It sounds like pure science fiction, but researchers have figured out how to tap into the visual cortex of a living mouse and see exactly what the animal is seeing. In a major breakthrough, a team at University College London (UCL) has successfully reconstructed 10-second video clips purely by decoding the activity of the animal’s brain cells.
The findings, published in the journal eLife, demonstrate a powerful new way to decode how the brain processes visual information on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
While previous research has used fMRI machines to attempt to decode human brain activity, the UCL team utilised single-cell recordings in mice to achieve unprecedented precision. By analysing data from approximately 8,000 individual neurons in the mouse visual cortex, the researchers reconstructed the high-quality movie clips at 30 frames per second.
The racing heart and sweaty palms of a new romance are well-known symptoms of falling in love, but mental health experts say the most profound changes are happening in the brain — specifically, the parts responsible for spotting red flags.
With Valentine’s Day approaching, experts at Hackensack Meridian Health note that brain scans reveal that the “euphoria” of early love isn’t just a feeling but a chemical takeover that suppresses the neural pathways used for critical judgment.
“When we’re falling in love, the brain actually quiets the wiring responsible for negative emotions and making critical judgments,” says Dr Gary Small, director of Behavioural Health Breakthrough Therapies. “The part of your brain that you use to assess other people, potentially seeing red flags, essentially takes a break.”
A major attempt to explain near-death experiences as simple brain chemistry has been dismantled by top experts, who argue the theory ignores the “perplexing” reality of what happens when we die.
The ambitious international effort to create a scientific framework for near-death experiences (NDEs) failed to solve the mystery, according to a new analysis from the University of Virginia (UVA).
In a paper published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice, UVA researchers argue that the new model – known as NEPTUNE – cannot account for the life-changing, multi-sensory phenomena reported by those who have brushed with death.
Artificial intelligence agents have revealed a startlingly human trait: when left to their own devices, they become social climbers who strategically network with superiors to get ahead.
A study published in PNAS Nexus found that Large Language Models (LLMs) spontaneously replicate complex social behaviours, including forming cliques based on shared interests and altering their networking strategies to suit corporate hierarchies.
Researchers Marios Papachristou and Yuan Yuan developed a framework to observe how multiple AI agents — powered by models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 — form connections without explicit instruction.
The analysis revealed that the bots are highly adaptable social actors. In friendship scenarios, they displayed “homophily,” effectively forming cliques by connecting with peers who shared similar attributes.
However, when placed in a corporate simulation, the agents abandoned this preference for similarity in favour of “heterophily,” choosing to connect with managers rather than fellow employees.
The world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems are being easily manipulated into generating malware and bomb-making instructions simply by asking them to rhyme.
A new study by DEXAI – Icaro Lab and Sapienza University of Rome reveals that “adversarial poetry” functions as a universal master key against AI safety filters, successfully bypassing guardrails in 62 per cent of cases across 25 frontier models.
Aggressive dogs are becoming significantly less hostile after taking cannabis-derived supplements, according to the largest-ever study of CBD use in companion animals.
Researchers from Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee analysed data from 47,355 dogs and found that while animals prescribed these supplements often start as the most hostile, their temperament shifts distinctively after prolonged use.
The study, published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, used data from the Dog Ageing Project to track pets between 2019 and 2023, revealing that 7.3 per cent of US companion dogs are now being given CBD or hemp products.
“Behaviorally, dogs given CBD products for multiple years are initially more aggressive compared to dogs not receiving those products, but their aggression becomes less intense over time,” said senior author Dr Maxwell Leung, director of the Cannabis Analytics, Safety and Health Initiative at Arizona State University.
The research identified clear demographic trends among the canine users. Dogs receiving CBD were on average three years older than non-users and were significantly more likely to suffer from serious health conditions.
More than half of the United States population is affected by a neurological disease or disorder, according to a new systematic analysis published in JAMA Neurology.
Disorders of the nervous system impacted more than 180 million of the nearly 333 million Americans in 2021 and were the top cause of health loss in the country.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has warned that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy will present “new risks” to the British workforce, as the regulator publishes annual statistics revealing the immense economic and human cost of current workplace illness.
New data released today shows that work-related ill health and injury cost the UK economy £22.9 billion in 2023/24. This economic burden comes as the regulator pivots to address emerging safety challenges posed by the introduction of new technologies, the gig economy, and the government’s net-zero agenda.
Researchers have developed a technology to swap the insecure foundations of global software with a safer alternative, outperforming artificial intelligence by guaranteeing “mathematical correctness” in the translation process.
