Why does music exist, and why does it move us so deeply? Beyond being a universal source of emotion, music reveals something fundamental about how the brain works: we are constantly predicting. Check this @nature.com review www.nature.com/articles/s41... @manlius.bsky.social @gemmadlc.bsky.social
Why the central dogma? Why, in particular, is there no reliable path from protein → DNA (reverse translation) (despite recent findings)? Because the step DNA → protein entails the suppression of digital information. Check out this very cool paper by E. Koonin.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Scientists stunned by ‘fundamentally new way’ life produces DNA | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
If Darwin explained the survival of the fittest, how does the fittest arrive in the first place? This foundational paper by Fontana & Buss show that organization can emerge from simple interactions, without natural selection: order may arise from combination rules.
link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
Just ordered the first book!
OK.... I was already curious about Tchaikovsky's book. I'll need to read that !
Do primate brains and social insect colonies make decisions in similar ways? As shown in this @royalsocietypublishing.org paper, both share competing populations that accumulate evidence until a threshold is reached. @jordipinero.bsky.social @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @dornhaus.bsky.social
After so many serious discussions about this paradox with physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers, I can’t help but find this cartoon absolutely hilarious.
On this day, seven years ago, newspapers around the world featured on their front pages something that once seemed impossible: the first-ever image of a black hole. A hidden monster, long predicted by Einstein's equations, finally revealed. A triumph of science and of global collaboration.
Our new Complex Systems Lab website www.complexsystemslab.org is now available. Still under construction, but soon full power with our research areas, publications, teaching, outreach, news and highlights. Stay tuned. @marktas.bsky.social @jordiplam.bsky.social
Some computers are easy to spot — smartphones, laptops, the machines we build. But many natural systems — cells, brains, even turbulent fluids — carry out computations too.
A new paper by SFI’s David Wolpert and Jan Korbel explores these computations encoded in natural dynamic systems.
What a strange time we are living in. As astronauts travel far into the silence of space, carrying with them the brilliance, curiosity, and collective dreams of our species, an ignorant, corrupt bully leads the most powerful country and threatens to “erase an entire civilisation.” We must stop him.
The fascists helping the fascists
Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
And so far two PhDs have been completed at @melisupf.bsky.social on the topic by @blaividiella.bsky.social (which won multiple awards) and @vmaull.bsky.social (just finished and now in a research visit to Ascension Island) @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social
This is one of the most active research areas in my Lab, where we started proposing the concept ten years ago. A long adventure that is now also starting experimentally thanks to the support of @embl.org @akhilesh-nandan.bsky.social and @museuciencies.cat @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social
Can we terraform our own ecosystems, perhaps to rescue them from degradation and collapse? There is a Victorian story about this: Ascension Island, Darwin's synthetic ecosystem. Now in a film: www.europesays.com/uk/813985/ @vmaull.bsky.social @ftmaestre.bsky.social @vdlorenzo.bsky.social
NASA just dropped this image of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch looking back at us. The first woman to ever see our planet in its entirety. I’m not crying you’re crying 🥹🔭🧪 📸: NASA
L’evolució ens permet entendre els nostres orígens, la diversitat de la biosfera, l’origen de les pandèmies i de moltes malalties, així com les estratègies del càncer. Limitar o eliminar l’ensenyament de l’evolució és l’estratègia perfecta per fomentar el negacionisme.
Es pot tenir una societat d’individus amb sentit crític sense coneixements científics? La ciència, la filosofia i, en particular, la teoria de l’evolució són puntals necessaris que s’han de reforçar, no debilitar, en el sistema educatiu. @ara.cat @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social
Why does cancer arise across such diverse life forms? The answer lies in evolution. This @royalsocietypublishing.org issue shows how cancer emerges as a breakdown of cooperation in multicellular organisms. @multicellgenome.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1...
However, experimental manipulation of plant tumours in the Lab provided early glimpses into a fascinating (and open) problem in cancer research: spontaneous remission. Check this 1965 @sciam.bsky.social paper: www.jstor.org/stable/24931... @guimaguade.bsky.social @sandyanderson.bsky.social
The architecture of plants and their development differ markedly from those of animals. From their rigid cell walls to their intrinsic stemness, they are equipped with several safeguards against cancer growth.See:https://n ature.com/articles/nrc2942.pdf
Do plants develop cancer? Since trees live long and have many cells, shuld we expect to see "tumoral forests" as the on in the image (my drawing)? Spoiler: negative answers to both questions (with exceptions). Understanding why is a fascinating story @guimaguade.bsky.social
This editorial discusses the critical value of human-generated scientific writing in the era of large language models (LLMs), arguing that writing is essential to structured thinking and research comprehension. Writing as Thinking: The act of writing structure's thoughts, sorting research data, and identifying the main message, unlike LLMs which may lack true understanding or accountability. LLM Hallucinations: LLM-generated text requires rigorous verification because these models can produce incorrect information or fake references. Human vs. AI Roles: While LLMs are useful tools for brainstorming, improving grammar, or overcoming writer's block, human researchers must maintain control to engage in the creative task of shaping a compelling narrative.
Writing forces your brain to coordinate memory, reasoning, and meaning-making simultaneously.
Every time you write, you rewire toward clearer thinking. Every time you let an LLM do it, you rewire toward consumption.
The paper extends ideas from computability theory and Gödelian limits, but grounded in physics. The universe may evolve deterministically, yet the ability of subsystems within it to predict that evolution is strictly bounded. Laplace’s demon cannot be part of the universe it predicts.
Can Laplace’s demon really exist? @sfiscience.bsky.social David Wolpert shows that even if it is, no physical system inside the universe can fully predict it, because inference itself is a physical process with fundamental limits. docuri.com/download/lap... @gemmadlc.bsky.social
Is the universe really fine-tuned for life? The claim that even tiny changes in fundamental constants would make life impossible (the God-needed argument) is been dismantled by recent research: Life can emerge under a wide range of physical conditions ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019PhR....
🚀 Artemis II update: the launch teams have begun filling the rocket with its fuel. Stay tuned!
📸: NASA
What if intelligence comes from interaction rather than reasoning? In his early, provocative 1990 paper, Rodney Brooks argued that intelligence emerges from agents embedded in the world, tightly coupling perception and action instead of relying on abstract symbols.
www2.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/tea...