Hasta La Gadget!

Rock’s joke surrounding his 2016 Oscars hosting gig didn’t go as planned during Saturday’s live Netflix special.

A Virginia judge has ruled that frozen embryos can legally be considered property, based partly on a 19th century law governing the treatment of slaves.

The sudden explosion of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other large language models has led to renewed attention on artificial intelligence that’s capable of mimicking speech, especially for well-known figures. It has left some spectators fearful of a rise in deepfake-fueled misinformation, copyright chaos, or possibly even the…

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Meta might offer a Twitter alternative like Mastodon in the future, according MoneyControl and Platformer. The social networking giant is reportedly in the early stages of developing an app codenamed P92 that would let users post text-based updates, and it’s going to support Mastodon’s social networking protocol called ActivityPub. Meta confirmed that a decentralized social network is in the works at the company and told the publications:

“We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”

P92 will carry Instagram’s branding and will let users register and log in using their Instagram credentials, according to the sources. It will populate users’ profile with their Instagram account details if they use their login on the photo-sharing app. But based on the product brief MoneyControl saw, “data sharing from Instagram to P92 will be minimal, if not none” after the initial sign up. 

Since the app is decentralized, that means users can set up their own servers and set their own rules for content moderation. A source told MoneyControl that the app will allow users to broadcast their posts to those on other servers, but it remains to be seen whether they will be able to follow each other, as well. If the app supports ActivityPub, though, people will likely expect it to be somewhat interoperable with Mastodon and other decentralized apps that use the protocol. 

Meta has a list of features it definitely wants the app to have, including tappable links for posts with previews, shareable images and videos, as well as verification badges. The sources didn’t say whether the company will be charging a fee for its badges as well, but it’s worth noting that Meta launched a $12-a-month paid verification service for Facebook and Instagram back in February. Users will have the ability to leave comments and send private messages, but they might not be available in the first version of the app. And at this point, Meta is unsure whether to give people the ability to reshare posts like they can on Twitter. 

MoneyControl says it’s not quite quite clear whether the company has already started building the app, or if it’s still in the planning period of development. By the time it launches, it’s bound to have several more competitors to contend with, since Twitter rivals have been popping up to offer users an alternative after Elon Musk took over last year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-decentralized-twitter-competitor-071316333.html?src=rss

Researchers understand the structure of brains and have mapped them out in some detail, but they still don’t know exactly how they process data — for that, a detailed “circuit map” of the brain is needed. 

Now, scientists have created just such a map for the most advanced creature yet: a fruit fly larva. Called a connectome, it diagrams the insect’s 3016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, Neuroscience News has reported. The map will help researchers study better understand how the brains of both insects and animals control behavior, learning, body functions and more. The work may even inspired improved AI networks.

“Up until this point, we’ve not seen the structure of any brain except of the roundworm C. elegans, the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons,” said professor Marta Zlatic from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. “This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we’re guessing on the way computations are implemented. But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works.” 

To build the map, the team scanned thousands of slices from the larva’s brain with an electron microscope, then integrated those into a detailed map, annotating all the neural connections. From there, they used computational tools to identify likely information flow pathways and types of “circuit motifs” in the insect’s brain. They even noticed that some structural features closely resembled state-of-the-art deep learning architecture.

Scientists have made detailed maps of the brain of a fruit fly, which is far more complex than a fruit fly larva. However, these maps don’t include all the detailed connections required to have a true circuit map of their brains. 

As a next step, the team will investigate the structures used for behavioural functions like learning and decision making, and examine connectome activity while the insect does specific activities. And while a fruit fly larva is a simple insect, the researchers expect to see similar patterns in other animals. “In the same way that genes are conserved across the animal kingdom, I think that the basic circuit motifs that implement these fundamental behaviours will also be conserved,” said Zlatic.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scientists-create-the-most-complex-map-yet-of-an-insect-brains-wiring-085600210.html?src=rss