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Two later-stage trials investigating LSD for treating anxiety are due to conclude in 2026, which could lead to the drug being approved for the common mental health condition

A photon was apparently detected in two places at once in a twist on the classic double-slit experiment, but many physicists didn't accept the results

The history and pseudohistory of this infamous and ubiquitous obscene gesture.

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An analysis of ongoing trials suggests that mRNA cancer vaccines have the potential to deliver health benefits worth $75 billion each year in the US alone

A team led by the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) analyzed samples of C-type asteroids in a recent study. Their findings support the idea that these asteroids can serve as a crucial source of materials if and when asteroid mining is realized.

Supermassive black holes have a reputation for devouring everything in sight, but new observations from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array reveal they can be surprisingly picky eaters. Even when galaxy mergers deliver enormous amounts of cold molecular gas directly to a black hole’s doorstep, many choose to nibble rather than gorge raising questions about what triggers feeding episodes. The discovery suggests black hole growth during galaxy collisions may be far more inefficient and episodic than we previously thought.

A new catalyst design could transform how acetaldehyde is made from renewable bioethanol. Researchers found that a carefully balanced mix of gold, manganese, and copper creates a powerful synergy that boosts efficiency while lowering operating temperatures. Their best catalyst achieved a 95% yield at just 225°C and stayed stable for hours. The discovery points to a cleaner, more sustainable path for producing key industrial chemicals.

In light of the absence of news as well as my recurring insomnia, which has made me unable to brain, I’m posting a list of what I consider the three best cuisines in the world.  What I mean by this is that if I were constrained to eat only one nation’s cuisine for the rest of my life, these are the three I’d choose among.

Now I have experience with all of these on their home turf (and I’m also a decent Szechuan cook), so I know I’d be happy with them. One notable omission is Italian, although it’s only because I’m not familiar with the cuisine and have been to Italy only a handful of times. I suspect if I knew it better, that would be on the list.  Here we go, and in no particular order:

French (all regions)
Indian (all regions, particularly the north where wheat and meat dominate over rice and vegetables, but I would never neglect the great food of southern India as well).
Chinese (again, all regions, though Hunanese and Szechuan are my favorites)

I’ll add that I am not looking for haute cuisine, particularly in France. The dishes that regular people eat are the dishes I want.

Sadly, I see Jewish food as constituting a mediocre cuisine. Yes, some Jewish food is great—latkes, pastrami, and (if you consider it Jewish) cheesecake—but you can’t eat just that for the rest of your life.

Of course you should weigh in below. And remember, this is a purely subjective list, but it is based on considerable experience.

A specimen of French food: a cassoulet:

BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Indian: A biryani, Hyderabad style

Mahi Tatavarty, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And mapo dofu, one of the glories of Szechuan cuisine (I ate it at the place in Chengdu where it was said to have been created):

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

MIT researchers have designed a printable aluminum alloy that’s five times stronger than cast aluminum and holds up at extreme temperatures. Machine learning helped them zero in on the ideal recipe in a fraction of the time traditional methods would take. When 3D printed, the alloy forms a tightly packed internal structure that gives it exceptional strength. The material could eventually replace heavier, costlier metals in jet engines, cars, and data centers.

Mars isn’t just dusty—it crackles with electricity. Scientists discovered that dust devils can generate tiny electric sparks, captured for the first time by Perseverance’s microphone. These static discharges may rapidly destroy chemicals like methane and reshape how Mars’ atmosphere works. The sparks could even affect climate patterns and pose risks to future missions.

A major breakthrough in battery science reveals why promising single-crystal lithium-ion batteries haven’t lived up to expectations. Researchers found that these batteries crack due to uneven internal reactions, not the grain-boundary damage seen in older designs. Even more surprising, materials thought to be harmful actually helped the batteries last longer. The discovery opens the door to smarter designs that could dramatically extend battery life and safety.

