New paper - AI from a diverse intelligence perspective: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley… Abstract: "Recent discussions and debate around artificial intelligence (AI) and its status are notably incomplete, missing the implications of highly relevant aspects of the emerging fields of diverse intelligence (DI) and synthetic morphology, as well as of basic facts of developmental biology. Herein, it is argued that human flourishing is impossible without an appreciation of the space of possible beings and of the ways in which today's intelligent machine debates are about universal existential questions facing biological beings, not just AI. The inevitable arrival of a wide set of unconventional bodies and minds as humans modify and create new forms will disrupt untenable old narratives of what people are and how to recognize their sentient allies in unfamiliar guises. Herein, the issues engendered by the advent of AI from the perspective of the field of DI and the evolutionary history of the bodies and minds are discussed."

Watch this wonderful double feature in which I unravel the Agentworld project and thesis and Marek Poliks introduces, Superdark Factory, the first article in the Agentworld issue of Antikythera in grand detail.

We form our identities always in relation to the other. The other used to be the animals, now the other is artificial, silicon intelligence. This provides an opportunity to identify as a biological intelligence that will unite the natural world.

Simulating the natural world requires computing systems that inherently operate on quantum principles. Google Quantum AI aims to build quantum computing for these otherwise unsolvable problems. ↓ goo.gle/4xUUj9q

La pianista catalana Laura Farré Rozada ha rebut el premi a la millor instrumentista de 2026 als InterContinental Music Awards pel disc "Araspel". També ha estat convidada a formar part de la Recording Academy i de la Latin Recording Academy.

My #article addresses the latest scientific findings regarding the structure of the #cellwall in #Archaea. It also explores #evolutionary #scenarios that led to the emergence of #eukaryotes. A particularly significant evolutionary achievement of eukaryotes is the possession of #mitochondria, the cell's "power stations", which supply the cellular metabolism with free energy in the form of #ATP. Approximately 1.6 to 1.8 billion years ago, an event known as #eukaryogenesis occurred. The world of living organisms, at that time confined to #anaerobicconditions in the #oceans, underwent a dramatic transformation within a relatively short period. This shift had profound consequences for the previously dominant unicellular organisms: the #archaea and the #bacteria. The so-called #GreatOxidationEvent approximately 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago pushed archaea into sediment layers where largely anaerobic conditions still prevailed. There, they coexisted with metabolically flexible #alphaproteobacteria. Within the Archaea, the #Asgard archaea are the #sistergroup to the Eukaryota. They had already lost the cell wall found in other archaea, a state that persisted in early eukaryotes. This loss of the cell wall was the prerequisite for an important case of #endosymbiosis, specifically, the incorporation of alphaproteobacteria, the later mitochondria. It is no longer believed that true #phagocytosis of the bacteria occurred; instead, the bacteria were initially held in place by #armlike #projections formed from the archaea's flexible membrane. Over the course of evolution, these projections fused together, thereby enclosing the bacterium. Initially, the incorporated bacterium enabled a #syntrophic #exchange of substances between #host and #endosymbiont (e.g., hydrogen transfer between the Asgard host and the alphaproteobacterium); The bacterium was able to break down organic substances much more efficiently with the help of #oxygen. The Asgard host provided metabolic products and was protected from direct contact with oxygen by the bacterium, which was helpful given the rising oxygen content in the water and the resulting steep physical and chemical gradients, so-called #oxyclines. Later, this arrangement evolved into an innovation for generating large amounts of energy. R. Smith et al. (2026) investigated the cell wall structure of the archaeon #Methanobrevibacter #smithii, a member of the human gut microbiome. They discovered that the cell wall contains a previously unknown sugar, which the researchers named N-acetylarmosamine (#ArmNAc). This finding is remarkable because the prevailing scientific consensus had previously assumed the presence of the sugar building block N-acetyltalosaminuronic acid (#TalNAc) instead. Furthermore, the researchers identified the #enzyme #ArmA, a hydrolase that acts as #molecularscissors to locally cleave the rigid ArmNAc sugar armor. This grants the underlying #membrane greater mobility and #flexibility, a crucial factor during cell division. The insights into cell envelope regulation in archaea gained through this research will also pave the way for understanding membrane flexibility in the cell-wall-lacking Asgard archaea, a factor of great significance regarding the eukaryogenesis. However, this does not directly imply that they used ArmA, but rather that #enzymemediated #regulation of cell envelope modification is a deeply rooted archaeal trait. ©#StefanFWirth, October 2026, Berlin Please support my science writing efforts: ko-fi link 👇 in my first reply. Reference: R. Smith et al. (2026): DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11028-y 👇 link in my first reply. #Images: 1) Eukaryogenesis. Authors H. Imachi et al. (2020), under which the Creative Commons License 4.0 international. 👇link in my first answer 2) #Protheoarchaeum #syntrophicum, artistic recreation in plasticine. Author Maulucioni, 2020, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0 international 👇 link in my first answer

A new study shows that "butterfly wing patterns work in tandem with flight dynamics to create visual illusions that confuse predators". "The striking coloration of butterflies makes it easy to catch a glimpse of them on the wing. Actually catching one of these insects midflight is another story, however. That’s because the dazzling stripes and spots on their wings create powerful visual illusions as they flap, tricking predators into missing them […]." #Science #Biology #Insects #Ecology ⏯️Butterfly wing patterns give predators the old razzle-dazzle 1-science.org/content/article/… 2-nature.com/articles/s41586-0… /

#otd in 1950, the Turing Test was born w/Alan Turing’s seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." bit.ly/2Yiby9V

Have we built machines that think like humans? 🧠🤖 In a new preprint, we propose CogGym, which compares AI and human judgments across 258 commonsense-reasoning experiments from 100 cognitive-science papers. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.21259 Platform: coggym.org

"Coleoid cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus, and squid) are marine mollusks with elaborate nervous systems that support a diverse repertoire of complex behaviors." Read how "breakthroughs in genetically altering cephalopods pave way for new studies of perception, brain evolution, and more". #Science #Biology #Biotechnology ⏯️Scientists engineered a glowing cuttlefish. Why was it so hard? 1-science.org/content/article/… 2-biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… /

Our Neuroevolution textbook is finally in print! Free online edition: neuroevolutionbook.com/ Pre-order: a.co/d/06DpkH9h I am incredibly grateful to my co-authors Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, and Risto Miikkulainen for making this happen. Neuroevolution is a subject very dear to my heart. It is the field that convinced me that nature has already figured out how to build intelligence: through evolution, collective behavior, and adaptation under constraints. This idea, that intelligence emerges from evolution operating under constraints rather than unlimited resources, is what eventually led me to founding Sakana AI here in Japan. The concepts in this book about open-ended creativity and self-organizing systems are exactly what we build at @SakanaAILabs. Our name and logo are inspired by schools of fish moving together, adapting as one. It is the core philosophy of what we build. This book captures the theoretical foundations of that belief.