Andy Clark 
Nature Communications volume 16, Article number: 4627 (2025)

As human-AI collaborations become the norm, we should remind ourselves that it is our basic nature to build hybrid thinking systems – ones that fluidly incorporate non-biological resources. Recognizing this invites us to change the way we think about both the threats and promises of the coming age.

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Luís A. Nunes Amaral, Arthur Capozzi, Dirk Helbing

Organizations learn from the market, political, and societal responses to their actions. While in some cases both the actions and responses take place in an open manner, in many others, some aspects may be hidden from external observers. The Eurovision Song Contest offers an interesting example to study organizational level learning at two levels: organizers and participants. We find evidence for changes in the rules of the Contest in response to undesired outcomes such as runaway winners. We also find strong evidence of participant learning in the characteristics of competing songs over the 70-years of the Contest. English has been adopted as the lingua franca of the competing songs and pop has become the standard genre. Number of words of lyrics has also grown in response to this collective learning. Remarkably, we find evidence that four participating countries have chosen to ignore the “lesson” that English lyrics increase winning probability. This choice is consistent with utility functions that award greater value to featuring national language than to winning the Contest. Indeed, we find evidence that some countries — but not Germany — appear to be less susceptible to “peer” pressure. These observations appear to be valid beyond Eurovision.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Neuroscientist Anil Seth lays out three reasons why people tend to overestimate the odds of AI becoming conscious. No one knows what it would take to build a conscious machine — but as Seth notes, we can’t rule it out. Given the unknowns, he warns against trying to deliberately create artificial consciousness.

Read the full article at: bigthink.com

David Deutsch, Chiara Marletto

Constructor theory asserts that the laws of physics are expressible as specifications of which transformations of physical systems can or cannot be brought about with unbounded accuracy by devices capable of operating in a cycle (‘constructors’). Hence, in particular, such specifications cannot refer to time. Thus, laws expressed in constructor-theoretic form automatically avoid the anomalous properties of time in traditional formulations of fundamental theories. But that raises the problem of how they can nevertheless give meaning to duration and dynamics, and thereby be compatible with traditionally formulated laws. Here we show how.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Giulia Menichetti, Ph.D., Albert-László Barabási, Ph.D., and Joseph Loscalzo, M.D., Ph.D.

N Engl J Med 2025;392:1836-1845

Food contains more than 139,000 molecules, which influence nearly half the human proteome. Systematic analysis of food–chemical interactions can potentially advance nutrition science and drug discovery.

Read the full article at: www.nejm.org