80 million in USAID funding, primarily to its school of public health and a global health affiliate. Elsewhere, Stanford announced a hiring freeze tied to NIH cuts, Baylor's College of Medicine said it will scale back expansion plans and trim its incoming graduate school class while Emory's public health school warned of "potentially radical adjustments."” Axios Fallout from Trump research cuts expands across academia Feature image source Feature image source source

Did Special Counsel Robert Hur’s Report, Referencing Joe Biden’s Memory, Derail Neuroscience?

Authors:
(1) Kinjal Basu, IBM Research;
(2) Keerthiram Murugesan, IBM Research;
(3) Subhajit Chaudhury, IBM Research;
(4) Murray Campbell, IBM Research;
(5) Kartik Talamadupula, Symbl.ai;
(6) Tim Klinger, IBM Research. Authors: Authors: (1) Kinjal Basu, IBM Research; (2) Keerthiram Murugesan, IBM Research; (3) Subhajit Chaudhury, IBM Research; (4) Murray Campbell, IBM Research; (5) Kartik Talamadupula, Symbl.ai; (6) Tim Klinger, IBM Research. Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Background 2 Background 3 Symbolic Policy Learner 3 Symbolic Policy Learner 3.1 Learning Symbolic Policy using ILP 3.1 Learning Symbolic Policy using ILP 3.2 Exception Learning 3.2 Exception Learning 4 Rule Generalization 4 Rule Generalization 4.1 Dynamic Rule Generalization 4.1 Dynamic Rule Generalization 5 Experiments and Results 5.1 Dataset 5.1 Dataset 5.2 Experiments 5.2 Experiments 5.3 Results 5.3 Results 6 Related Work 6 Related Work 7 Future Work and Conclusion, Limitations, Ethics Statement, and References 7 Future Work and Conclusion, Limitations, Ethics Statement, and References Abstract Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as an important collection of NLP tasks, requiring reinforcement learning (RL) agents to combine natural language understanding with reasoning. A key challenge for agents attempting to solve such tasks is to generalize across multiple games and demonstrate good performance on both seen and unseen objects. Purely deep-RL-based approaches may perform well on seen objects; however, they fail to showcase the same performance on unseen objects. Commonsense-infused deep-RL agents may work better on unseen data; unfortunately, their policies are often not interpretable or easily transferable. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present EXPLORER[1] which is an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual reinforcement learning. EXPLORER is neurosymbolic in nature, as it relies on a neural module for exploration and a symbolic module for exploitation. It can also learn generalized symbolic policies and perform well over unseen data. Our experiments show that EXPLORER outperforms the baseline agents on Text-World cooking (TW-Cooking) and Text-World Commonsense (TWC) games. 1 Introduction Natural language plays a crucial role in human intelligence and cognition. To study and evaluate the process of language-informed sequential decision-making in AI agents, text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as important simulation environments, where the states and actions are usually described in natural language. To solve game instances, an agent needs to master both natural language processing (NLP) and reinforcement learning (RL). At a high level, existing RL agents for TBGs can be classified into two classes: (a) rule based agents, and (b) neural agents. Rule-based agents such as NAIL (Hausknecht et al., 2019) rely heavily on prior predefined knowledge. This makes them less flexible and adaptable. To overcome the challenges of rule-based agents, in recent years, with the advent of new deep learning techniques, significant progress has been made on neural agents (Narasimhan et al., 2015; Adhikari et al., 2020b). However, these frameworks also suffer from a number of shortcomings. First, from deep learning, they inherit the need for very large training sets, which entails that they learn slowly. Second, they are brittle in the sense that a trained network may show good performance with the entities that are seen in the training instances, yet it performs very poorly in a very similar environment with unseen entities. Additionally, the policies learned by these neural RL agents are not interpretable (human-readable). In this paper, we introduce EXPLORER for TBGs that utilizes the positive aspects of both neural and symbolic agents. The EXPLORER is based on two modules - neural and symbolic, where the neural module is mainly responsible for exploration and the symbolic module does the exploitation. An overview of the EXPLORER agent can be found in Figure 1. A key advantage of EXPLORER is that it has a scalable design that can integrate any neural module and can build the symbolic module upon it. For the symbolic module, instead of using predefined prior knowledge, EXPLORER learns its symbolic policies by leveraging reward and action pairs while playing the game. These policies are represented using a declarative logic programming paradigm — Answer Set Programming (ASP) (Lifschitz, 2019), which allows the policies to be interpretable and explainable. Due to its non-monotonic nature and efficient knowledge representation ability, ASP has proven its efficiency in NLP research (Basu et al., 2020, 2021; Pendharkar et al., 2022; Zeng et al., 2024); Commonsense reasoning research (Gupta et al., 2023; Kothawade et al., 2021); and NLP + RL research (Lyu et al., 2019; Basu et al., 2022b; Sridharan et al., 2017; Mitra and Baral, 2015; Yang et al., 2018). We believe nonmonotonic reasoning (NMR) (Gelfond and Lifschitz, 1988; Reiter, 1988) is a crucial capability in partially observable worlds, as the agent’s beliefs can change in the presence of new information and examples. Importantly, with the help of an exception learner (illustrated in Section 3.2), EXPLORER learns the symbolic policies as default theories so that the agent can perform NMR, and the policies remain consistent with the agent’s findings. After learning the symbolic policies, EXPLORER can lift or variablize the rules using WordNet (Miller, 1995) to generalize them. By generalizing the symbolic policies, we find that EXPLORER overcomes the challenge of getting poor performance over unseen entities or out-of-distribution (OOD) test sets, as the unseen objects are similar in nature to the training objects and occur under the same class in WordNet. Figure 2 illustrates the components of our neurosymbolic architecture and shows an overview of the agent’s decision-making process. We have used TW-cooking to verify our approach and then performed a comprehensive evaluation of EXPLORER on TWC games. To showcase the scalability aspects of EXPLORER, we have done comparative studies with other SOTA neural and neuro-symbolic models, and the empirical results demonstrate that EXPLORER outplays others by achieving better generalization over unseen entities. Due to the neuro-symbolic nature of EXPLORER, we are also able to perform detailed qualitative studies of the policies (illustrated in section - 5.3). The main contributions of this paper are: (1) we present EXPLORER for TBGs that outperforms existing models in terms of steps and scores; (2) we discuss the importance of non-monotonic reasoning in partially observable worlds; (3) we demonstrate how default theories can be learned with exceptions in an online manner for TBGs; and (4) we provide a novel information-gain based rule generalization algorithm that leverages WordNet. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv [1] Code available at: https://github.com/kinjalbasu/explorer

Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Meets RL: EXPLORER Outperforms in Text-World Games

https://open.spotify.com/episode/76y8RrdWwdnlhyNsFFbNFx?si=GniO7qcNQWWE-yDpoQyNYw&embedable=true https://open.spotify.com/episode/76y8RrdWwdnlhyNsFFbNFx?si=GniO7qcNQWWE-yDpoQyNYw&embedable=true Weaponized Apathy Your brain is being systematically hijacked. Full stop. Your brain is being systematically hijacked. Full stop. Every notification, every headline, every social validation marker—they're all targeting the same neural pathway that evolution designed for genuine survival threats. The amygdala doesn't distinguish between a saber-toothed tiger and a negative comment on your post. It's the same biochemical cascade. This isn't philosophy. This is neuroscience. And it's time we applied it ruthlessly. Most people waste their limited cognitive resources on things that don't matter. They drain their mental energy worrying about what someone said about them online, political arguments that change nothing, minor inconveniences that are forgotten in a week, and manufactured outrage designed to hijack attention. Meanwhile, they ignore the things that actually move the needle in their lives. It's time to take back control. It's time to take back control. The Neurobiology of Not Giving a Damn Your average human has approximately 70,000 thoughts per day. Research indicates that 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive. This isn't random. Your default mode network—the brain circuitry active when you're not focused on a specific task—is constantly scanning for threats. It's literally wired to give a fuck about everything, especially potential social rejection. default mode network Weaponized apathy isn't about becoming emotionally dead. It's about neural optimization—ruthlessly eliminating emotional expenditure on stimuli that deliver zero evolutionary advantage. ruthlessly eliminating emotional expenditure on stimuli that deliver zero evolutionary advantage The modern world is bombarding you with stimuli your brain was never designed to handle. Your ancestors never had to process 24/7 news cycles of global catastrophes. They never had access to the opinions of thousands of strangers. They weren't constantly comparing themselves to curated highlight reels. They didn't have unlimited access to information without context. Your brain processes this onslaught as if each piece of information represents an immediate threat. This leaves you perpetually stuck in a low-grade fight-or-flight response, pumping out cortisol and adrenaline in response to things you can't control. Let me tell you something nobody else will: You are not morally obligated to care about everything. You are not morally obligated to care about everything. In fact, caring about everything is the fastest path to achieving nothing. The Attention Death Spiral Here's what they won't tell you: Your ability to care is not unlimited. It's a finite neurological resource. Your ability to care is not unlimited. finite neurological resource Every ounce of emotional bandwidth you waste on Instagram likes, political arguments with strangers, office gossip, and perceived slights is bandwidth stolen from the neural pathways that could be dedicated to your actual goals. Every time you allow your nervous system to activate over something inconsequential, you're literally restructuring your brain to become more reactive and less effective. This is the attention death spiral: You engage with emotional triggers. Your brain gets a hit of stress hormones. You become more sensitized to similar triggers. Your attention becomes increasingly fragmented. Your ability to focus on high-value activities diminishes. You become less effective at everything that matters. Repeat until your life consists entirely of reacting to bullshit. Breaking free from this spiral isn't just nice to have. It's the foundational skill of effective entrepreneurs in the digital age. Radical Neuroplasticity Protocol The solution isn't gentle mindfulness. It's aggressive neural rewiring. It's aggressive neural rewiring. Your brain's default settings are optimized for survival in conditions that no longer exist. It's time to update the operating system. Step 1: The Neurochemical Reset Step 1: The Neurochemical Reset Your brain has been conditioned to react emotionally to things that don't matter. It's time to break that pattern. When you notice an emotional trigger, observe it without engaging. This isn't about suppression – it's about rewiring. observe it without engaging Think of it like this: When your brain signals "This deserves your attention," simply respond: "This offers no real advantage. Not worth my bandwidth." "This offers no real advantage. Not worth my bandwidth." Start small: Read headlines without clicking the bait. Scroll past outrage-inducing posts without commenting. Notice criticism without feeling compelled to defend yourself. With practice, your automatic emotional reactions will weaken and eventually disappear. Step 2: Dopamine Redirection Step 2: Dopamine Redirection Social media platforms have hacked your brain's reward system. They've trained you to chase likes, comments, and arguments for cheap dopamine hits. Time to take your brain chemistry back. Create new reward pathways around selective apathy: Feel a sense of victory when you choose not to engage. Enjoy the peace of mind that comes from ignoring manufactured drama. Immediately do something you genuinely enjoy after successfully disengaging. For example, when you resist jumping into an online argument, go make your favorite coffee or take a quick walk. Your brain will start associating selective attention with pleasure instead of FOMO. Step 3: The Evolutionary Audit Step 3: The Evolutionary Audit Our brains evolved to manage about 150 relationships and respond to immediate physical threats. Not infinite social drama and global catastrophes. When something demands your attention, run it through this filter: Does it directly impact my physical safety or health? Does it affect my ability to advance my goals or status? Does it significantly impact the people I genuinely care about? If you answer "no" to all three, your concern is an evolutionary mismatch. Let it go. I use this daily. When I catch my mind spinning on something, I ask myself if it's truly relevant to my survival, goals, or inner circle. If not, I consciously redirect to something that is. The Strategic Advantage of Selective Concern Those who can choose what they care about operate on an entirely different level from those who can't. While others are depleting their cortisol reserves over social media debates, burning cognitive resources on office politics, and wasting neural real estate on celebrity opinions, you'll be preserving your executive function capabilities and directing neurological resources toward high-value targets. Your competitors cannot defeat what they cannot emotionally manipulate. Your competitors cannot defeat what they cannot emotionally manipulate. Consider Steve Jobs. Consider Steve Jobs. In his biography, Walter Isaacson details how Jobs practiced "extreme focus" - not just in product design, but in emotional investment. Jobs famously wore the same outfit daily to eliminate decision fatigue and maintained a ruthless approach to saying "no" to projects, features, and concerns that didn't align with his core vision. This wasn't just about productivity - it was about preserving cognitive and emotional bandwidth for what actually mattered. While competitors spread themselves thin trying to please everyone, Jobs concentrated Apple's resources on creating breakthrough products that redefined entire industries. As he said: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully." "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully." The same principle applies to your emotional investments. Applied Neurological Freedom Let's get practical. Let's get practical. I used to waste mental energy on everything. Industry gossip, social media arguments, and news cycles that changed daily – all living rent-free in my head while my actual goals collected dust. I had to develop practical filters or watch my ambitions die a slow death by a thousand distractions. Here are three approaches that actually work: 1. The 72-Hour Test 1. The 72-Hour Test When something triggers an emotional response, ask yourself: "Will this matter 72 hours from now?" "Will this matter 72 hours from now?" That's it. Simple but ruthless. Most concerns fail this test instantly. Arguments online, minor criticisms, small rejections – they feel world-ending at the moment but evaporate within days. Elon Musk does something similar. When asked how he handles criticism, he said he filters by asking if it will matter in a week or a month. His answer: "Almost never." This isn't about ignoring legitimate problems. It's about not treating every input as equally deserving of your limited mental bandwidth. 2. Impact-to-Effort Ratio 2. Impact-to-Effort Ratio For everything demanding your attention, quickly evaluate: Potential impact ÷ Energy required Potential impact ÷ Energy required This cuts through emotional noise and forces you to be rational about where your attention goes. A project that might transform your business but requires focused work: high priority. A random comment questioning your approach that would take hours to address: low priority. The math doesn't lie. When you start calculating this consciously, you'll be shocked at what you've been prioritizing. 3. The Intervention Question 3. The Intervention Question For any concern, ask: "Can I directly affect this situation?" "Can I directly affect this situation?" If you can't meaningfully intervene, it doesn't deserve your sustained attention. Global news cycles, other people's opinions, problems from five years ago – none of these pass this filter. This isn't callousness. It's acknowledging reality. Your emotional investment should align with your ability to influence outcomes. Strategic Focus vs. Reactive Attention Here's what I've observed after years of working with entrepreneurs: Those who can selectively deploy their attention consistently outperform those who can't. Not because they work harder. Because they work cleaner. Look at any high performer you respect. They're not reacting to everything. They're proactively focused on what moves their needle. Bill Gates doesn't split his foundation's resources across thousands of issues. He chooses specific problems where focused attention can create leverage. Elite athletes don't waste mental energy worrying about the crowd or their last mistakes during critical moments. They channel 100% of their focus to execution. This isn't dismissing real concerns. It's strategic allocation of a finite resource – your attention. When I work with entrepreneurs who feel scattered, we conduct a simple exercise: Track exactly where your mental energy goes for three days. Note what you get in return from each investment. Identify what high-value opportunities are being neglected. The pattern is consistent: most are investing heavily in low-return mental activities while neglecting the few that would create real leverage. The Last Fuck You'll Ever Need to Give Here's the cognitive trap: Here's the cognitive trap: You've been conditioned to believe that caring about everything makes you a better person. The truth? Indiscriminate concern is not a virtue. It's neurological self-sabotage. Indiscriminate concern is not a virtue. It's neurological self-sabotage. The people who achieve extraordinary outcomes aren't caring more—they're caring with laser precision. They've mastered the ultimate psychological skill: the ability to choose, without guilt or hesitation, exactly where their finite neurological resources will be deployed. They understand that every unnecessary fuck given is a strategic opportunity lost. In my own work, I've seen this pattern repeatedly. The entrepreneurs who break through aren't the ones who care about everything - they're the ones who ruthlessly prioritize their emotional bandwidth for what matters most. This isn't about becoming cold. It's about becoming calibrated. It's about becoming calibrated. This isn't philosophy. It's neurology. Your brain has limited bandwidth. Deploy it wisely. Your brain has limited bandwidth. Deploy it wisely. Neurological Sovereignty What we're really talking about is neurological sovereignty – reclaiming your brain from those who profit from hijacking it. This isn't just self-help. It's revolution. It's revolution. Your attention is the most valuable commodity on the planet right now. Companies worth billions exist solely to capture and monetize it. Naval Ravikant nails it: "The modern devil is cheap dopamine." "The modern devil is cheap dopamine." Your brain's reward systems have been weaponized against you. You've been programmed to seek emotional engagement with things that don't matter. Taking back control isn't easy. Your brain will resist because it's addicted. Society will resist because your independence threatens the status quo. You'll face accusations of being disconnected, cold, or uncaring. But remember: But remember: You can't set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm. You can't set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm. You can't contribute anything meaningful if your brain is scattered across a thousand meaningless concerns. You can't achieve your vision if you're constantly reacting instead of creating. The path forward isn't complicated, but it requires discipline: Choose ruthlessly what gets access to your attention. Practice daily disengagement from low-value concerns. Redirect your mental energy toward what actually moves the needle. Make this your default operating system. Your neurology is too valuable to waste on things that drain without giving back. Your attention is too precious to surrender to those who profit from your anxiety. Your potential is too important to sacrifice on the altar of indiscriminate concern. It's time to take back control. It's time to take back control. It's time for neurological sovereignty. It's time for neurological sovereignty. – Scott

