Introducing WhAM: An A.I model that transforms any audio into authentic-sounding sperm whale vocalizations!

Learn more: bit.ly/48g0885

By: Orr Paradise, Pranav Muralikrishnan, Liangyuan Chen, Hugo Flores García, Bryan Pardo, Roee Diamant, David Gruber, Shane Gero and Shafi Goldwasser.

🐋📓 MOTH’s new ethics framework for Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies is live—catch the panel and explore the report: 

🔗https://mothlife.org/technology-ecology/nonhuman-animal-communication-technologies/ 🔗https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVVSxNDUyUg

Do you need your toes to think?

YESS!

Happy to see this one out 😎!

From your humble toes to your noble neurons, you need all your cells to solve your most important problem :

How to stay alive 😎😅

The earliest mature debate about animal consciousness occurred around 1900 and centred on the insects. We cover this rich history in this new article, as well as some more recent developments on the topic: royalsocietypublishing.org/.../10.../rs...

new paper with @robertchisciure.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"Cognition all the way down 2.0: neuroscience beyond neurons in the diverse intelligence era"

🧪

If you missed our great discussion with Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social on consciousness and its potential biological basis, check it out here!
Very thought provoking, including nuanced discussions on AI consciousness.
Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon:
youtu.be/wZE4_Oa3YA0

Here is our new paper that we're really excited about. What makes a cell different from a rock? The answer we argue is the USE of information. But information carries meaning and that changes everything if we want to understand the "physics of life".

journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

🐾 How do we build shared tools for interspecies communication research?
 
Our new roundtable tackled this question while brainstorming open-source solutions. The conversation is continuing on Slack. 

🚀 Join us and watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCAkI-KqeQ

A lot of the continued confusions about what can and cannot be autopoietic/autonomous, whether this is unique to life, whether machines could qualify, the status of computational simulations etc. stem from precisely the issues and ambiguities she identifies.

Cambridge Elements are free to download until 7/25-check out my little book How To Study Animal Minds. I had fun writing this one, and I'll never forget how nervous I was in front of a bunch of scientist friends, including Sara Shettleworth, hearing their thoughts on the draft! tinyurl.com/3yy6a52c

New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2505.15849 : Reed Bender (www.linkedin.com/in/reed-bend...), Karina Kofman (www.linkedin.com/in/karina-ko...), @blaiseaguera.bsky.social
"What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life"

🐋 Meet @begus.bsky.social — Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and Linguistics Lead at @projectceti.bsky.social, researching how humans and machines learn language!

🚀 Explore more insights in the Workshop Proceedings ➡️ www.interspecies.io/publication

Thanks @sfiscience.bsky.social + @xprize.org 🙌🏽

Had a great time chatting about A Drive to Survive with @kensycoop.bsky.social, who did a heroic job of making me sound surprisingly coherent.

Physical book available here:
mitpress.mit.edu/978026255132...

Or PDF for *free* here: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

What does it mean to understand another species?

For the first time, experts from across ethology, biology & tech have developed a set of critera for decoding animal communication.

Learn more in @interspecies-io.bsky.social's landmark report: www.interspecies.io/publication

Adaptivity is central to life, yet conceptually homeless. While adaptation is tied to selection, adaptivity is an ongoing organismal process—rooted in metabolism, not just evolutionary causation

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...