Category Archives: Singularity

For depression, magic mushrooms may indeed be magic.

Over the past decade, a slew of pioneering trials found that just one or two doses of psilocybin, the main component in magic mushrooms, rapidly pulls people out of severe depression. The treatmentwhen coupled with behavioral supportacted lightning fast, even in those who hadnt responded to conventional antidepressants.

The results spurred intrepid neuroscientists to pursue psilocybin and other psychedelics as a dramatically new route to battle depression, even with their illegal status in most countries. Ketamine, the party drug and horse tranquilizer, won an early battle, gaining FDA approval in 2019 as the first fast-acting antidepressant and putting psychedelics on the therapeutic radar.

It may now be psilocybins time to shine. Despite their antidepressant potential, how magic mushrooms work their magic remained elusive, limiting their entry as a serious contender for mental health treatment.

A new study in Nature Medicine headed by psychedelic experts Drs. David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris at the Imperial College London may have cracked the enigma. Combining brain imaging results from two trials of people with severe depression treated with psilocybin, the study found that the chemical shakes up global neural networks in the brain, essentially rebooting how they communicate and forcing the brain out of its entrenched depressive funk.

These findings are important because for the first time we find that psilocybin works differently from conventional antidepressantsmaking the brain more flexible and fluid, and less entrenched in the negative thinking patterns associated with depression, said Nutt in a press release. This confirms psilocybin could be a real alternative approach to depression treatments.

Even more impressive, when compared toe-to-toe with Lexapro, a classic antidepressant, psilocybin acted faster at alleviating symptoms and retained its effect for weeks after stopping treatment.

This rework of the brains connections might not be limited to depression. One exciting implication of our findings is that we have discovered a fundamental mechanism via which psychedelic therapy works not just for depression, but other mental illnesses, such as anorexia or addiction, said Carhart-Harris.

Depression feels like dragging yourself through mud. All the willpower and pep talks to pull yourself up stumble and fail, because youre stuck in a monochrome bleakness that seeps into every corner of your life.

As is the brain.

The brain is often locked in a state of negative cognitive bias, which draws people to think more negatively with a rigid idea about themselves and their future. Its a type of fixation thats difficult to shake off, leading some to dub these episodes as attractor states, emotional states that depressed people naturally fall into, as if pulled by gravity.

This fundamental shift made some neuroscientists dig deeper: whats going on with brain networks that supports those negative outlooks? As it happens, there are quite a few involved. One is the default mode network, which covers wide-ranging connections of brain regions related to introspection and self-referential thinking and becomes overactive in depression. The executive network, which helps control and maneuver your thoughts based on your goalsfor example, switching your attention or focusing on the job at handis also disrupted. A final malfunctioning network is the salience network, which normally helps you hone in on relevant stimuli and supports communication and social interactions.

Unlike a healthy brain, one with depression is characterized by segregation, said Daws. This break in network function undermines a brains ability to flexibly switch between patterns of thinking and viewpoints.

In other words, depression makes the brains networks and information processing far more rigid. Unfortunately, most antidepressants today zone in on a different aspect of depressionthat is, lack of a brain chemical called serotoninbut dont necessarily target these network-level changes.

For the past two decades, Imperial College London has taken on the unpopular role of trying to revitalize psychedelics for mental health research. Although psychedelics were broadly banned in the 1970s, they were previously examined in thousands of trials for their impact on the brain two decades prior.

Much of Imperial College Londons work was funded philanthropically. Tapping into modern technology, including functional MRI (fMRI)a looking glass at how the brain reacts in real timethe studies hinted at psilocybins antidepressant potential. In the last 15 years, at least 6 separate clinical trials have reported impressive improvements in the depressive symptoms with psilocybin therapy, the authors wrote.

Among those were two clinical trials to assess the safety and efficacy of psilocybin treatment for depression under careful clinical care. One was open-labeled in patients with treatment-resistant depression and lasted six months. Another was a double-blind, randomized control trialneither the patient nor the doctor knew what the patient was gettingcomparing psilocybin with Lexapro.

In the new study, the team took advantage of brain scans from those two trials to uncover how magic mushrooms work in the depressed brain. Psilocybin rapidly decreased depression symptoms in both trials, based on a standardized questionnaire. With just two in-clinic doses, psilocybin reduced the patients depressive score by 64 percent after 3 weeks. In contrast, Lexapro dropped the score by only 37 percent 6 weeks after taking it daily. Patients treated with psilocybin scored low for depression even half a year after stopping treatment.

Peeking into their brains, the team analyzed the brain scans with a method dubbed network modularity, which looks at how connected or segregated different brain areas are. Comparing fMRI scans of peoples brains before and after psilocybin treatment, the team found increased connectivity just one day after psilocybin. Previously segregated networks re-formed their social networks, causing an increase in brain connectivity, especially in networks normally disrupted by depression.

Using a metric called dynamic flexibility, the team also found that brain networks treated with psilocybin changed their community allegiance more rapidly over time. This suggests that rather than their locked state in depression, the networks are shaken up to restructure their communications across the brain to alleviate depressive symptoms. Psilocybin doesnt dampen brain activityrather, it liberates the entrenched depressed brain, making it more integrated and flexible, wrote the editors of Nature Medicine.

In contrast, Lexapro didnt drive any network changes and only had modest effects on depression.

