AI: The current threat of a second Cold War may impact investment portfolios. The author recommends considering assets that could suffer from higher interest rates and increased volatility, such as growth stocks and technology stocks. It is recommended to allocate assets across different industries and asset classes, including consumer staples, healthcare, defense, cybersecurity, agriculture and soft commodities. It is also important to consider diversification at a global level, given potential sanctions and protectionism. Finally, the author recommends adding traditional alternative assets such as gold and industrial materials to the portfolio.m. Consider the outlook for the world and its economic situation, as well as your own circumstances and investment objectives.
KEY TAKEAWAYS Recovery includes any activity that provides pleasure and peace while not activating your stress response. Sleep is one of the best recovery tools available to anyone, but unfortunately, it can be challenging for some. Other recovery activities used by top performers include exercise, float tanks, nature walks, and even expressing gratitude.
KEY TAKEAWAYS The more we learn about the human "gut microbiome," the better our ability to change it to improve our health. A Stanford-led team of researchers has potentially discovered a brand new class of gut-dwelling organisms. The next steps include confirming the findings through peer-review and determining if these organisms have any impact on human health.
Abstract Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions. Music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and cluster structures were similar for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music were consistently associated with the emotion ratings and music-induced bodily sensations across cultures. These results highlight the importance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrate consistent associations between musical features, music-induced emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures.
AI: Sam Altman was presented with two big pieces of news this week: OpenAI is developing agent software to automate complex tasks, and Sam Altman is seeking trillions of dollars for a chip and artificial intelligence project involving the UAE and other partners. However, this news raises concerns about possible security risks and negative consequences for society and the economy. In particular, LLM-based agents can be vulnerable to malicious hijacking and stupid mistakes, and pose a serious threat to user privacy. In addition, the $7 trillion figure for a chip and artificial intelligence project may be unrealistic and lead to serious consequences for society and the economy if the project fails.
AI: MIT researchers have found a link between children's socioeconomic status (SES) and their brains' sensitivity to reward. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they found that children with lower SES levels showed less sensitivity to rewards than children with higher SES levels. This may be due to the fact that in lower SES environments there are fewer rewards, leading to brain adaptations to respond less to rewards. The study also highlights the importance of including diverse groups of participants in studies to obtain more accurate results about the influence of SES on brain development.
AI: Edward Fuller Torrey puts forward two arguments against the genetic theory of schizophrenia: the failure to find any schizophrenia genes that have a large effect; and that schizophrenia is harmful to a person's physical fitness, which contradicts the theory of evolution. Torrey also offers three possible explanations for why even genes with small effects still exist: evolution has not yet had time to get rid of them; schizophrenia genes have some positive advantage; each specific schizophrenia gene has its own countervailing advantage. Torrey suggests that if schizophrenia genes were beneficial for physical health or other aspects of life, this could have implications for future methods of selecting embryos early in development.
AI: Mozilla Monitor Plus is a new paid service from Mozilla Monitor (formerly known as Firefox Monitor) that alerts users when their email has been compromised. It offers automatic data deletion and continuous monitoring of exposed personal information for an annual fee of $8.99 per month ($107.88 per year). The service offers a free one-time scan to determine the sources of exposed personal information and allows users to request automatic data removal from more than 190 data broker sites (twice more than other competitors). The service will only be available to US residents at launch.
AI: Dr Maoyang Zhu has discovered a unique 1.56 billion-year-old fossil in northern China that he believes is the oldest known multicellular eukaryote on Earth. The discovery pushes the evolutionary frontier of multicellularity back a billion years and challenges fundamental assumptions about the evolution of life on Earth. The second discovery, the 1.63-billion-year-old microfossil of Qingshania magnifica, confirms the first discovery and provides new insight into the “boring billion,” a period between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago that was thought to show little change in evolution and ecology.
The study, conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) and Nemesys Insights, surveyed 168 virology, epidemiology and infectious disease experts from 47 countries to get their views on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Most experts agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic was most likely caused by natural zoonosis, that is, the transmission of a virus from an animal to humans without interference from virological or biomedical research.
While the vast majority of experts favor natural transmission of the virus, they also acknowledged some possibility that the virus could have been released in a laboratory accident.
Roughly half of the experts believe there are major gaps in understanding the origins of COVID-19, and most of these experts believe that more research could help improve understanding of the issue.
A clear majority of experts agreed that clarity about the origins of COVID-19 would help better understand the potential causes of future pandemics and take action to prevent them.
The experts also put forward several recommendations to prevent future pandemics, including measures to prevent people from becoming infected initially, preventing the spread of infection and mitigating the effects of the pandemic.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many deaths, many experts believe that future pandemics could be even more devastating, and therefore studying COVID-19, including its origins, will help reduce the risk of future pandemics.