All This Complexity.

All quiet on the far side of the moon.

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1. Carrisa Wong:

Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science and is available online, reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimeter, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”

The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometers thick — that could be imaged using electron microscopes.

Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D. “I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” says Jain. “It felt sort of spiritual.” (Sources: linkedin.com, nature.com, lichtmanlabs.fas.harvard.edu) More on this here.

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2. What nearly every neuron looks like:

Researchers built a 3D image of nearly every neuron and its connections within a small piece of human brain tissue. This version shows excitatory neurons colored by their depth from the surface of the brain. Blue neurons are those closest to the surface, and fuchsia marks the innermost layer. The sample is approximately 3 mm wide. (Source: Google Research & Lichtman Lab, Harvard University, Rendering by D. Berger)

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3. Steve Nadis:

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” would get another. You’d probably be a little worried about your friend’s mental faculties, and you’d almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave.

That’s exactly what’s happening with many large language models (LLMs), the ultra-powerful machine learning tools that power ChatGPT and other marvels of artificial intelligence. A generative question, which is open-ended, yields one answer, and a discriminative question, which involves having to choose between options, often yields a different one. “There is a disconnect when the same question is phrased differently,” said Athul Paul Jacob, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To make a language model’s answers more consistent — and make the model more reliable overall — Jacob and his colleagues devised a game where the model’s two modes are driven toward finding an answer they can agree on. Dubbed the consensus game, this simple procedure pits an LLM against itself, using the tools of game theory to improve the model’s accuracy and internal consistency.

“Research exploring self-consistency within these models has been very limited,” said Shayegan Omidshafiei, chief scientific officer of the robotics company Field AI. “This paper is one of the first that tackles this, in a clever and systematic way, by creating a game for the language model to play with itself.” (Source: quantamagazine.org)

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4. Bloomberg:

The US must undertake a “full-time surge” to combat the rise in cyberattacks that is undermining US national security, the recently departed head of the National Security Agency said in an interview.

Paul Nakasone, who is also the former commander of Cyber Command and a recently retired four-star general, proposed a more aggressive approach that would focus diplomacy, business partnerships and technical know-how to thwart the threat. The goal, he said, would extend “the same type of work we do for our election security” to all cybercrime.

Under Nakasone, intelligence and offensive hacking teams started combining as a matter of course, focused on finding and disrupting election threats. Key to their efforts tackling election meddling has been efforts to understand the threats, rapidly share information with other partners across government and undertake concrete responses, he said, arguing the US needs to advance all three approaches in a focused way to make a dent in nationwide hacking.

His call comes as the US battles a wave of serious cyberattacks that have gravely affected the health sector and seen US water utilities under attack. It also comes amid warnings from the US government dating back a year that China is preparing to disrupt domestic civilian infrastructure en masse in the event of conflict over Taiwan. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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5. Jaushieh Joseph Wu:

Just as the fight to protect democracy in Ukraine has global implications, so, too, does the defense of Taiwan. According to Bloomberg Economics, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would cost the global economy around $10 trillion, the equivalent of nearly ten percent of global GDP—dwarfing the impacts of the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the global financial crisis of 2008–9. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan would result in less immediate destruction but would still cost the global economy around $5 trillion.

The reason is simple: over 90 percent of advanced chips are produced in Taiwan, and approximately half of the global fleet of ships that carry shipping containers pass through the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan is an indispensable and irreplaceable part of the global supply chain, and defending it requires a global effort. But the value of Taiwanese security is not merely economic; it is also geostrategic. Preserving the status quo in the strait is vital to maintaining the U.S. alliance system, the regional balance of power, and nuclear nonproliferation. These three critical pillars have kept the Indo-Pacific region stable and prosperous for generations and would be threatened were China to gain control of Taiwan. Economic losses and supply chain disruptions could be mitigated over time. But a geostrategic shift to the advantage of China’s authoritarian expansionism would harm the world for decades to come. (Source: foreignaffairs.com)

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