Neurological Sovereignty: The Neurobiology of Not Giving a Damn

What do board games, neuroscience, brain hacking, and common scents have in common? All are core to the board game WHIFF. The gaming world is often dominated by visuals, whether electronic or analog. At the Festival International des Jeux, I was able to test some games which break this mould. At the Nuits du Off, I was fortunate enough to bump into Dr Alice Drew and Dr Alice Vidal and test out their prototype party game, WHIFF. The Festival International des Jeux is one of the largest board game events in Europe, hosting the As d’Or (Golden Ace) awards, panels, exhibitions of new games, and the Nuits du Off or Protolab where game designers bring their prototypes to test out ideas, balance their games, and show off their unpublished works. The premise of WHIFF is simple. There are a number of vials on a beautifully crafted wooden turntable, each containing a different aroma. The actual smell is written inside the cap of each. To take your turn you select one of these, insert it into a wooden holder with a bulb, and choose your level of difficulty. There are three choices: easy - the color will match the scent


medium - the color will not match the scent


hard - the color may or may not match the scent Once a difficulty is chosen, another player checks the answer and inserts a color filter before turning on the light. The main player then takes the wooden holder and takes a good whiff. If this sounds too easy, you haven't tried it. It's based on solid research on how much of our sense of smell is based on visual information (as is our sense of taste). At one point, I managed to somehow get fixated on yellow being banana, so everything with a yellow light smelled like a banana. I did best with truffle and a red light, but only because garlic wasn't an option (I don't know why truffle with a red sensory input was garlic, and science has yet to provide a better answer than that humans aren't good at segregating sensory inputs). After trying the game, I arranged an interview the next day to ask more. How It All Began The first whiff of the concept came about while Drew and Vidal were finishing their neuroscience PhDs and followed their noses into the puzzle of how the brain integrates senses. Both already had a personal interest in the world of flavors and smells, and realized that they (and everyone else) were not good at identifying different smells isolated from context, so they started looking into challenging their senses. Around the same time, people were losing their sense of smell to COVID-19 infections, and the impact of this on quality of life was becoming more obvious. While other games do exist using smells (there's a short list of a few different ones at the end of this article), Whiff deliberately creates a mismatch between visual and olfactory inputs, and people often depend on the visual cue (the writer can attest to this - since playing this game everything yellow brings back the scent of banana). As well as appearing this year at Cannes, WHIFF also featured as a finalist in the DAU Festival in Barcelona. Showing its scientific roots, it’s also been seen at the Barcelona Science Festival in 2024. The Future? While the concept is simple, this is a game I can easily see making its way into homes for families and parties - throughout the playtest, there was a lot of discussion and laughter about the different scents and perceptions. Not only does it create a scent of competition, but it also helps explore and understand one of our senses which is simultaneously one of the most impactful and most overlooked. The inclusion of conflicting visual input may sound like it would have limited impact, but the effect has to be seen (and smelled) to be believed. Drs Drew and Vidal have also created workshops for corporate events and delivered them at a business school. Another is scheduled to be delivered to an architecture design firm, to help develop an appreciation of how our senses are integrated and how different designs can affect both smell and, as a result, taste and wider experience. While WHIFF is still published directly by the creators to order, Drs Drew and Vidal are speaking with publishers and distributors. The board itself, and the scent holder, are beautifully made of recycled wood by Roy Wolff and would fit in perfectly on a dining table after a meal (or before, if you'd prefer not to contaminate your senses before playing). The Science So, what’s it all based on? The Drs’ PhDs in neuroscience give the game away here. There have been a number of experiments over the years which establish how much we depend on the integration of our senses to process inputs, rather than treating each in isolation. Scent and sight are particularly linked, and it’s been demonstrated time and time again with everything from Brochet’s oenology-busting red/white wine experiments to Pepsi in Coca-Cola glasses (or Coca-Cola in Pepsi glasses) to blue steak that sight and smell have strong, sometimes unpredictable interactions. This opens up possibilities that go far beyond the obvious culinary and mixologist applications. It doesn’t go as far as lending weight to some of the more outlandish aromatherapist claims, but there is a comfortable middle ground where we can see the positive effects of designing environments to leverage multiple senses and their interactions. Other Olfactory Games You can get WHIFF directly from the website, soon to be updated with pricing and design options. To scratch the nasal itch, there are a number of other games that use scents as a core part of gameplay if you want to expand your olfactory palette. SentoSphere SentoSphere does a series of sensory-based games, from family-oriented to more specialized. They are based in France, but many of their games are available worldwide. Bacchanales is, as the box art and name suggest, based on wine tasting. Playable by up to 7 people (more if you work in pairs), players bring along a bottle of wine each to taste (or rather for other players to taste) and score points based on identifying the different properties of the wine. The game includes a thorough guide to help players identify the different markers, and on average, first-time players get three out of five right. Voyage Olfactif is another party-style game using scents, but instead of trying to deceive the senses, it relies on identifying them along with different properties. A dozen images are laid out around the board and each player is secretly given one to try and communicate to the other players. They do this using one to three scents, which they can use to describe the scenes in different ways - whether the color is relevant, the smell is present in the scene, whether it’s got an abstract connection, and so on. I tested Voyage Olfactif at the festival, and not only recommended it but highly recommended a suggestion by one of SentoSphere’s representatives which was to try it with personal photos instead of the stock ones provided as a family game. Cortex Challenge With less of a focus on scent, Cortex Challenge is a fast and light puzzle game that plays with different modes, including smell and touch challenges along with mazes, duplicates, and others. While it’s less scent-centered than the others, the scratch and sniff cards do add an extra dimension to the gameplay. What do board games, neuroscience, brain hacking, and common scents have in common? All are core to the board game WHIFF . WHIFF WHIFF The gaming world is often dominated by visuals, whether electronic or analog. At the Festival International des Jeux , I was able to test some games which break this mould. At the Nuits du Off, I was fortunate enough to bump into Dr Alice Drew and Dr Alice Vidal and test out their