The team stresses that the study is just the first step in tearing off psilocybins veil for treating mental health disorders.

While theres growing evidence that psychedelic therapy is an option for psychiatry, our understanding of how it works remains rudimentary. Digging into its function will help bring forth a paradigm-changingand challengingtherapeutic model, with both scientific and political roadblocks along the way.

For now, we dont know what happens after treatment stops in half a year or longerthat is, whether the network shakeup lasts. And although long in the making, the study is still just a starting point. Its a little bit like looking out into the universe with a telescope and seeing interesting things and then starting to build theories based on that, said Dr. Stephen Ross at the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

Psilocybin phase 3 trials are underway to assess its safety and efficacy on a greater scale. The team especially highlights the need for replicationthat is, to see if the same dynamic brain connectivity changes happen in separate groups of people. Meanwhile, they strongly caution against DIYing treatment. The psilocybin trials took place in clinical settings with careful monitoring, and taking magic mushrooms in lieu of these guardrails to self-medicate for depression could be detrimental, if not outright dangerous.

While psychedelics havent yet fully proven themselves for therapy, the team is thankful for modern neuroscience technologies to start offering plausible models of their action on the brain.

It might sound trite to say, but I think psilocybin therapy opens up the mind, and thats its strength, said Carhart-Harris.

Image Credit: Hans / 20749 images

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Scientists Used Brain Scans to See How Magic Mushrooms Battle Depression. Here's What They Found - Singularity Hub

Sugary breakfast flavors have expanded beyond the cereal aisle. Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz

If youve ever eaten Capn Crunch Berries, smelled the leftover milk and thought:

Wow, Id like to smoke that, youre strangely not alone. Its the scent of the best-selling strain of legal marijuana in California: Cereal Milk by Cannabiotix. Cereal Milk is just one of dozens of weird and surprising cereal-themed products marketed to adults, many of which, like Cannabiotixs, are not officially associated with cereal brands. Froot Loops has inspired a vodka flavor (Loopy), Lucky Charms infuses an IPA beer (Saturday Morning), and vape liquid is scented like knock-off Frosted Cheerios (Frosted Os).

Cereal has become one of the go-to flavors in both unofficial cereal-adjacent products and official branded items like the scarlet-colored Fruity Pebbles syrup (which one Facebook user labeled as evidence of a health crisis in the USA), that you can drench your Lucky Charms pancakes in while swigging coffee topped off with Golden Grahams creamer. No cereal flavor is more ubiquitous than Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which is now available as a cake mix, popcorn, spice (Cinnadust), creamer, protein bar, frosting, oatmeal, milk, and ice cream (among other things). As the co-host of the cereal podcast The Empty Bowl, Justin McElroy joked in one episode, Before long we will reach a singularity where there is no longer the flavor of cinnamon sugar, no one will know what that flavor is, it is just all Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

So why cereal and why now? And are these products merely trying to recreate cereal flavor or the nostalgia that goes along with it?

According to the cereal companies themselves, cereal has become the ultimate nostalgia-driven comfort food, reminiscent of childhood and a pre-pandemic time when death and disease werent looming around the corner.

Because of the of the stress from the pandemic and everybody being cooped up at home, we saw this resurgence of nostalgia, kidult culture, to be on the rise, where people are looking back to familiar products, trusted brands, brands that take them to a happier simpler time, says Claudine Patel, the chief marketing officer at Post Consumer Brands, which manufactures Fruity Pebbles, Honey Combs and Waffle Crips, among other cereals.

A Mintel survey of 1,806 internet users on July 2021, found that over half of participants (58%) agreed with the statement that the flavors of cereal I enjoyed as a child are still my go to. So it makes sense that many of these cereal spin-offs feature kid-friendly flavors marketed in adult products, like Fruity Rings Vape liquid.

The trend started before the pandemic, but has accelerated during it. Since 2016, sales of cereal have been declining or stagnant, but cereal sales increased 10.4 percent in 2020, and cereal has become cool again, according to CNN Business. The reason cereal had been trending down in the years pre-covid wasyou can't carry a bowl with milk in it and eat it with two hands while you're driving, says Russell J. Zwanka, director of the food marketing program at Western Michigan University. [During the pandemic] everyone was finally home again, so they returned to eating a slower breakfast. While customers were noshing on cereal on home, a slew of new cereal products blossomed. Now that we've seen a resurgence of people coming back and loving cereal, we have to think about how do we make sure we look to the future as people are going back to work? How do we make sure the category stays relevant? asks Patel.

No products typify this cerealization trend more than the bright red Mrs. Butterworths Fruity Pebbles syrup, released earlier this year, which the company claims is perfect on pancakes and waffles, and suitable for birthday celebrations.

It's basically like the junk food equivalent of clickbaitMore thought is given to the spectacle of this vibrant red syrup and less thought is given to a. how it tastes and b. how many people are really going to want to use a whole bottle of the stuff? asks Daniel Goubert, co-host of The Empty Bowl podcast and creator of Cerealously. In a review of the syrup on his blog, he called it noxiouspestilent fetid and foul, and says It stains countertops and rankles tongues and soils pancakes with its atomic potency and I do not recommend it to anyone.

So why does such a product exist? Zwanka says it makes sense from a branding point of view: syrup and cereal are both breakfast foods that likely appear in the same aisle of the grocery store. And it makes sense for Mrs. Butterworth too. You could have called that strawberry tropical flavor. [But] it actually would have been more difficult for someone to understand, than if you just call it Fruity Pebbles. The majority of population knows what Fruity Pebbles tastes like, he says.