It took 125 years, but in 2025 a team of mathematicians discovered the solution to a long-puzzling problem about the equations that govern the behaviour of particles in a fluid

There is a state of relaxation that few of us spend much time in, but which comes with profound well-being benefits. With healthier ageing, reduced risk of disease and feeling more energised all on offer, here's how to get there

Definitely the most fascinating and perhaps controversial topic in neuroscience, and one of the most intense debates in all of science, is the ultimate nature of consciousness. What is consciousness, specifically, and what brain functions are responsible for it? Does consciousness require biology, and if not what is the path to artificial consciousness? This is a debate that possibly cannot be fully resolved through empirical science alone (for reasons I have stated and will repeat here shortly). We also need philosophy, and an intense collaboration between philosophy and neuroscience, informing each other and building on each other.

A new paper hopes to push this discussion further – On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism. Before we delve into the paper, let’s set the stage a little bit. By consciousness we mean not only the state of being wakeful and conscious, but the subjective experience of our own existence and at least a portion of our cognitive state and function. We think, we feel things, we make decisions, and we experience our sensory inputs. This itself provokes many deep questions, the first of which is – why? Why do we experience our own existence? Philosopher David Chalmers asked an extremely provocative question – could a creature have evolved that is capable of all of the cognitive functions humans have but not experience their own existence (a creature he termed a philosophical zombie, or p-zombie)?

Part of the problem of this question is that – how could we know if an entity was experiencing its own existence? If a p-zombie could exist, then any artificial intelligence (AI), even one capable of duplicating human-level intelligence, could be a p-zombie. If so, what is different between the AI and biological consciousness? At this point we can only ask these questions, some of them may need to wait until we actually develop human-level AI.

What are the various current theories of consciousness? Any summary I give in a single blog post is going to be a massive oversimplification, but let me give the TLDR. First we have dualism vs pure naturalistic neuroscience. There are many flavors of dualism, but basically it is any philosophy that posits that consciousness is something more than just the biological function of the brain. We are actually not discussing dualism in this article. I have made my position on this clear in the past – there is no scientific basis for dualism, and the neuroscientific model is doing just fine without having to introduce anything non-naturalistic or other than biological function to explain consciousness. The new paper is essentially a discussion entirely within the naturalistic neuroscience model of consciousness (which is where I think the discussion should be).

Within neuroscience the authors summarize the current debate this way:

“Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational functionalism, which treats cognition as something you can fully explain in terms of abstract information processing: get the right functional organization (regardless of the material it runs on) and you get consciousness. On the other side is biological naturalism, which insists that consciousness is inseparable from the distinctive properties of living brains and bodies: biology isn’t just a vehicle for cognition, it is part of what cognition is.”

They propose what they consider to be the new theory of “biological computationalism”. They write:

“For decades, it has been tempting to assume that brains “compute” in roughly the same way conventional computers do: as if cognition were essentially software, running atop neural hardware. But brains do not resemble von Neumann machines, and treating them as though they do forces us into awkward metaphors and brittle explanations. If we want a serious theory of how brains compute and what it would take to build minds in other substrates, we need to widen what we mean by “computation” in the first place.”

I mostly agree with this, but I think they are exaggerating the situation a bit.  My reaction to reading this was – but, this was already my understanding for years. For example, in 2017 I wrote:

“For starters, the brain is neither hardware or software, it is both simultaneously – sometimes called “wetware.” Information is not stored in neurons, the neurons and their connections are the information. Further, processing and receiving information transforms those neurons, resulting in memory and learning.”

For the record, the idea that brains are simultaneously hardware and software, and that these two functions cannot be disentangled, goes back at least to the 1970s. Gerald Edelman, for example, stressed that the brain was neither software nor hardware but both simultaneously.  Any meaningful discussion of this debate is a book-length task, and experts can argue about the exact details of the many formulations of these various theories over the years. Just know these ideas have all been hashed out over decades, without any clear resolution, but it has certainly been my understanding that the “wetware” model is dominant in neuroscience. Also – I think the debate is better understood as a spectrum from computationalism at one end to biological naturalism at the other. Even the original proponents of computationalism, for example, recognized the biological nature and constraints of that information processing. The debate is mainly about degree.