prototype party game, WHIFF . Festival International des Jeux Festival International des Jeux WHIFF The Festival International des Jeux is one of the largest board game events in Europe, hosting the As d’Or (Golden Ace) awards, panels, exhibitions of new games, and the Nuits du Off or Protolab where game designers bring their prototypes to test out ideas, balance their games, and show off their unpublished works. The Festival International des Jeux is one of the largest board game events in Europe, hosting the As d’Or (Golden Ace) awards, panels, exhibitions of new games, and the Nuits du Off or Protolab where game designers bring their prototypes to test out ideas, balance their games, and show off their unpublished works. Festival International des Jeux As d’Or Nuits du Off The premise of WHIFF is simple. There are a number of vials on a beautifully crafted wooden turntable, each containing a different aroma. The actual smell is written inside the cap of each. To take your turn you select one of these, insert it into a wooden holder with a bulb, and choose your level of difficulty. There are three choices: WHIFF easy - the color will match the scent medium - the color will not match the scent hard - the color may or may not match the scent easy - the color will match the scent easy - the color will match the scent medium - the color will not match the scent medium - the color will not match the scent hard - the color may or may not match the scent hard - the color may or may not match the scent Once a difficulty is chosen, another player checks the answer and inserts a color filter before turning on the light. The main player then takes the wooden holder and takes a good whiff. If this sounds too easy, you haven't tried it. It's based on solid research on how much of our sense of smell is based on visual information (as is our sense of taste). At one point, I managed to somehow get fixated on yellow being banana, so everything with a yellow light smelled like a banana. I did best with truffle and a red light, but only because garlic wasn't an option (I don't know why truffle with a red sensory input was garlic, and science has yet to provide a better answer than that humans aren't good at segregating sensory inputs). After trying the game, I arranged an interview the next day to ask more. How It All Began The first whiff of the concept came about while Drew and Vidal were finishing their neuroscience PhDs and followed their noses into the puzzle of how the brain integrates senses. Both already had a personal interest in the world of flavors and smells, and realized that they (and everyone else) were not good at identifying different smells isolated from context, so they started looking into challenging their senses. Around the same time, people were losing their sense of smell to COVID-19 infections, and the impact of this on quality of life was becoming more obvious. While other games do exist using smells (there's a short list of a few different ones at the end of this article), Whiff deliberately creates a mismatch between visual and olfactory inputs, and people often depend on the visual cue (the writer can attest to this - since playing this game everything yellow brings back the scent of banana). Whiff As well as appearing this year at Cannes, WHIFF also featured as a finalist in the DAU Festival in Barcelona. Showing its scientific roots, it’s also been seen at the Barcelona Science Festival in 2024. WHIFF DAU Festival The Future? While the concept is simple, this is a game I can easily see making its way into homes for families and parties - throughout the playtest, there was a lot of discussion and laughter about the different scents and perceptions. Not only does it create a scent of competition, but it also helps explore and understand one of our senses which is simultaneously one of the most impactful and most overlooked. The inclusion of conflicting visual input may sound like it would have limited impact, but the effect has to be seen (and smelled) to be believed. Drs Drew and Vidal have also created workshops for corporate events and delivered them at a business school. Another is scheduled to be delivered to an architecture design firm, to help develop an appreciation of how our senses are integrated and how different designs can affect both smell and, as a result, taste and wider experience. While WHIFF is still published directly by the creators to order, Drs Drew and Vidal are speaking with publishers and distributors. The board itself, and the scent holder, are beautifully made of recycled wood by Roy Wolff and would fit in perfectly on a dining table after a meal (or before, if you'd prefer not to contaminate your senses before playing). WHIFF Roy Wolff The Science So, what’s it all based on? The Drs’ PhDs in neuroscience give the game away here. There have been a number of experiments over the years which establish how much we depend on the integration of our senses to process inputs, rather than treating each in isolation. Scent and sight are particularly linked, and it’s been demonstrated time and time again with everything from Brochet’s oenology-busting red/white wine experiments to Pepsi in Coca-Cola glasses (or Coca-Cola in Pepsi glasses) to blue steak that sight and smell have strong, sometimes unpredictable interactions. Brochet’s oenology-busting red/white wine experiments blue steak This opens up possibilities that go far beyond the obvious culinary and mixologist applications. It doesn’t go as far as lending weight to some of the more outlandish aromatherapist claims, but there is a comfortable middle ground where we can see the positive effects of designing environments to leverage multiple senses and their interactions. Other Olfactory Games You can get WHIFF directly from the website , soon to be updated with pricing and design options. To scratch the nasal itch, there are a number of other games that use scents as a core part of gameplay if you want to expand your olfactory palette. WHIFF website SentoSphere SentoSphere does a series of sensory-based games, from family-oriented to more specialized. They are based in France, but many of their games are available worldwide. Bacchanales is, as the box art and name suggest, based on wine tasting. Playable by up to 7 people (more if you work in pairs), players bring along a bottle of wine each to taste (or rather for other players to taste) and score points based on identifying the different properties of the wine. The game includes a thorough guide to help players identify the different markers, and on average, first-time players get three out of five right. Bacchanales Voyage Olfactif is another party-style game using scents, but instead of trying to deceive the senses, it relies on identifying them along with different properties. A dozen images are laid out around the board and each player is secretly given one to try and communicate to the other players. They do this using one to three scents, which they can use to describe the scenes in different ways - whether the color is relevant, the smell is present in the scene, whether it’s got an abstract connection, and so on. Voyage Olfactif I tested Voyage Olfactif at the festival, and not only recommended it but highly recommended a suggestion by one of SentoSphere’s representatives which was to try it with personal photos instead of the stock ones provided as a family game. Voyage Olfactif Cortex Challenge With less of a focus on scent, Cortex Challenge is a fast and light puzzle game that plays with different modes, including smell and touch challenges along with mazes, duplicates, and others. While it’s less scent-centered than the others, the scratch and sniff cards do add an extra dimension to the gameplay. Cortex Challenge