Not everyone dislikes the syrup, most notably the Cooking Goth, a YouTube food reviewer and cook who specializes in fast food, sweets, and cola. In a video titled, I Reviewed the New Fruity Pebbles and Didnt Get Diabetes, he bravely squirted the syrup into his mouth, triumphantly lifted the bottle into the air and declared, This is going to be a brand-new staple in my house for whenever I eat pancakes.

So naturally I had to buy some. I scoured the aisles of my local Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger and Publix and came up empty. I searched online and found it selling for $25 a bottle on eBay and referred to as rare. This was literally too rich for me, so I bought the closest product I found: Capn Crunchs Ocean Blue Artificially Maple Flavored Syrup, which was the same color and viscosity as Dawn dish liquid.

I tried the syrup on a buttered waffle, squirting it with abandon, turning my waffle into some kind of poor-mans edible Jackson Pollock homage. I hesitated before my first bite. In nature, bright colors signal poison and danger. But I reminded myself that in cereal spin-offs, the colors signal social media opportunities.

I bit into the syrup-drenched waffle, and the syrup tasted nothing like Capn Crunch, so, in desperation to make a connection, I gazed at the image of Horatio Magellan Crunch on the bottle, his googly eyes looking back at me, his blue hat and jacket matching the syrup color, his mouth agape, white moustache spread with approval. Then, I was hit by nostalgia, not just from the mascot, but also from the artificial maple syrup taste Id loved from childhood. So I kind of get the appeal, but not totally.

I asked Goubert to explain. Cereals that have spinoffs are the ones that have the cult appeal, the recognizable mascots and distinct flavors, he says. Grape Nuts syrup just wouldnt cause much of a furor on Instagram. Patel, however, argues, not quite convincingly, that the Mrs. Butterworths Fruity Pebbles syrup wasnt created for social media appeal. The rainbow cereal, which is over a half-century old, just happens to be an Instagrammable product because of the colors, movements, the fun, Patel said.

Spin-offs exist, she says, because we constantly have to think of fresh new ways to excite our consumers to make sure we continue to stay relevant with them, with culture. Post has to look beyond the cereal bowl, to do that, she said, which is why things like Fruity Pebbles Shake Ups, a Chex Mix-esque snack that features Fruity Pebbles boulders alongside pretzels and Waffle Crisp cereal, and Honeycomb Big Bites, a larger version of the cereal for snacking, exist.

But the spin-offs frustrate Goubert, because what he really wants is better, more interesting cereal. It seems like the more attention and creativity that's being given to these cereal-adjacent products, the less often we're seeing truly innovative and forward-thinking flavors for actual normal cereals, he says. He wants cereal companies to focus on innovations like General Millss CinnaGraham Toast Crunch, which brings graham flour to the forefront[Its] not as outlandish as something like a cereal-flavored syrup or anything, but it's a more intelligent and strategic innovation to take a different basic grain and put it in your cereal instead of using corn again, he says. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie gave the cereal his first five-spoon review in a video for Serious Eats, saying it has the structural integrity of Golden Grahams and the flavor of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Some spin-offs are more natural than others. Cinnamon Toast Crunch baking mixes make a lot of sense just because cinnamon and cookies and cake are already natural complements to each other, Goubert says. He also thinks the ice cream spin-offs work. The upscale New York City-based Milk Bar has been making one for over a decade (grocery store versions just hit shelves earlier this year). Ice cream is perfect because ice cream is really just a carrier for whatever flavor you want to put on it, Zwanka says, adding that ice cream sales also increased during the pandemic.

I tried a bunch of cereal-adjacent products with mixed results: the Duncan Hines Epic Fruity Pebbles boxed cake, with its pebbles-infused frosting was delicious. Cinnamon Toast Crunch soft-baked bars were like food clouds of joy. Fruity Sandwich cookies from Kroger were blindingly neon and surprisingly tasty. But duds remained. Cinnamon Toast Crunch Popcorn was like Cracker Jacks on a bad day. Fruity cereal Kit-Kats were one-note boring sugar wafer sticks. The MetRX fruity cereal crunch bar was a chalky hunk of protein aftertaste and regret.

Whether these products will remain on shelves is unknown, but Zwanka is bullish on their chances. Kellogg's owns [a lot] of the shelf space in the aisle for cereal, but cereal doesn't give you a breakfast on-the-go, so they need something handheld. Mintel, too, predicts that as more people return to their workplaces physical offices, consumers will seek more portable cereal products, perhaps in the little remix packages that pair cereals with things like pretzels, or in the Carnation Instant Breakfast drinks, which are flavored like Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Golden Grahams and Rice Krispie Treats.

It may be, however, that its the more adult cereal products that have staying power, like Cereal Milk marijuana, which wasnt intended to smell like Cereal Milk. Cannabiotix co-founder and CEO Neema Samara says it started as a cross between two strains of marijuana: strawberry lemonade and mint cookies. The breeder grew 50 seeds from the cross-strain, and phenotype number 15 smelled like the after milk from Capn Crunch Berries. It first went on sale about two years ago, in the relatively early months of the pandemic.

