Our thoughts are specified by our knowledge and plans, yet our cognition can also be fast and flexible in handling new information. How does the well-controlled and yet highly nimble nature of cognition emerge from the brain's anatomy of billions of neurons and circuits' First proposed in 2023 by Picower Professor Earl K. Miller and colleagues Mikael Lundqvist and Pawel Herman, spatial computing theory explains how neurons in the prefrontal cortex can be organized on the fly into a functional group capable of carrying out the information processing required by a cognitive task. Moreover, it allows for neurons to participate in multiple such groups, as years of experiments have shown that many prefrontal neurons can indeed participate in multiple tasks at once. The basic idea of the theory is that the brain recruits and organizes ad hoc 'task forces' of neurons by using 'alpha' and 'beta' frequency brain waves (about 10-30Hz) to apply control signals to physical patches of the prefrontal cortex. Rather than having to rewire themselves into new physical circuits every time a new task must be done, the neurons in the patch instead process information by following the patterns of excitation and inhibition imposed by the waves....

Some 150 million years ago, Europe was tropical ' and mostly underwater. The entire continent was closer to the equator than it is today, and what is now Germany and its neighbouring countries was submerged under a shallow inland sea, dotted with islands. On one cluster of islands, there were unusual creatures that didn't fit in with the rest of the fauna. These were some of the earliest birds on the planet: about the size of crows, with black feathers, and probably partial to eating insects. They weren't great fliers, spending most of their time on the ground and occasionally flapping into the air ' perhaps to escape sneaking predators1. They also didn't look like modern birds. They had teeth in their jaws and claws at the ends of their wings ' features seen on no adult birds today. These German animals were Archaeopteryx, and they bore many traces of their dinosaur ancestors. Fossils of Archaeopteryx are some of the most famous in history, but this creature is also an enigma. For more than a century, Archaeopteryx has been the only known bird genus from the Jurassic: the period when birds first evolved. Many other dinosaur-era birds have been discovered over the past few decades, but they are all from the subsequent period, the Cretaceous: a time when many diverse types of bird lived around the world. The group's origins remained lost in time....

Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain'computer interface (BCI) translated her thoughts into keystrokes ' and simple melodies, such as 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', rang out1. But there was a twist. For Smith, it seemed as if the piano played itself. 'It felt like the keys just automatically hit themselves without me thinking about it,' she said at the time. 'It just seemed like it knew the tune, and it just did it on its own.' Smith's BCI system, implanted as part of a clinical trial, trained on her brain signals as she imagined playing the keyboard. That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so, says trial leader Richard Andersen, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena....

When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, someone from the audience asked him if HBO's hit satire 'Silicon Valley' would be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the show, essentially answered no (at timestamp 38:17). The latest case in point is a new company called Clad Labs that launched out of Y Combinator this week. Clad's product is so outside-the-box that people thought it was an April Fools' joke in November. But it's a real product, founder Richard Wang told TechCrunch. The product is called 'Chad: The Brainrot IDE.' It is yet another vibe coding integrated development environment ' an IDE is the software developers use to code ' but with a twist. While waiting for the AI coding tool to finish its task, the developer can mess around with their favorite brainrot activities within a window of the IDE. Or, as the company's website advertises: 'Gamble while you code. Watch TikToks. Swipe on Tinder. Play minigames. This isn't a joke ' it's Chad IDE, and it's solving the biggest productivity problem in AI-powered development that nobody's talking about.'...