What the Nose Knows: How a Neuroscience-Inspired Game Makes Scents

Panama, Panama, December 9th, 2024/Chainwire/--Shiro Neko($SHIRO) launched and reached a $1 billion market cap on its first day of trading. With this, the team aims to make $SHIRO a standout memecoin, redefining expectations for new launches in the space. Shiro Neko's Metrics After its launch, Shiro Neko established a stable floor with a market cap between $300 million and $400 million. This retracement can demonstrate confidence. Shiro Neko’s adoption metrics: 12,000+ Holders On-Chain: Over 12,000 wallet addresses held $SHIRO on launch day.
Five Exchange Listings: On its first day, Shiro Neko debuted with listings on five exchanges, making it accessible to global investors and ensuring strong liquidity. Resonating with Retail Buyers Shiro Neko is designed to appeal to a broad audience, leveraging cultural relevance and strong community ties—the token’s name means “white cat” in Japanese. Unlike many tokens that rely solely on Twitter for growth, Shiro Neko’s strategy extends to other platforms, capturing retail interest in untapped spaces. Rising in the Cat Coin Rankings Shiro Neko has already become the fourth largest cat coin by market cap, following $Popcat, $Mog, and $Mew. Ethereum Memecoin According to the team, the market has shifted back to Ethereum-based tokens. Shiro Neko aims to be at the forefront of Ethereum memecoins, combining a strong narrative, large community backing, and a subcategory within the memecoin space. Future Plans Looking ahead, Shiro Neko has several initiatives in the pipeline, including integration with Shibarium and a staking feature that will enable $SHIRO holders to stake their tokens and potentially earn $SHIB or $BONE as rewards. Additionally, Shiro Neko is preparing to launch a charitable initiative, further enhancing its impact and community value. About Shiro Neko Shiro Neko ($SHIRO) is a next-generation memecoin based on cat-themed cryptocurrencies. Designed to capture interest, $SHIRO combines cultural significance with a compelling narrative to set a new standard for memecoins. Users can visit the project's official channels for more information on Shiro Neko and its progress. Website: https://www.shironeko.gg/ X: https://x.com/shiro Contact Robert O'Neill Shiro Neko info@shironeko.gg This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here Panama, Panama, December 9th, 2024/Chainwire/--Shiro Neko($SHIRO) launched and reached a $1 billion market cap on its first day of trading. With this, the team aims to make $SHIRO a standout memecoin, redefining expectations for new launches in the space. Shiro Neko's Metrics After its launch, Shiro Neko established a stable floor with a market cap between $300 million and $400 million. This retracement can demonstrate confidence. Shiro Neko’s adoption metrics: 12,000+ Holders On-Chain: Over 12,000 wallet addresses held $SHIRO on launch day. Five Exchange Listings: On its first day, Shiro Neko debuted with listings on five exchanges, making it accessible to global investors and ensuring strong liquidity. 12,000+ Holders On-Chain: Over 12,000 wallet addresses held $SHIRO on launch day. Five Exchange Listings: On its first day, Shiro Neko debuted with listings on five exchanges, making it accessible to global investors and ensuring strong liquidity. Resonating with Retail Buyers Shiro Neko is designed to appeal to a broad audience, leveraging cultural relevance and strong community ties—the token’s name means “ white cat ” in Japanese. white cat Unlike many tokens that rely solely on Twitter for growth, Shiro Neko’s strategy extends to other platforms, capturing retail interest in untapped spaces. Rising in the Cat Coin Rankings Shiro Neko has already become the fourth largest cat coin by market cap, following $Popcat, $Mog, and $Mew. Ethereum Memecoin According to the team, the market has shifted back to Ethereum-based tokens. Shiro Neko aims to be at the forefront of Ethereum memecoins, combining a strong narrative, large community backing, and a subcategory within the memecoin space. Future Plans Looking ahead, Shiro Neko has several initiatives in the pipeline, including integration with Shibarium and a staking feature that will enable $SHIRO holders to stake their tokens and potentially earn $SHIB or $BONE as rewards. Additionally, Shiro Neko is preparing to launch a charitable initiative, further enhancing its impact and community value. About Shiro Neko Shiro Neko ($SHIRO) is a next-generation memecoin based on cat-themed cryptocurrencies. Designed to capture interest, $SHIRO combines cultural significance with a compelling narrative to set a new standard for memecoins. Shiro Neko ($SHIRO) Shiro Neko ($SHIRO) Users can visit the project's official channels for more information on Shiro Neko and its progress. Website: https://www.shironeko.gg/ https://www.shironeko.gg/ https://www.shironeko.gg/ X: https://x.com/shiro https://x.com/shiro https://x.com/shiro Contact Robert O'Neill Shiro Neko info@shironeko.gg This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here here here

Shiro Neko Achieves $1 Billion Market Cap On Day One

Şiro Neko Birinci gündə 1 milyard dollarlıq bazar dəyərinə nail olur

Shiro Neko alcanza una capitalización de mercado de 1.000 millones de dólares el primer día