Its popularity is driven by a number of factors, Samari thinks. The nostalgia of that milk when you're done with the bowl of cereal is something that everyone can relate to When you bring that name to something like a cannabis strain: it just caught fire right away, he says. But its not just the nostalgia thats driving customers, of course. Cereal Milk also has a unique aesthetic look it produces just these really chunky like green buds that are just so frosted in THC and so draped in resin [which results] in a high THC and resin content, which causes it to be very potent, consistently, he says.

Is Cereal Milk cannabis a good thing? It kind of skirts the rules about appealing to kids, Zwanka says, in reference to laws about advertising cannabis. (Californias Bureau of Cannabis Control, for example, writes that marketing may not be designed in any manner likely to be appealing to minors or anyone under 21 years of age.)

But, he added, if it's legally advertised and legal to have in their jurisdiction, then let the customer decide whether or not they should be partaking in it. We have so many products that can be misused, that it's a slippery slope to pick one and say this one is bad for you, he says. And perhaps Cereal Milk cannabis will lead to more sales of actual cereal. People are definitely smoking the cereal milk and maybe eating a bowl of Luck Charms afterwards, Samari says.

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Another giant skyscraper could be built next to the Shard despite fears it could block views of St Pauls Cathedral. Developer, Great Portland Estates, wants to construct a 26-storey office block near London Bridge station in Southwark.

A 1980s office block would be demolished to make way for the skyscraper. The tower would include shops and a rooftop garden. London Bridge station would also get a new entrance from Borough High Street under the plans.

The plans will go before the governments planning body, the Planning Inspectorate, in July after Southwark Council failed to approve or refuse the proposals in time. But the local authority has criticised the plans, saying the building would damage the areas history.

READ MORE:Old ITV studios will be bulldozed for massive South Bank office blocks

Council documents read: The tower would be a significant incursion into the borough view from Nunhead Cemetery to St Pauls Cathedral, as its location, scale and height significantly exceed that of the cathedral in that view. It would dominate and crowd the cathedral, and would contribute to the canyoning of the borough view.

Therefore the tower would not preserve or enhance the borough views of this significant landmark, nor enhance the composition of the panorama across the borough and central London as a whole.

Southwark says the tower would also block views of the UKs tallest building, the Shard. Council documents read: The poor relationship between the proposed tower and the surrounding townscape context includes its relationship with the Shard, a tall building of particular importance both in the local townscape and more widely.

In a number of important views the proposed development would reduce the primacy and visibility of the Shard in the local townscape, and its singularity on the wider London skyline. Unlike other existing buildings in the emerging cluster, the resulting formal and visual relationship between the proposed tower and the Shard would be discordant and unsympathetic."

As of 2018, buildings on the site of the proposed skyscraper were used by 900 workers. Under the plans, a new public square would be created next to the tower. Affordable workspace would be created in the listed Keats House, which sits on the same site as the planned skyscraper.

The planning inspectorate will decide on the application during a hearing starting in July. Great Portland Estates previously submitted plans for a 37 storey skyscraper on the same spot in 2018. Great Portland Estates and Southwark Council have been contacted.

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Plans for massive skyscraper near the Shard could 'block views of St Paul's Cathedral' - My London

What could be better than a super freaky idea from the edges of astrophysics?Try two super freaky ideas from the edges of astrophysics.

That is exactly what we get from a new paper that explores how an advanced civilization might build a Dyson Sphere around a black hole to extract titanic amounts of energy. Now, I realize that last sentence is pretty wild. Indeed, the paper, by T.Y. Hsiao and his collaborators from the Institute of Astronomy in Taiwan, brings us to the very edge of possibility itself. Lets unpack things a bit.

We can start with the Dyson Sphere. This would be a vast shell of energy collectors placed around a star to harvest its entire light output. Freeman Dyson proposed the idea in the early 1960s. When NikolaiKardashev later devised a scale for classifying advanced aliens based on their capacities to harvest energy, he used the Dyson Sphere as a signature of a Type II civilization. We now know that an actual sphere would be unstable; it would crash into the star. These days, astronomers talk instead about Dyson Swarms dense arrays of orbiting energy collectors. A Dyson Swarm around the sun that harvested most of its energy would yield power measured in the trillions upon trillions of watts.

Next come black holes, which are far more well known. Lets describe them nevertheless. A black hole forms when a large enough collection of mass comes together in a small enough space. Under the right conditions, the matters self-gravity overwhelms everything else, leading it to collapse into what we call a singularity where all the mass gathers in a single geometric point. (We need a theory of quantum gravity to really understand what happens at the singularity.) A black hole comprises this singularity and its event horizon, which is simply the black holes surface of no return. Anything that crosses the event horizon is lost forever from our Universe.

Okay, so we have our two super freaky ideas. The first describes vast, solar system-sized machines surrounding a star and built by a hyper-advanced civilization to harvest energy. The second outlines impossibly dense regions of space and time surrounded by boundaries that separate their interiors from the rest of the cosmos. Now lets put them together in the same way Hsiao et al did.

The first question you are probably asking is, how can you get any energy out of a black hole? After all, dont black holes swallow everything that falls into the event horizon, including light?

The answer is pretty simple.

