Groundbreaking: Japanese scientists develop a technique to connect brain cells grown in the lab

i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 193 points –
Groundbreaking: Japanese scientists develop a technique to connect brain cells grown in the lab
breezyscroll.com
29

Maybe I missed it but my ultimate pet peeve of these articles about scientific breakthroughs is that they neither credit a single name of a scientist in their article nor even just putting a single link to the work. I know its likely behind a paywall (darn you scientific publishing), but still!

I browsed a bit through Nature Communications and haven't seen the article...

more like darn you current interpretation of capitalism for forcing all of us to keep us hungry for profit in order to survive

surely there is a better economic model right?

If your understanding of "better" is following a single-party ideology, loss of freedom and individuality as well as censorship of speech, then yes, there are "better" models.

Journalists barely cite anything. "A study from this organisation says this." Don't tell you when it was published, or link to the official website. Nada.

Journalists are pretty trash at citing their sources on average. I think it's wild most countries don't seem to regulate this. It would do wonders for archives of news content so that you can actually follow up on the story to it's source.

Now I wait for some internet strangers to tell me why is this not groundbreaking at all

Babies can literally do this, not impressed

Brain cells have already existed for millions of years. This is nothing revolutionary.

Bro, my brain alone has like millions of cells and these guys are getting all excited over, what, six!?

Nah chief, it's pretty groundbreaking. I mean we don't know how to specifically target existing connections to strengthen the sheathe between existing brain cells, but connecting two brain cells at all, manually, is such a feat

Next up: OI, Organic Intelligence

Bio-neural gel packs from Star Trek Voyager.

I was always curious about those. Surely they can't be faster than computers right? I mean, whatever computers they have in the 24th century.

The idea was, as I remember, that they were most of all more efficient and performed certain tasks better(faster) than the regular computer

No possible way for this to be turned evil. Lab grown brains? Definitely could never be evil.

Should science cease to exist because most discoveries could be used for evil?

Imagine some future generations of CPUs, GPUs or APUs having little brain matter processors on them.

When your gaming pc slows down you have to refill the cerebral fluid container

this is far more likely to make things like recovery from quadriplegia possible.

This seems like a better candidate for AI, GPUs are just to energy inefficient.

Would it still be AI if it gains its own intelligence?

Probably depends on our part in its emergence. If we purposely set it on a path that we think ends there, I would still call it artificial. If it emerges through a process unknown and unintended by us, I wouldn't.

That compares a whole human vs. A graphics card. If you only have connected brain cells, I imagine that it would be much cheaper than having to sustain a whole body.

It's a pretty horrifying article tbh. The assumptions and conclusions it's making if you just start asking yourself how you actually save that energy should be obvious.