In any case, the authors do, I think, make a good contribution to the wetware side in this discussion, essentially reformulating it as their “biological computationalism” theory. This theory has three components. The first is that biological consciousness, and brain function more generally, is a hybrid between discreet events and continuous dynamics. Neurons spiking may be discrete events, but they occur on a background of chemical gradients, synaptic anatomy, voltage fields, and other aspects of brain biology. The discrete events affect the continuous dynamic state of the brain, which in turn affects the discrete events.

Second, the brain is “scale-inseparable”, which is just another way of saying that hardware and software cannot be separated. There is no algorithm running on brain hardware – the hardware is the algorithm and it is altered by the function of the algorithm – they are inseparable.

Third, brain function is constrained by the availability of energy and resources, or what they call “metabolically grounded”. This is fundamental to many aspects of brain function, which evolved to be energy and metabolically efficient. You cannot fully understand why the brain works the way it does without understanding this metabolic grounding.

I full agree with the first two points, and that this is a good way of framing the “wetware” side of this debate. I think the brain is metabolically grounded, but that may be incidental to the question of consciousness. An AI, for example, may be grounded by other physical constraints, or may be functionally unlimited, and I don’t see how that would matter to whether or not it could generate consciousness.

What does all this say about the ability to create artificial intelligence? That remains to be seen. I think what it means is that it is possible we will not be able to create true AI self-aware consciousness with software alone. We may need to create a physical computational system that functions more like biology, with hardware and software being inseparable, and with discrete events and continuous dynamics also being entangled. I don’t think the authors answer this question so much as provide a framework for discussing it.

It may be true that these aspects of brain function are not necessary for, but are incidental to, the phenomenon of consciousness. It may also be true that there is more than one way to achieve consciousness, and the fact that human brains do it in one way does not mean it is the only possible way. Further, even if their theory is correct, I don’t think this answers the question of whether or not a virtual brain would be conscious.

In other words – if we have a powerful enough computer to create a virtual human brain – so all the aspects of brain function are simulated virtually rather than built into the hardware – could that virtual brain generate consciousness? I personally think it would, but it’s a fascinating question. And again, we still have the problem of – how would we really know for sure?

The good news is I think we are on a steady road to incremental advances in the question of consciousness. We have a collaboration among philosophers, neuroscientists, and computational scientists each contributing their bit from their own perspective, and the discussion has been slowly grinding forward. It has been incredible, and challenging, to follow and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

The post Biological vs Artificial Consciousness first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Some of the world's most advanced robots showed off their skills at tech shows and sporting events, doing everything from cooking shrimp to running half marathons

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California has been firing record-breaking X-ray pulses for years, but now it’s due for a shutdown and an upgrade. When it is turned back on, it will be even more powerful

The Majorana 1 quantum computer was hailed as a significant breakthrough by Microsoft, but critics say the company has yet to prove it actually works despite a year of debate

It has been claimed that because most of our DNA is active, it must be important, but now human-plant hybrid cells have been used to show this activity is mostly random noise

As 2025 barrels towards its depressing conclusion, I look back at the damage federal science and medicine have sustained thus far under Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through the lens of a classic film. Truly, it's a mad house, in which our federal science apparatus is run by Lysenko's heirs.

The post It’s a madhouse! Public health under the heirs to Lysenko (and Dr. Zaius) in 2025 first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A joint research team from South Korea has developed a fascinating wheel inspired by origami and Da Vinci bridge principles that could unlock access to the Moon’s most dangerous and scientifically useful terrain. The wheel expands from 230 mm to 500 mm in diameter on demand, allowing small rovers to navigate steep lunar pits and lava tube entrances that would trap conventional vehicles.