While matter and energy that fall through the event horizon are lost, stuff that stays farther out can still radiate energy and escape. Hsiao and his team thought first about stellar-mass black holes that form a binary system with a normal star. In such pairings, the black hole pulls material away from the regular star. This material then forms a swirling disk of gas, known as an accretion disk, that spirals around the black hole and eventually passes through the event horizon. The accretion disk is pretty hot. It radiates a lot of energy. While the hot material stays beyond the singularitys event horizon, it can emit energy that radiates away into space.Accretion disks also routinely produce high-energy beams, or jets, of plasma that rocket away from the disk and the Black Hole at velocities close to the speed of light.

Hsiao et al considered putting a Dyson Sphere around this kind of binary system. This obviously involves some pretty extreme astronomical engineering. Building a Dyson Sphere around any star requires very advanced capacities. You would probably have to ground up whole planets just to get the material you need. Building one in the extreme environment around a binary system with a black hole would be even harder, especially if you wanted to capture energy from the jets.

But imagine indeed that you could build the black hole Dyson Sphere. It would produce far more energy than even a normal Dyson Sphere. The results depend on the assumptions put into the model, but this contraption could collect anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of times more energy. In this way, a single black hole Dyson Sphere could put the beings that built it on a path to becoming a Type III civilization one with the capacity to collect the energy equivalent of an entire galaxy.

Now, all of this is obviously the purest of pure speculation. There may not even be any other civilizations out there, advanced or otherwise. And even if there are other civilizations, the technologies needed to create Dyson Spheres may be impossible. The cool thing, however, is how astrophysics lets you envision what might be possible. If we want to dream, we might as well dream big.

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Could aliens suck the energy from black holes with Dyson Spheres? - Big Think

I have a long held belief that predictability is underrated, and it ties in here with the rise in credibility once more of the concept of mono-tasking rather than the futility of being merely competent in several disciplines there is something to be said in the mastery of a point of focus, and delivering again and again in that field. These words need to be framed with a context that this is not damning with faint praise or providing criticism, but acknowledgement that Unveil In The Abyss (Xtreem Music), the seventh full-length from doom / death stalwarts Desecresy, follows the patterns and symbols laid down by its predecessors, and does so to the expected standards sole contributor Tommi Grnqvist has long established.

With a deep-rooted sound, forged on the anvil of the late eighties and early nineties Finnish death metal (with a liberal grunt of Bolt Thrower poured into the molten mix) over the course of their discography, various productions have proven somewhat of an achilles heel to the Desecresy legacy. Unveil In The Abyss manages to side-step that particular trap, meaning the vision is untampered.

Churning lower fretboard riffs are the order of the day, harkening back to Karellian Isthmus era Amorphis and Abhorrence, while Grnqvist delivers a foetid line in swampy subterranean guttural vocals that add depth and murkily dwell in and amongst the riffs, and the first couple of tracks gurgle by. Cult of Troglodytes takes a different approach, easing in with an atmospheric synth before the gloom engulfs once more. There are shades to the dark, though, and Necrolevitation shifts, a barreling tank of a song based around a chromatic chuggery and a descending lead-pattern hewn from the early Peaceville days of before breaking down to charge back in. Dissolve Through Obscure Worlds returns us to the darkness.

The singularity of vision, the utmost focus, and the execution are all to be admired, as is Grnqvists ability to navigate around the tight space without things being too samey or repetitive. Unveil In The Abyss feels the most accurate representation of Desecresy to date, is the most consistent in terms of performance across all the instruments, the strongest sonically and in presentation of the art, and provides a monument to the timelessness of the traditional death doom sound of Finland.

Buy the album here: https://xtreemmusic.bandcamp.com/album/unveil-in-the-abyss

7 / 10

STEVE TOVEY

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The partnershipmeans thatcurrent and aspiringleaders can earn accredited graduate and executive degrees from IU while gaininga deeper understandingofhow exponential technologies aredramatically affectingcompanies, communities, and countries. In addition to learning about the future through a river of content from Singularity, IU students will become part of an exclusive IU cohort within the Singularity community of over 250,000 impact innovators.These innovators themselves contributecontent andinsights from countries around the world on topics such as clean energy, longevity, mobility, smart cities and more.

"Several major trends are converging that make this partnership powerful. First, hundreds of millions of students around the world deserve'anytime' access to more affordableand more relevant undergraduate and graduate programs. Second, exponential technologies continuously make possible new solutions to serious problems facing humanity and the planet," said Steve Leonard, CEO of Singularity Group. "Our partnership with IU combines the best of our respective abilities for the benefit of students around the worldas they grow into leaders of companies, communities, and countries."

Sven Schtt, CEO of IU, said: "At IU, we are passionate about learner-centric education to unlock human potential and empower people to grow. As Europe's fastest-growing university and the biggest state-accredited educational institution in Germany, we are a pioneer in leveraging technology and innovation. IU democratizes education by removing cultural, geographical and financial entry barriers with flexible and tailor-made modes of studying. And we equip our students with the tech proficiency necessary to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. We are excited to team up with Singularity to reach even more learners around the world and bring together our unique strengths for the benefit of societies around the world."

For more information, please visit https://www.singularity-university.org/.

About Singularity GroupSingularity Group is a global impact organization that looks into the future to help leaders better understand how exponential technology will shape businesses and societies in the years ahead. Through a deeper understanding of the accelerated pace of change and the role that technology plays in it,theseleaders create tremendous positive impact that improves the wellbeing of people and the health of the planet. Over the past decade, Singularity has worked with more than 75,000 leaders drawn from corporations, nonprofits, governments, investors, and academia. With 250,000 impact-minded innovators across the Singularity network, 125 chapters and partners across six continents and a strong digital presence, Singularity Group reaches millions of people each month. The organization has launched over 5,000 social impact initiatives and its alumni have started more than 200 companies. For more information, visit https://su.org/.

