BraiNCA: brain-inspired neural cellular automata and applications to morphogenesis and motor control Most of the Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) defined in the literature have a common theme: they are based on regular grids with a Moore neighborhood (one-hop neighbour). They do not take into account ...

New #preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2604.01932
"BraiNCA: brain-inspired neural cellular automata and applications to morphogenesis and motor control"
@bhartl.bsky.social and Leo Pio-Lopez:

New #preprint: @LPiolopez and Benjamin Lyons
www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

"From Cancer to AI Alignment: Tackling Externalities Through Homeostatic Principles"

#naturephotography #infrared

Some life forms:

yep they are

New preprint! Memory in Xenobots.
@paivaibhav.bsky.social , James A. Traer, Megan M. Sperry, Yuxin Zehg
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Two different experiences produced distinct, long-term, stimulus-specific memories, detectable through both transcriptional and physiological signatures.

Toward autonomous self-organizing biological robots with a nervous system By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Biobots, whose growing line of variants started with Xenobots, are fascinating tiny self-powered living robots built exclusively using frog embryonic cells. Originally ...

@wyssinstitute.bsky.social

wyss.harvard.edu/news/toward-...

See the work of our awesome team in Advanced Science: "Engineered Living Systems With Self-Organizing NeuralNetworks: From Anatomy to Behavior and Gene Expression"

Haleh Fotowat
Laurie O'Neill
Leo Pio-Lopez
Megan M. Sperry
Patrick Erickson
Tiffany Lin

@tufts.edu now.tufts.edu/2026/03/16/s...

What would a nervous system look like if it self-assembled inside a novel being that hadn't faced a history of selection for its organism-level form and function? How would #Xenobots look & act, and what their transcriptome would be, with neurons?

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Our special issue "Biology computes: Information processing across biological scales"

Editorial - authors.elsevier.com/a/1moUK3si8Q...

Contributions from @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, Chris Barnes, Matthias Függer, Thomas Nowak, @angelgm.eurosky.social - www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Toward autonomous self-organizing biological robots with a nervous system By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Biobots, whose growing line of variants started with Xenobots, are fascinating tiny self-powered living robots built exclusively using frog embryonic cells. Originally ...

Wyss Institute researchers, led by @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, create the first-of-its-kind neurobots, autonomously moving self-organizing biological robots with a nervous system that integrates and functions. @tufts.edu

Call for papers for 'Artificial Life for Science and Engineering' at ALife 26.

We seek work applying ALife concepts and tools to model real-world systems and engineer solutions — and assist scientific discovery through open-ended and curiosity-driven search.

Call info: alifeforscience.github.io

From complementarity to non-duality: Seeing objects and processes as pragmatic constructs

Replies to the comments on
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

is now out here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"From complementarity to non-duality: Seeing objects and processes as pragmatic constructs"

New preprint with Léo Pio-Lopez:
www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

"Multi-Scale Longevity: Defeating Aging from Cells to Embodied Human Minds, and the Future of the Species"

a broader view of longevity research.

Huh not sure, I'll check. Meanwhile, both are open to read at

osf.io/preprints/os...

A perspective, in 2 parts:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains—Parts One and Two

🧪

Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology Cell and developmental biology (CDB) offer numerous remarkable examples of collective adaptive plasticity, as cells coordinate to implement large-scal…

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology"

(quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).

Poster for the call. All relevant information is in thread

1/6

Excited to share the call for posters & registration for the 2nd XSCAPE Workshop: "Varieties of Externalism" !

📅 Friday, April 10th, 2026 — Gallery Room, Bramber House, University of Sussex

Registration is free but places are limited. 🧵

#naturephotography

Hi Phil! We should talk, there's a bunch of new work on this coming very soon. Some very interesting relationships between learning capacity in such networks and causal emergence, with implications for origin of life and evolution (and roots in math, not physics/chemistry).

Bootstrapping Life-Inspired Machine Intelligence: The Biological Route from Chemistry to Cognition and Creativity Achieving advanced machine intelligence remains a central challenge in AI research, often approached through scaling neural architectures and generative models. However, biological systems offer a bro...

New preprint with Giovanni Pezzulo:
arxiv.org/abs/2602.08079
Bootstrapping Life-Inspired Machine Intelligence: The Biological Route from Chemistry to Cognition and Creativity

Bingo! That chemical brain can do several kinds of learning:
www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24...
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
w/ positive feedback loop with causal emergence:
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
also see www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38372...
and problem-solving: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Remapping and navigation of an embedding space via error minimization: a fundamental organizational principle of cognition in natural and artificial systems The emerging field of diverse intelligence seeks an integrated view of problem-solving in agents of very different provenance, composition, and substrates. From subcellular chemical networks to swarms...

New preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.14096
@chrisfields38.bsky.social
@bhartl.bsky.social
Leo Pio-Lopez
"Remapping and navigation of an embedding space via error minimization: a fundamental organizational principle of cognition in natural and artificial systems"
🧪

What kinds of cognitions are possible? Are there discrete classes of cognition? Here's our new paper with @brigan.bsky.social @jordiplam.bsky.social @mitibennett.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social and @drmichaellevin.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2601.12837 We explore basal, neural and human-AI spaces.

Hmm I'm unsure of the distinction you are drawing. We cannot detect (are blind to) X-rays for example, and have built up theories of far-off objects in space based on detectors. Is this basically an argument against Naive Realism or something else?

superb, thanks!

#naturephotography

Evolution by natural induction Abstract. It is conventionally assumed that all evolutionary adaptation is produced, and could only possibly be produced, by natural selection. Natural ind

A new, long paper on evolution - natural induction - split into 2:

royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article...

royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article...

@RichardWatson90 and Tim Lewens

#naturephotography #infrared

#naturephotography