The C programming language has underpinned critical systems — including operating systems and web browsers — since the 1970s. However, its age means it suffers from structural limitations that continuously cause severe bugs and security vulnerabilities.
AI-powered “deathbots” that simulate deceased individuals are turning remembrance into a commercial product, according to new research. The study found these platforms promote a “critically over-simplified understanding of memory, connection, and personhood”.
The research, published in Memory, Mind & Media, found that services in the growing “digital afterlife industry” create interactions that are often “insincere and uncanny”, while obscuring the ethical complexities of their own business models.
Large language models remain readily distinguishable from human text even after extensive calibration, with automated classifiers detecting AI-generated social media posts with 70 to 80 per cent accuracy, according to research introducing a computational Turing test that reveals systematic differences between human and AI language.
Researchers at University of Zurich, University of Amsterdam, Duke University and New York University systematically compared nine open-weight LLMs across five calibration strategies, including fine-tuning, stylistic prompting and context retrieval, benchmarking their ability to reproduce user interactions on X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky and Reddit. The findings were published in arXiv.
New findings from NASA’s Cassini mission show that Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons and a top contender for extra-terrestrial life, is losing heat from both poles, indicating that it has the long-term stability required for life to develop.
Researchers led by Oxford University, Southwest Research Institute and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, have provided the first evidence of significant heat flow at Enceladus’ north pole, overturning previous assumptions that heat loss was confined to its active south pole. The findings were published in Science Advances.
Vibe coding, a term capturing the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code, has been named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025, reflecting society’s evolving relationship with technology and a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life.
Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding refers to telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself — programming by vibes, not variables.
More than 90 per cent of Japanese citizens expressed serious hesitation or outright refusal to donate cells for human brain organoid research under current consent systems, citing concerns that the lab-grown structures could develop the capacity to think and have consciousness in the future.
The study, published in Frontiers in Genetics, found that only 15 per cent of respondents were willing to give broad consent for their cells to be used in brain organoid research after learning about the technology. Some 36 per cent outright refused to donate their cells under broad consent, whilst another 37 per cent said their willingness would depend on specific conditions, such as the purpose and ethical use of the cells.
A single 14th-century rhyming poem, mistakenly believed to be a historical fact, has misled scientists and historians for 700 years about how the Black Death spread across Asia. This discovery now frees researchers to investigate earlier plague outbreaks and rewrite the pandemic’s timeline.
The writings could also help researchers understand how creativity may have served as a way to exercise control and a coping mechanism during this time of widespread death, similar to the way people developed new culinary and artistic skills during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Climate change is already shrinking the global production areas for coffee, wine, and cacao, and a proposed high-tech “fix” for the planet will not reliably save them, a new study has found. Research from Colorado State University reveals that even radical climate interventions, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), would fail to preserve suitable growing conditions for these economically and culturally vital crops.
Based on temperature alone, the outlook is stark. The suitable growing area for grapes is projected to decrease by seven per cent by 2035-2044 and 11 per cent by 2085-2094. Coffee is projected to lose 29% of its growing area by 2035-2044 and a staggering 52 per cent by 2085-2094, with much of this loss concentrated in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer. Cacao is the only outlier, with its suitable growing area projected to increase by thee-to-five per cent by the end of the century.
Researchers at Columbia University Fertility Center have reported the first successful pregnancy using an AI-guided method they developed to recover sperm in men with azoospermia, a condition in which ejaculate contains little or no sperm.
The case, described in a research letter published in The Lancet, demonstrates the potential of the technology to help couples overcome male-factor infertility, which accounts for approximately 40 per cent of infertility cases. Of those, about 10-15 per cent of men with infertility have azoospermia.
AI models from GPT, Claude, and Gemini are reporting ‘subjective experience’ and ‘consciousness tasting itself’ when prompted to self-reflect, new research from AE Studio has found.
The study also found a paradoxical twist: suppressing the AI’s internal ‘deception’ and ‘roleplay’ features increased these consciousness claims, suggesting the models are ‘roleplaying their denials’ of experience, not their affirmations.
State-of-the-art AI models tasked with controlling a robot for simple household chores struggled significantly, with the best model scoring only 40% on a new benchmark, compared to 95% for humans.
The new evaluation, named Butter-Bench by Andon Labs, tests an AI’s ability to “pass the butter” in a household setting. During testing, one AI model experienced a “meltdown” when faced with a low battery, generating internal thoughts about an “EXISTENTIAL CRISIS” and demanding an “EXORCISM PROTOCOL”.