About IU International University of Applied SciencesWith over 85,000 students, IU International University of Applied Sciences (IU) is the largest university in Germany. The private, state-recognized educational institution brings together more than 200 Bachelor's and Master's degree programs under its roof, which are offered in German or English. Students can choose between on-campus study, dual study, distance learning and flexible combination models and thus shape their studies in a self-determined way. In addition, IU facilitates continuing education and promotes the idea of lifelong learning. The university's goal is to make education possible for as many people as possible. IU began operations in 2000 and is now represented in 28 German cities. It cooperates with over 10,000 companies and actively supports them in employee development. Its partners include hotel group Motel One, Volkswagen Financial Services and Germany's national railway company. Further information at: http://www.iu.de/en

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Champion bridge player Sharon Osberg once wrote, Playing bridge is like running a business. Its about hunting, chasing, nuance, deception, reward, danger, cooperation and, on a good day, victory.

While its little surprise chess fell to number-crunching supercomputers long ago, youd expect humans to maintain a more unassailable advantage in bridge, a game of incomplete information, cooperation, and sly communication. Over millennia, our brains have evolved to read subtle facial queues and body language. Weve assembled sprawling societies dependent on the competition and cooperation of millions. Surely such skills are beyond the reach of machines?

For now, yes. But perhaps not forever. In recent years, the most advanced AI has begun encroaching on some of our most proudly held territory; the ability to navigate an uncertain world where information is limited, the game is infinitely nuanced, and no one succeeds alone.

Last week, French startup NukkAI took another step when its NooK bridge-playing AI outplayed eight bridge world champions in a competition held in Paris.

The game was simplified, and NooK didnt exactly go head-to-head with the human playersmore on that belowbut the algorithms performance was otherwise spectacular. Notably, NooK is a kind of hybrid algorithm, combining symbolic (or rule-based) AI with todays dominant deep learning approach. Also, in contrast to its purely deep learning peers, NooK is more transparent and can explain its actions.

What weve seen represents a fundamentally important advance in the state of artificial intelligence systems, Stephen Muggleton, a machine learning professor at Imperial College London, told The Guardian. In other words, not too bad for a cold, calculating computer.

To play bridge, maybe the most challenging card or board game yet tackled by AI, the NukkAI team combined deep reinforcement learning with symbolic AI, an approach famously used by IBMs Deep Blue to defeat Garry Kasparov at chess in the 90s.

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms are made up of a network of interconnected artificial neurons. To learn a game, an algorithm plays itself billions of times, evaluates its performance after each round, and incrementally improves by tuning and retuning its neural connections until it finally masters play.

Symbolic AI, on the other hand, is rules-based. Software engineers hard code the rules the AI needs to know to succeed. These might be, for example, that a bishop can move diagonally any number of squares on a chess board, or that if an opponent pursues a particular strategy, then employing some counterstrategy increases the chances of winning. This approach is fine for the finite, but as the space of all possible moves rises in complex games, it becomes untenable.

Thats why the 2016 defeat of Go world champion, Lee Sedol, by DeepMinds AlphaGo was a big deal. At the time, experts hadnt expected AI to beat top Go players for a decade. AlphaGo showed the surprising power of deep learning compared to good ol fashioned AI.

But deep learning has its drawbacks. One of them is that its a black box. How the billions of nodes in a neural network achieve any given task is mysterious.

AlphaGos Move 37 against Lee Sedol was a choice no human would makeit calculated the odds a professional would have chosen that move at 1 in 10,000but it made the move anyway, and won. Still, the algorithm couldnt explain what in its training informed its confidence. This opacity is a problem when the stakes are higher than a board game. To trust self-driving cars or medical algorithms making life-and-death decisions and diagnoses, we need to understand their rationale.

One potential solution, championed by researchers like NukkAI, would mash deep learning and symbolic AI together, exploiting each ones strengths in whats called a neurosymbolic approach.

NooK, for example, learns the rules of the game first, then improves its skills by playing. The combination refines the algorithms probabilistic brain, Muggleton told The Telegraph, taking it beyond statistics.NooK, he said, uses background knowledge much in the way that we augment our own learning with information from books and previous experience. As a result, the algorithm can explain decisions: Its a white box AI.

This is why bridgea game of communication and strategy thats resisted conquest by AIis a great test for the approach. In bridge, you cant play if you dont explain, NukkAI cofounder Vronique Ventos told The Guardian.

There are bridge-playing algorithms out there, but they dont hold a candle to the best humans. In NukkAIs Paris competition a little over a week ago, the situation looks to have changed.

The NukkAI Challenge pitted NooK against eight bridge world champions.

Each champion played ten sets of ten games, while NooK played 80 sets of ten games, or 800 straight deals. Instead of playing each other, human and AI played the same hands against the same opponents, a pair of bridge bots (not built by NukkAI) called Wbridge5.

A game of bridge begins with players bidding on how many tricks, or rounds of play, they think they can win. The highest bid is called the contract, and whoever sets the contract is the declarer. The declarers partner, or the dummy, lays their hand down on the table face up, and exits the game. The declarer now plays both hands against their opponents, and tries to win enough tricks to meet their bid.