シロネコ、初日に時価総額10億ドルを達成

შირო ნეკო პირველ დღეს 1 მილიარდ დოლარს აღწევს

Shiro Neko dia mahatratra 1 miliara dolara amin'ny tsena amin'ny andro voalohany

शिरो नेकोले पहिलो दिन १ अर्ब डलरको मार्केट क्याप हासिल गरेको छ

Shiro Neko 1.000 millones dolarkunata qhatuta haypan Ñawpaq p’unchaypi

Широ Неко дар рӯзи аввал ба сармояи бозор 1 миллиард доллар мерасад

ሽሮ ነኮ ኣብ ቀዳማይ መዓልቲ 1 ቢልዮን ዶላር ዕዳጋ ኣመዝጊቡ።

Shiro Neko birinchi kunida 1 milliard dollarlik bozor kapitaliga erishdi

Shiro Neko 上市第一天市值就达到 10 亿美元

U-Shiro Neko Uzuza U-$1 Billion Market Cap Ngosuku Lokuqala

If an individual is sleep deprived, at what minimum can certain functions continue without getting any sleep? If someone sees something from a distance, but it is just clear enough to be roughly interpreted by the mind in terms of kind, but not specificity, is there an input configuration requirement to guarantee an optimum interpretation of the external world by the human mind? If functions are continuously operating at minimums, could there be a likelihood that some of the factors responsible for optimum outputs may start getting the message that they are no longer necessary? If this is the case, could it cascade into a serious condition? Neurons are known to have around 50 billion proteins. Protein misfolding has been established as a major cause of some neurodegenerative diseases. A possible reason for protein misfolding has been identified as [cellular] environmental stress. A theoretical basis for why environmental stress may be responsible could be to look at working minimums and maximums, for functions, over certain intervals. Theorizing protein folding requires a top-down approach, which means that there is a source for which problems might arise, resulting--eventually--in misfolding and degenerative diseases. The closest destination for the top option is the electrical and chemical signals of neurons. It is theorized that the human mind is responsible for all functions that the brain is said to do. The human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals, with their interactions and features, in sets, in clusters of neurons, across the central and peripheral nervous system. This means that the human mind is the signals with their interactions and features. All the configurations for which representations and interpretations are based, for interoception and exteroception, have just one possible option in the brain, the signals, not genes, proteins, neurons, or other types of cells. This means that whatever is interpreted, accurately or not, or seems represented, accurately or not, is a result of the signals, such that with signals, interpretations, and features, in sets, are at the top, though their work has implications for other cells in the body, and several other molecules, especially proteins, abundant in neurons. Why? Exercise, for example, is an activity where electrical and chemical signals are interacting actively, with varying features applying. This top activity results in relays of electrical signals that, conceptually, for interactions with chemical signals, in sets, have an effect on other parts of the body. Simply, electrical and chemical signals are involved in every function. The consequences of those functions can also be seen elsewhere. Proteins, Neurons, and Signals Since neurons are not the human mind, or their proteins, because they do not organize information, it can be theorized that as neurons are involved in clusters, with sets of signals, their proteins assist several interactive processes between electrical and chemical signals. This indicates that when there are extended minimums or maximums, in sets of signals, there are ways that they come to have an effect on some of the proteins of the neurons involved in respective clusters [hence environmental stress]. Simply, neurons have proteins, and these proteins contribute to the primary role of signals, but as signals carry out their roles, depending on the pace or direction, they come to also have effects on the protein of some neurons, which may work more or work less, over an interval, which may, for some cases lead to misfolding, and then accumulations and disease, conceptually. It means that the mechanisms of signals can have an effect, conceptually, on the misfolding of proteins, then possibly developing into a degenerative disease for some. Tracking Possible Paths for Protein Misfolding From Signals It is possible to develop a number of minimums, maximums, and interactive-feature stretches of signals, with an exploration of how, for some people with Amyloidosis, that may have resulted from cellular [environmental] stress, to look at the roles that signals played. The interaction of signals is the way electrical signals strike at chemical signals, while the features are some of the states of the signals, in sets, at the times of the interactions. If a person drinks cold water but does not feel it as cold, why did the signals not give the experience of cold? There are several examples like this, but what can be looked at is the intensity of certain experiences or the longevity of others, which may have caused the larger protein folding error. Theorizing why proteins misfold may have to center around the major functional operators the electrical and chemical signals, which can then be sought, as the source toward reversal or prevention. There is a recent story in Nature, AI protein-prediction tool AlphaFold3 is now open source, stating that, "AlphaFold3, unlike its predecessors, is capable of modelling proteins in concert with other molecules. But instead of releasing its underlying code — as was done with AlphaFold2 — DeepMind provided access via a web server that restricted the number and types of predictions scientists could make. Crucially, the AlphaFold3 server prevented scientists from predicting how proteins behave in the presence of potential drugs. But now, DeepMind’s decision to release the code means academic scientists can predict such interactions by running the model themselves. The company initially said that making AlphaFold3 available only through a web server struck the right balance between enabling access for research and protecting commercial ambitions. Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinoff company in London, is applying AlphaFold3 to drug discovery." There is a recent press release, Argonne team breaks new ground in AI-driven protein design, stating that, "Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and the world’s fastest supercomputers, a research team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has developed an innovative computing framework to speed up the design of new proteins. On the heels of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which recognized advances in computational protein design, Argonne’s AI-driven approach has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize. Presented by the Association of Computing Machinery, the annual prize recognizes breakthroughs in using high performance computing to solve complex science problems. Mapping a protein’s amino acid sequence to its structure and function is a long-standing research challenge. Each unique arrangement of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — can yield different properties and behaviors. The sheer volume of potential variations makes it impractical to test them all through experiments alone. To put this in perspective, modifying just three amino acids in a sequence of 20 creates 8,000 possible combinations. But most proteins are far more complex, with some research targets containing hundreds to thousands of amino acids." If an individual is sleep deprived, at what minimum can certain functions continue without getting any sleep? If someone sees something from a distance, but it is just clear enough to be roughly interpreted by the mind in terms of kind, but not specificity, is there an input configuration requirement to guarantee an optimum interpretation of the external world by the human mind? If functions are continuously operating at minimums, could there be a likelihood that some of the factors responsible for optimum outputs may start getting the message that they are no longer necessary? If this is the case, could it cascade into a serious condition? Neurons are known to have around 50 billion proteins . Protein misfolding has been established as a major cause of some neurodegenerative diseases . A possible reason for protein misfolding has been identified as [cellular] environmental stress . A theoretical basis for why environmental stress may be responsible could be to look at working minimums and maximums, for functions, over certain intervals. have around 50 billion proteins major cause of some neurodegenerative diseases as [cellular] environmental stress Theorizing protein folding requires a top-down approach, which means that there is a source for which problems might arise, resulting--eventually--in misfolding and degenerative diseases. The closest destination for the top option is the electrical and chemical signals of neurons. It is theorized that the human mind is responsible for all functions that the brain is said to do. The human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals, with their interactions and features, in sets, in clusters of neurons, across the central and peripheral nervous system. This means that the human mind is the signals with their interactions and features. All the configurations for which representations and interpretations are based, for interoception and exteroception, have just one possible option in the brain, the signals, not genes, proteins, neurons, or other types of cells. This means that whatever is interpreted, accurately or not, or seems represented, accurately or not, is a result of the signals, such that with signals, interpretations, and features, in sets, are at the top, though their work has implications for other cells in the body, and several other molecules, especially proteins, abundant in neurons. Why? Exercise, for example, is an activity where electrical and chemical signals are interacting actively, with varying features applying. This top activity results in relays of electrical signals that, conceptually, for interactions with chemical signals, in sets, have an effect on other parts of the body. Simply, electrical and chemical signals are involved in every function. The consequences of those functions can also be seen elsewhere. Proteins, Neurons, and Signals Since neurons are not the human mind, or their proteins, because they do not organize information, it can be theorized that as neurons are involved in clusters, with sets of signals, their proteins assist several interactive processes between electrical and chemical signals. This indicates that when there are extended minimums or maximums, in sets of signals, there are ways that they come to have an effect on some of the proteins of the neurons involved in respective clusters [hence environmental stress]. Simply, neurons have proteins, and these proteins contribute to the primary role of signals, but as signals carry out their roles, depending on the pace or direction, they come to also have effects on the protein of some neurons, which may work more or work less, over an interval, which may, for some cases lead to misfolding, and then accumulations and disease, conceptually. It means that the mechanisms of signals can have an effect, conceptually, on the misfolding of proteins, then possibly developing into a degenerative disease for some. Tracking Possible Paths for Protein Misfolding From Signals It is possible to develop a number of minimums, maximums, and interactive-feature stretches of signals, with an exploration of how, for some people with Amyloidosis, that may have resulted from cellular [environmental] stress, to look at the roles that signals played. The interaction of signals is the way electrical signals strike at chemical signals , while the features are some of the states of the signals, in sets, at the times of the interactions. If a person drinks cold water but does not feel it as cold, why did the signals not give the experience of cold? There are several examples like this, but what can be looked at is the intensity of certain experiences or the longevity of others, which may have caused the larger protein folding error. The interaction of signals is the way electrical signals strike at chemical signals Theorizing why proteins misfold may have to center around the major functional operators the electrical and chemical signals, which can then be sought, as the source toward reversal or prevention. There is a recent story in Nature , AI protein-prediction tool AlphaFold3 is now open source , stating that, "AlphaFold3, unlike its predecessors, is capable of modelling proteins in concert with other molecules. But instead of releasing its underlying code — as was done with AlphaFold2 — DeepMind provided access via a web server that restricted the number and types of predictions scientists could make. Crucially, the AlphaFold3 server prevented scientists from predicting how proteins behave in the presence of potential drugs. But now, DeepMind’s decision to release the code means academic scientists can predict such interactions by running the model themselves. The company initially said that making AlphaFold3 available only through a web server struck the right balance between enabling access for research and protecting commercial ambitions. Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinoff company in London, is applying AlphaFold3 to drug discovery." Nature AI protein-prediction tool AlphaFold3 is now open source There is a recent press release, Argonne team breaks new ground in AI-driven protein design , stating that, "Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and the world’s fastest supercomputers, a research team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has developed an innovative computing framework to speed up the design of new proteins. On the heels of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which recognized advances in computational protein design, Argonne’s AI-driven approach has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize. Presented by the Association of Computing Machinery, the annual prize recognizes breakthroughs in using high performance computing to solve complex science problems. Mapping a protein’s amino acid sequence to its structure and function is a long-standing research challenge. Each unique arrangement of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — can yield different properties and behaviors. The sheer volume of potential variations makes it impractical to test them all through experiments alone. To put this in perspective, modifying just three amino acids in a sequence of 20 creates 8,000 possible combinations. But most proteins are far more complex, with some research targets containing hundreds to thousands of amino acids." Argonne team breaks new ground in AI-driven protein design

AlphaFold 3: How Does Proteins Misfolding Cause Neurodegenerative Diseases?

