There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Neurons play Pong: the edge of ‘sentience’
By integrating networks of human and mouse neurons with computer hardware, a team of scientists believe that they have witnessed a 'sentient' game of the arcade classic Pong, report ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and JOEL HELLEWELL
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
TO perform the experiment, cortical cells taken from the brains of rodent embryos were placed in a vat of nutrients in which they grew into a dense, complicated network. This network resembles a very scaled-down version of the network of neurons that comprise our own brains.
Performing the same process with human neurons requires an extra step, since there are further ethical considerations for direct collection and use of human tissues.
Consensually collected human cells such as red blood cells can be “reversed” into pluripotent stem cells, the initial form that all human cells take before they begin to specialise into things like skin, muscle, or bone. These stem cells are then triggered into changing into human neurons and are grown into dense networks the same way as the mice neurons.
The neurons were grown on very fine grids of electrodes that can record the chains of electrical signals that fire along connected neurons, as well as send external electrical signals into the network. The result is a two-way interface between the network of neurons and a computer system.
The computer system was programmed to run a one-player version of the game Pong, where you move a paddle up or down to bounce a ball against a wall on the opposite side of the screen. The computer sends signals into a specific region of the neuron network and interprets any signals in two different regions as requests to move the paddle up or down.
The computer communicates sensory information such as ball location on the y-axis or ball speed into the network. The hope was that the network of neurons would learn to interpret this information and respond by moving the paddle in the correct direction.
However, the neurons need a reason to care about this sensory information that they are receiving: without any feedback on their performance could the neurons learn? This is where the scientists made use of a specific theory of how intelligent behaviour emerges, pioneered by senior author on the paper Karl Friston.
Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist based at University College London and is a leading proponent of what he has called the “free energy principle.”
More from this author
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
