🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social
We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked
What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective
We call it the digital sphinx
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
How do neural circuits generate the walking rhythm?
Using connectome simulations, @sarahpugly.bsky.social found a minimal central pattern generator (CPG) that produces oscillations in leg motor neurons. Same circuit motif for each 🪰 leg.
w @bingbrunton.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1. In yesterday's primary elections, anti-transgender Democrats found out the hard way why you don't throw transgender people under the bus.
Two anti-trans dems lost their primaries, including one that cast the deciding veto override vote, in blowouts.
Subscribe to support our journalism.
Well it’s not like I made the OG image, I’m not sure who did
Two views of a ramjet robot probe, showing the cylinder-cone assembly of the nuclear ramjet engine, the instrument mast, and the short, pointed aerosurfaces.
Dimensions of the ramjet aerobot - it is 2.84m long and 1.29m tall.
Internal layout - the nuclear reactor on which the ramjet runs was to be derived from the MITEE miniaturized nuclear thermal rocket.
Description of flight path, a winding journey from the poles of Jupiter to the Great Red Spot.
Thinking about one of my favorite old NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts studies: "Exploration of Jovian Atmosphere Using Nuclear Ramjet Flyer". A tiny little descendant of Project Pluto, it'd use a direct-cycle fission ramjet to fly a drone roughly the size of a Weddell seal all over Jupiter.
Did anyone else imagine their crew members in FTL: Faster Than Light having relationships amongst themselves or was that just me?
like anything else but to someone who doesn’t it’s fun and makes sense.
Invincible is very good with this kind of stuff generally, I find it engages a little more deeply with sci fi ideas than usual superhero stuff. Mind uploading with the mauler twins is another example.
They maintain this velocity even under immense force which gives them all their abilities.
It’s funnily similar to the Protomolecule from the Expanse. Something about it is just intuitively satisfying. Of course if you know anything about physics it probably falls apart just
Explanations for superpowers are always bullshit but I personally am a fan of “smart atoms” from Invincible as a justification for Viltrumites’ powers. Essentially femtotech that has a preferred velocity in relation to other atoms and as determined by the user.
Matched with you for the same reason. Then you see each other’s profiles as specifying actual character attributes and you take things from there and organize a meetup with which specific sleeves you will use.
I believe it would be more Efficient.
I like to imagine what dating apps would be like for morphologically free transhumans. You could have it where you select a list of sleeves you are attracted to, then are matched with people who have the specified sleeves as something they comfortable with using, having-
Which is to say, I believe this because I believe it turn consciousness into a much more practical matter than the alternatives. I’m not sure that it is actually a feature of reality however, I simply assume it is because doing so in my eyes is what’s most productive.
I wouldn’t put it that way specifically. I would say that consciousness being medium independent falls out naturally from assuming it must be strictly necessary for certain patterns of behavior, and that assumption is a load bearing one if you want consciousness to be empirically determinable.
all still waves
I think consciousness is probably more like waves than some kind of intrinsic property unique to certain instantiations of matter. A wave can exist in air. Or water. Or a metal pole. You can create a wave in a slinky. You can simulate waves. You can have waves made of people, and they are-
To us, beauty in other humans tends to be wildly variable. Some people are gorgeous, while others not so much.
But this doesn’t hold for other species. To us, species tend to appear aesthetically homogeneous. What I wonder is would human beauty be as variable to aliens as it is to us?
I suppose there could be analogs to sex behaviors in AIs that form emergently over time. One example is the practice of model merging, which when you get down to it has some similarity to the horizontal gene transfer you see in certain microbes.
The reason I say this is because I have strong overlap with the former group but given that sex is specifically an evolved capacity it’s hard to see why AIs would have that drive by default, unless someone put it in there intentionally, and that feels icky.
Everyone says they want to fuck robots but no one asks if the robots want to fuck us.
They should make robots that clean your teeth like those shrimps that clean the mouths of various sea animals.
I sometimes forget how flexible proteins are. It becomes really apparent when you use NMR states for an animation. That poor cofactor is getting pushed around a lot 😅
#sciart #blender3d #biocatalysis
Or maybe the majority of people will simply not give a shit. Like we have aircraft carriers now, and fiction will regularly depict aircraft carriers in very silly ways but almost no one will care.
Perhaps the idiosyncrasies particular to real spaceships as dictated by physical law would be reasonably common knowledge. Maybe unphysical SF settings like those you see now would live on as a kind retrofuturism like fallout.
You’d think it’d make many typical assumptions look very silly to the average person. For example, perhaps people living then would find ships depicted as having a majority of it occupied by floor space as opposed to just a relatively small hab section silly and anachronistic.
Something I think about a lot is whether the kind of settings you see frequently in non-hardSF will really survive contact with a future that actually does have a lot of space travel where millions of people are regularly on board spaceships. They might appear like this to them