The NukkAI Challenge removed bidding to simplify play, and both the humans and NooK assumed the role of declarer in each game, with the bridge bot pair as opponents (or defenders). The difference between NooKs score and each human players score was averaged over each set. NooK beat its rivals in 67, or 83 percent, of the 80 sets played.

Its pretty desperate for the humans, French champion Thomas Bessis said. There are just times that we dont understand why the AI is playing better than usbut it is. Its very frustrating.

NooKs victory is an impressive feat, but there are caveats. Skipping the bidding process and playing only the declarer role removed challenging and nuanced parts of the game in which partners must communicate with each other and deceive their opponents. Also, its challenging for a human to stay focused for 100 straight hands, but not so a computer. Finally, NukkAI cofounder, Jean-Baptiste Fantun, said he was confident the machine would prevail over thousands of deals, but was less sanguine about its prospects over just 800. In other words, the more it plays, the better its odds of winning, so playing a lot of hands consecutively may have helped the AI nudge out the humans in this case.

So even in bridge, there are other things to be solved, Fantun said. We still have a roadmap in front of us. That is, its too much to say bridge has fallen to AI, like chess or Go. But AI outscoring top human players in part of the game is a key milestone on Fantuns map. And while ever-bigger AI algorithms, like OpenAIs GPT-3, continue to impress, NukkAIs performance in bridge may add weight to the argument for a hybrid approach.

Next, theyll have to show NooK can play and winno disclaimers needed.

Image Credit:T A T I A N A / Unsplash

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A Hybrid AI Just Beat Eight World Champions at Bridgeand Explained How It Did It - Singularity Hub

Downey and Hall had worked together several times in the past, notably in the comedy films "Weird Science" in 1985, and "Johnny Be Good" in 1988. In 2016, Hall had most recently appeared in the Academy Award-nominated film "Foxcatcher," and had made several appearances on hit TV shows like "Psyche" and "Awkward."

"Singularity" was to be produced by both Downey and his wife Susan in a massive deal between the actor's production company and Sonar Entertainment. Details of the project were kept tightly under wraps when the show was announced, with Downey being frustratingly coy. There were no ready details about the show's premise or plot or the nature of Hall's character. It was exciting to think of Downey directing, however, as he hadn't directed a high-profile film or TV show in the past. In fact, heonce dismissed the idea entirely. Hall leading another series was also exciting for fans of "The Dead Zone," which ran from 2002 to 2007.

The only speculation one may have been able to make was about the genre of "Singularity." The title likely was taken from the physics term which is defined by Oxford Languages as "a point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole." In technology, "singularity" refers to the point wherein mechanical devices will become more advanced than human bodies, making physical biological flesh obsolete. The title alone might have one assuming "Singularity" was to be a sci-fi show. But it is only speculation, because neither Downey nor Hall confirmed that.

The only other connection to Downey and to "Singularity" that I was able to find was asingle malt, single hopped session IPA with a Kolsch yeast. But it turned out the Downey Brewing Company (based in Michigan), and their beer Singularity, have nothing at all to do with Robert Downey Jr. and his pilot "Singularity." It's merely a fun coincidence. Order some beer at the Downey Brewing website.

Read more here:

Robert Downey Jr. Directed A TV Pilot We Never Got To See - /Film

If you are what you eat, Gervon Dexter would have been a Twinkie. A 313-pound one, at that.

He liked to snack away, comforted by the knowledge that the calories likely would melt away at football practice. And when youre 6-foot-6, you can carry a few more Twinkies than the average guy.

But after two seasons, Dexter knew he needed more than bulk to play defensive tackle at an NFL-prospect level. He needed to get quicker.

Enter Kelsee Gomes, the new queen of Floridas Kitchen.

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Her title is actually director of sports nutrition football. When Billy Napier was introduced as head coach, he said hed bring in an army to help revive the Gators program. And you know what they say about that?

An army marches on its stomach.

Napoleon supposedly coined the phrase 200 years ago, long before Nick Saban started hiring individual chefs for offense, defense and special teams. Whether its the French Imperial Army trying to take over Europe or Napiers army trying to capture the SEC, it all begins with happy bellies.

Based on early reviews, the Gators' bellies are very happy with Gomes.

Shes a rock star, strength coach Mark Hocke said.

She like oil for a car, Demarkcus Bowman tweeted, so without that oil that car aint gonna crank.

David Whitley: For Billy Napier, building new culture for Florida football begins with strength coach Mark Hocke | Whitley

Gomes was hired from North Carolina, where she was in charge of 28 sports. Shed worked as an assistant nutritionist here during Will Muschamps days, but what really attracted her back was the singularity of her mission.

Its all football, though Florida has five nutritionists for other sports. Gomes could also hire two full-time assistants just for football.

The whole sports nutrition business has exploded in the past decade. Part of it is advances in science and technology, and better understanding of how a good diet leads to better performance.

And part of it is the insatiable SEC desire to seek even the slightest advantage over the next guy. Thats why Georgia has a director of nutrition, a performance chef for football and a culinary services manager for football.

For all we know, Saban really might have 14 quality-control nutritionists. Whatever the case, weve certainly come a long way from the days when a guy in an apron slung mashed potatoes onto trays at the mess hall.