If the purpose is to understand how the the brain works, where in the brain is physicalism? Or, where in the brain is dualism? What part of the brain is materialism? How has the philosophy of mind defined the human mind, exactly for components within the cranium? There would have been eras that physicalism, dualism, materialism, panpsychism and several other philosophical takes may have held court with descriptions of how the mind or body worked, but with advances in neuroscience, there is little to no fit for their expressions. There are currently difficult problems of the mind like substance abuse, gambling addiction, mental disorders, and more. These are not problems that need more labels, but problems that, at minimum, any theory should state how the mind is operational while they are in effect and what could be done against their tides. Even within neuroscience, how the brain works is simply not neurons, neural circuits, or a population of neuronsbecause if a cluster of neurons mechanizes a function, what exactly is the cluster doing that another cluster is not? If it is stated that it is yet to be understood, then what theory of neural circuit has expressed why a [neurons] group specializes in a function? Neurons are not like changing. Neurons are close to solid [physical] forms, so it is unlikely that they are getting shaped in one direction that would indicate why they interpret a smell differently from the next, or a smell from a sound. Simply, neurons are not having direct anatomic changes to ensure a function, in contrast to another function. Even with synapses, when strong or weak, what must be definitive in every synapse? Assuming the philosophy of mind had looked closely at clusters of neurons in the last century to base many of its takes, maybe it would have been ahead of science. So far, philosophy of mind is no longer ahead of neuroscience and may not even be much linked anymore, since the philosophy chooses what it wants but the science is vacant for an advance within the cranium. The closest options to what the mind is and how the mind works is theorized to be the electrical and chemical signals of nerve cells, in sets, in clusters of neurons. It is the configuration of the signals, their interactions, and features that could be zeroed in on for how the human mind works. There is no function of neurons—for the mind—that signals are not involved in. There is no synapse—chemical or electrical—that is absent of signals. Genes are not the human mind. The environment is not the human mind. Neurons are not the human mind. Elementary particles of physics are not the human mind. Neuroglia are not the human mind as well. To answer questions about the human mind is to seek out what the mind might be in the cranium, not stray juxtapositions that, no matter how cutely described, cannot even answer for mental disorders, in the same mind for which several consciousness or philosophical stretches should define. To properly evaluate any consciousness theory or philosophical theory of mind, questions—on what the mind is [in the cranium, not the mind of the universe], how it works distinctively and how it may explain or suggest solutions to mind problems—should be sought, not generalized neuroimaging, adversarial collaboration or vague correlates. It is like trying to understand how human memory works, with mentions of long-term, short-term and others, without naming relays across memory destinations or if the configuration of any memory is different from an emotion or a feeling, or the exact forms for which memories are associated. There is a new book featured on The Transmitter, How did consciousness evolve? An excerpt from ‘A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness’, stating that, "However, life is a scientifically observable phenomenon, while our subjective experiences are not accessible to third parties. Furthermore, for conscious subjects, their own life is an experiential phenomenon as well. One alternative to get away from the mind-body conundrum has been pan-psychism, which is an extension of the identity hypothesis, proposing that some degree of consciousness is a feature of the universe like energy or gravity are. Some other researchers, particularly physicists, have moved much farther, proposing that the source of consciousness relies on quantum mechanics. In this view, quantal superpositions of states in elementary particles would collapse wave functions into (proto-) moments of experience composed of basic qualia, the fundamental ‘particles’ of consciousness. However, despite the apparent relation between consciousness and complexity, how material mechanisms become transformed into a first-person qualitative experience poses a major problem for neuroscientific research, which is conceived to deal with second-person observable phenomena. Because the unobservable nature of subjective states by second parties severely limits their scientific study, some have decided to downplay them as an irrelevant illusion generated by our complex brain networks. Whether consciousness is or is not relevant for our decisions and behavior is a debatable issue, but the illusion argument does not really explain to me how subjectivity is in fact produced." There is a recent paper in Nature, Neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows, stating that, "Despite long knowing what brain areas support language comprehension, our knowledge of the neural computations that these frontal and temporal regions implement remains limited. One important unresolved question concerns functional differences among the neural populations that comprise the language network. Neural populations exhibiting these profiles are interleaved across the language network, which suggests that all language regions have direct access to distinct, multiscale representations of linguistic input—a property that may be critical for the efficiency and robustness of language processing." If the purpose is to understand how the the brain works, where in the brain is physicalism? Or, where in the brain is dualism? What part of the brain is materialism? How has the philosophy of mind defined the human mind, exactly for components within the cranium? There would have been eras that physicalism, dualism, materialism, panpsychism and several other philosophical takes may have held court with descriptions of how the mind or body worked, but with advances in neuroscience, there is little to no fit for their expressions. There are currently difficult problems of the mind like substance abuse, gambling addiction, mental disorders, and more. These are not problems that need more labels, but problems that, at minimum, any theory should state how the mind is operational while they are in effect and what could be done against their tides. Even within neuroscience, how the brain works is simply not neurons, neural circuits, or a population of neurons because if a cluster of neurons mechanizes a function, what exactly is the cluster doing that another cluster is not? how the brain works is simply not neurons, neural circuits, or a population of neurons If it is stated that it is yet to be understood, then what theory of neural circuit has expressed why a [neurons] group specializes in a function? Neurons are not like changing. Neurons are close to solid [physical] forms, so it is unlikely that they are getting shaped in one direction that would indicate why they interpret a smell differently from the next, or a smell from a sound. Simply, neurons are not having direct anatomic changes to ensure a function, in contrast to another function. Even with synapses, when strong or weak, what must be definitive in every synapse? Assuming the philosophy of mind had looked closely at clusters of neurons in the last century to base many of its takes, maybe it would have been ahead of science. So far, philosophy of mind is no longer ahead of neuroscience and may not even be much linked anymore, since the philosophy chooses what it wants but the science is vacant for an advance within the cranium. The closest options to what the mind is and how the mind works is theorized to be the electrical and chemical signals of nerve cells, in sets, in clusters of neurons. It is the configuration of the signals, their interactions, and features that could be zeroed in on for how the human mind works. There is no function of neurons—for the mind—that signals are not involved in. There is no synapse—chemical or electrical—that is absent of signals. Genes are not the human mind . The environment is not the human mind. Neurons are not the human mind. Elementary particles of physics are not the human mind. Neuroglia are not the human mind as well. Genes are not the human mind To answer questions about the human mind is to seek out what the mind might be in the cranium, not stray juxtapositions that, no matter how cutely described, cannot even answer for mental disorders, in the same mind for which several consciousness or philosophical stretches should define. To properly evaluate any consciousness theory or philosophical theory of mind, questions—on what the mind is [in the cranium, not the mind of the universe], how it works distinctively and how it may explain or suggest solutions to mind problems—should be sought, not generalized neuroimaging, adversarial collaboration or vague correlates. It is like trying to understand how human memory works, with mentions of long-term, short-term and others, without naming relays across memory destinations or if the configuration of any memory is different from an emotion or a feeling, or the exact forms for which memories are associated. There is a new book featured on The Transmitter , How did consciousness evolve? An excerpt from ‘A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness’ , stating that, "However, life is a scientifically observable phenomenon, while our subjective experiences are not accessible to third parties. Furthermore, for conscious subjects, their own life is an experiential phenomenon as well. One alternative to get away from the mind-body conundrum has been pan-psychism, which is an extension of the identity hypothesis, proposing that some degree of consciousness is a feature of the universe like energy or gravity are. Some other researchers, particularly physicists, have moved much farther, proposing that the source of consciousness relies on quantum mechanics. In this view, quantal superpositions of states in elementary particles would collapse wave functions into (proto-) moments of experience composed of basic qualia, the fundamental ‘particles’ of consciousness. However, despite the apparent relation between consciousness and complexity, how material mechanisms become transformed into a first-person qualitative experience poses a major problem for neuroscientific research, which is conceived to deal with second-person observable phenomena. Because the unobservable nature of subjective states by second parties severely limits their scientific study, some have decided to downplay them as an irrelevant illusion generated by our complex brain networks. Whether consciousness is or is not relevant for our decisions and behavior is a debatable issue, but the illusion argument does not really explain to me how subjectivity is in fact produced." The Transmitter How did consciousness evolve? An excerpt from ‘A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness’ There is a recent paper in Nature , Neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows , stating that, "Despite long knowing what brain areas support language comprehension, our knowledge of the neural computations that these frontal and temporal regions implement remains limited. One important unresolved question concerns functional differences among the neural populations that comprise the language network. Neural populations exhibiting these profiles are interleaved across the language network, which suggests that all language regions have direct access to distinct, multiscale representations of linguistic input—a property that may be critical for the efficiency and robustness of language processing." Nature Neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows

