With flows nearing record lows, the Colorado River and the people who depend on it are in for a rough summer. On a packrafting trip down a popular stretch of the river, a Backpacker editor finds a still-gorgeous landscape—and motivation to keep up the fight for one of America’s most important waterways.
While E. Josie Clowney would never suggest that neuroscience is simple, a new study by her team at the University of Michigan could drastically reduce complexity in future studies. Their work focused on instinctual behaviors in fruit flies, but it has the potential to accelerate work to better understand the neurobiology that underlies behavior and decision-making in mammals, including humans.
The research establishes a new way to understand neurons, their connectivity and the behaviors they control. Within this new framework, the researchers can circumvent the conventional approach of considering each type of neuron individually and instead focus on groupings defined by shared structure and by two sets of regulatory genes. The work is published in the journal Nature.
While there are more than 8,000 kinds of neurons in the fruit fly cerebrum —the part of its brain where instinctual behaviors are hardwired—there are less than 200 major structural groups, or ground plans. Led by Najia Elkahlah, who recently defended her doctoral thesis in the Clowney lab, the team’s discoveries revealed how these ground plans get set up. There is a sort of order or hierarchy, where one set of genes coordinates the formation of the ground plan, and the other set produces small differences in shape and connectivity among neurons within each ground plan.
Despite its rapid development and widespread adoption, AI is a nascent technology with vast potential for enormous growth in the coming years.
Decades of science fiction make it easy to imagine a future in which AI evolves beyond task-focused point applications to offer broad, human-like intelligence. Although artificial general intelligence (AGI) is theoretical, the road to real AGI is fraught with serious technological and societal challenges. AGI developers face the daunting hurdles of making AGI work effectively, accurately, reliably — and, most of all, safely.
An exploration into the idea of other dimensions beyond what we see, and whether they actually exist, or not.
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Zhang et al. found that two waves of apoptosis occur in developing human retinas and retinal organoids, affecting RPCs and RGCs, respectively. Retinal organoids undergo an additional wave of necrosis in the core, further eliminating RGCs. Blocking apoptosis in organoids promotes RGC long-term survival and delays their neurogenesis and maturation.