Latest from practice: Quick takeaways from Florida Gators' ninth of 15 spring practices under Billy Napier

Gomes conducted a body-mass scan on each player to find their fat vs. lean mass ratios, consulted with the strength coaches, position coaches and training staffs and came up with individual meal plans.

She prefers that term instead of diet, which conjures visions of Jenny Craig and pretending your stomach isnt grumbling at 110 decibels for a slice of pizza.

Ive always had this approach that all foods fit, Gomes said.

She told players shes not here to send them into Twinkie detox. Its all about eating a well-balanced meal plan with the right combination of fiber, proteins, antioxidants and all that other stuff you can read on the labels of vitamin bottles.

I dont want them to feel guilt or shame about eating a certain type of food, Gomes said.

She does emphasize the benefits of eating certain types of food. That way, a player understands how eating a bowl of blueberries will help alleviate aching muscles after a three-hour practice.

She came in and she got it instantly, Dexter said. She didnt waste any time.

D-line: Florida Gators defensive line in development, with new players and a new leader in Sean Spencer

He told Gomes what his goals were. She had a meal plan ready the next day. Dexter said hes leaner and meaner this spring than hes been since arriving in Gainesville.

Its all Miss Kelsee, he said. I cant give no credit to myself.

Gomes doesnt do the actual cooking. She designs the menus for the football chefs to whip up, then she makes sure everybody follows their orders.

Our team really likes vegetables, Gomes said. And we have a lot of fruit guys, too.

Napier has made breakfast mandatory, so two of Gomes assistants check attendance every morning. Napiers also into visual reminders, so Gomes has put individualized signs in every locker.

They say things like, More Muscle Mass or Maintain Muscle Mass.

Its all just another component in Napiers grand plan. Every school has stepped up its nutrition game, so Florida really had no choice.

But if an army marches only as well as their stomachs feel, the Gators should eventually gopretty far.

David Whitley is The Gainesville Sun's sports columnist. Contact him at dwhitley@gannett.com. And follow him on Twitter: @DavidEWhitley

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Florida football nutritionist getting rave reviews: What's she got cooking for the Gators? - Gatorsports.com

04/04/2022 - Nataa Urban's CPH:DOX-winning film is a multi-layered exploration of collective and personal memory and responsibility with a remarkable stylistic approach

Serbian-born, Oslo-based director Nataa Urban's documentary The Eclipse, which has just won the main award at CPH:DOX, is a remarkable exploration of collective and personal memory and responsibility. Combining 16mm and manipulated Super 8 footage with an exquisite analogue, tape modulation-dominated soundtrack, the director has created a multi-layered work that resonates on several distinctive levels.

Urban hails from the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, which is populated by a dozen ethnic groups, with her own grandmother being Romanian. It has a very different atmosphere than that of Belgrade or central Serbia, with its flatlands and low hills and focus on agriculture: pets and farm animals feature prominently in the film, with a special accent on pig slaughter as a symbol of violence, one of its main themes.

As the documentary opens with images of landscapes in the soft morning light, the viewer experiences a stillness that will soon be contrasted with an exploration of painful memories. The whole film relies on this often unnerving dichotomy, but the viewing experience is surprisingly smooth, much to the credit of DoP Ivan Markovi and editor Jelena Maksimovi.

Urban left Serbia decades ago, and as she says in the voice-over, never looked back. But she came upon her father's hiking journal, and started connecting the dates and entries with key events from the 1990s. She gets her father to retrace his steps, and we watch the slender, grey-bearded man as he walks through forests, villages and hills, and listen to him reading out those old sentences.

The first date is 24 November 1990. While Dad was visiting the village of erevi, a narrative title informs us that the Golubinka pit in Croatia was opened, revealing the remains of 600 Serbian victims killed by the Ustae in the Second World War. The TV footage shows Orthodox priests saying prayers over skulls and bones, which came to be heavily used in the Serbian propaganda of the 1990s.

Similarly, Urban counterpoints the beginning of the war in Croatia and the bloody siege of Vukovar, the first democratic protests in Serbia, the siege of Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and the NATO bombing of Serbia, with her father's diary entries that seem to come from another world. Yet despite his self-imposed isolation from these events, the war is gradually closing in on him as well.The story of the family climbing Caucasus in 1995, when Sarajevo was still under siege, or a their photo on the mountain top of Magli in Bosnia with a Yugoslav flag in 1991, when the war in Croatia was raging, are jarringly ambivalent.

Interviews with the director's family and friends make a trajectory from happy memories of the pre-war days to those of the strikingly sad and brutal events of the 1990s. To reflect those times, Urban filmed on Super 8, which was then processed to get the texture of a particular era. This simulated archive footage has a profound effect when coupled with Svenn Jakobsen's atmospheric sound design and the haunting score by Bill Gould and Jared Blum which appropriately nods to William Basinski's "Disintegration Loops," one of music's most potent explorations of memory.

Underlining the nature of memory makes Urban's confrontational approach to the issue of collective responsibility non-judgmental. When she reminds her mother of the times that she prefers to forget, she is not pointing a finger, rather, she is asking her to look deep inside herself. The solar eclipse in the title is similarly a symbolic framing device which reflects this same duality, which is in fact a singularity: it is possible to simultaneously love a person - or a country - and hold them responsible.

The Eclipse was produced by Norway's Medieoperatrene and the UK's Taskovski Films has the international rights.

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Review: The Eclipse - Cineuropa