Consciousness: Why Philosophy of Mind May No Longer Be Relevant to Neuroscience

**LONDON, United Kingdom, August 9th, 2024/Chainwire/--**NeurochainAI, a decentralized AI-as-a-Service (DeAIAS) network, today launched its Token Generation Event (TGE) with its $NCN token becoming available for trading at 12 pm UTC on two centralized exchanges, Gate.io  and WhiteBIT, with listings on additional CEXs to be announced in the near future. With over 150,000 users already onboard and more than 80,000 wallets connected to the platform, NeurochainAI is swiftly establishing itself as a leader in the DeAIAS space that also covers a reliable DePIN for AI Inference. To further enhance user experience and accessibility, NeurochainAI has rolled out a beta version of its mobile app for AI inference. The beta app is already being tested by over 3,000 users across 183 countries, reflecting the global demand and anticipation for NeurochainAI's innovative solutions. The TGE marks the official launch of NeurochainAI’s $NCN token, with the project committed to a fair launch strategy by listing directly on centralized exchanges (CEXs), ensuring equal access and better terms for everyone. As a part of the strategy, the community also has the opportunity to earn NCN by connecting GPUs and participating in data tasks for extended periods of time. With a strong reputation in the industry and over 10 million users, Gate.io boasts a daily trading volume that exceeds $12 billion. WhiteBIT stands out as a top choice for crypto enthusiasts with impressive trading volumes and over 4 million users from 150 countries. The token launch will be immediately followed by the introduction of node staking, an initiative aimed at fostering network decentralization with a fair way to grow a validator network. The approach mirrors industry best practices, ensuring transparency with rewards known upfront, decentralization as the same stake applies to all nodes, and a fair chance for all to participate on a first come, first serve basis. “We're focused on creating a TGE and node staking that makes fairness and transparency a central goal, ” said Julius Serenas, CEO of NeurochainAI. “Our fair launch approach ensures all participants have the opportunity to partake in the NeurochainAI ecosystem, promoting network decentralization and community-driven growth in the AI-as-a-Service space." Operating a Neuron Validator not only contributes to the ecosystem’s decentralization but also rewards participants with daily $NCN compensation, where a stable amount of native coins must be staked to become a validator. 40% of the $NCN supply will be allocated to Neuron Validator NFTs, with a structured vesting plan designed to incentivize long-term engagement. To learn more about NeurochainAI’s node staking opportunities and becoming a Neuron Validator, visit their guide here. About NeurochainAI NeurochainAI is a decentralized AI-as-a-Service (DeAIAS) network that streamlines the process of building, launching, and use of AI-powered decentralized applications (dApps). Providing a ready-to-use AI infrastructure, the network enables developers to create AI dApps up to 24 times faster and 5 times more cost-effectively compared to traditional methods. The platform is focused on advancing the field of AI application development, offering unparalleled ease of use and affordability. Website | x | Telegram | Discord | Linkedin | Medium Contact COO Odeta Iseviciute odeta@neurochain.ai This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. **LONDON, United Kingdom, August 9th, 2024/Chainwire/--**NeurochainAI, a decentralized AI-as-a-Service (DeAIAS) network, today launched its Token Generation Event (TGE) with its $NCN token becoming available for trading at 12 pm UTC on two centralized exchanges, Gate.io  and WhiteBIT, with listings on additional CEXs to be announced in the near future. With over 150,000 users already onboard and more than 80,000 wallets connected to the platform, NeurochainAI is swiftly establishing itself as a leader in the DeAIAS space that also covers a reliable DePIN for AI Inference. To further enhance user experience and accessibility, NeurochainAI has rolled out a beta version of its mobile app for AI inference. The beta app is already being tested by over 3,000 users across 183 countries, reflecting the global demand and anticipation for NeurochainAI's innovative solutions. The TGE marks the official launch of NeurochainAI’s $NCN token, with the project committed to a fair launch strategy by listing directly on centralized exchanges (CEXs), ensuring equal access and better terms for everyone. As a part of the strategy, the community also has the opportunity to earn NCN by connecting GPUs and participating in data tasks for extended periods of time. With a strong reputation in the industry and over 10 million users, Gate.io boasts a daily trading volume that exceeds $12 billion. WhiteBIT stands out as a top choice for crypto enthusiasts with impressive trading volumes and over 4 million users from 150 countries. The token launch will be immediately followed by the introduction of node staking, an initiative aimed at fostering network decentralization with a fair way to grow a validator network. The approach mirrors industry best practices, ensuring transparency with rewards known upfront, decentralization as the same stake applies to all nodes, and a fair chance for all to participate on a first come, first serve basis. “We're focused on creating a TGE and node staking that makes fairness and transparency a central goal, ” said Julius Serenas, CEO of NeurochainAI. “Our fair launch approach ensures all participants have the opportunity to partake in the NeurochainAI ecosystem, promoting network decentralization and community-driven growth in the AI-as-a-Service space." “We're focused on creating a TGE and node staking that makes fairness and transparency a central goal, ” said Julius Serenas, CEO of NeurochainAI. “Our fair launch approach ensures all participants have the opportunity to partake in the NeurochainAI ecosystem, promoting network decentralization and community-driven growth in the AI-as-a-Service space." Operating a Neuron Validator not only contributes to the ecosystem’s decentralization but also rewards participants with daily $NCN compensation, where a stable amount of native coins must be staked to become a validator. 40% of the $NCN supply will be allocated to Neuron Validator NFTs, with a structured vesting plan designed to incentivize long-term engagement. To learn more about NeurochainAI’s node staking opportunities and becoming a Neuron Validator, visit their guide here . here here About NeurochainAI NeurochainAI is a decentralized AI-as-a-Service (DeAIAS) network that streamlines the process of building, launching, and use of AI-powered decentralized applications (dApps). Providing a ready-to-use AI infrastructure, the network enables developers to create AI dApps up to 24 times faster and 5 times more cost-effectively compared to traditional methods. The platform is focused on advancing the field of AI application development, offering unparalleled ease of use and affordability. Website | x | Telegram | Discord | Linkedin | Medium Website Website x x Telegram Telegram Discord Discord Linkedin Linkedin Medium Medium Contact COO Odeta Iseviciute odeta@neurochain.ai This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here . here here

NeurochainAI Launches $NCN Token Ahead Of Node Staking

NeurochainAI নোড স্টেকিংয়ের আগে $NCN টোকেন চালু করেছে

NeurochainAI führt $NCN-Token vor Node-Staking ein

NeurochainAI lanza el token $NCN antes del staking de nodos

NeurochainAI lance le jeton $NCN avant le jalonnement des nœuds

न्यूरोचैनएआई ने नोड स्टेकिंग से पहले $NCN टोकन लॉन्च किया

NeurochainAI、ノードステーキングに先立ち$NCNトークンをリリース

NeurochainAI, 노드 스테이킹에 앞서 $NCN 토큰 출시

NeurochainAI lança token $NCN antes do staking de nós

NeurochainAI запускает токен $NCN перед стейкингом узлов

NeurochainAI, Node Staking'den Önce $NCN Token'ını Piyasaya Sürüyor

NeurochainAI ra mắt $NCN Token trước Node Staking

NeurochainAI 在节点质押之前推出 $NCN 代币

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