I'm a little bit skeptical but i dont have any objective argument or experience in the field to justify it. I didn't want to post it, but I was surprised that almost no one in the hn comments had the same feeling.
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).
Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.
Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.
>> We reliably produced distinct scents such as a campfire burn or fresh air!
These are exactly the types of smells people report when they get head CT scans (I've experienced it myself). Always thought it was ozone forming but perhaps it's more interesting than that.
It looks like independent hackers with a strong technical background and little regard for decorum.
Their methodology seems reasonable, and their results are plausible.
I’m reserved about the final part of the post where they moot about applications, but the core result seems solid. They elicited osmosphenes like one can elicit phosphènes by targeting the visual cortex.
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).
There's quite a lot of research in this direction (stimulation, be it ultrasound or otherwise) to tackle exactly things you mention. Not completely sure but probably stimulators to suppress epilepsy are the most common. It has been proven in animal research stimulating the right area induces visual stimuli - IIRC this has been tested and confirmed in humans as well, i.e., make people see again. And there's more going on.
In the end: everything in the brain is electrical current. Meaning that in theory stimulating the right bits can do pretty much everything.
Chiming in as a reply to your comment since I had a similar feeling. There's no... institution!? No university or other institution listed. They list author names, which is something. But no institution, no paper, no heritage of research concepts. No citations outside of a few NIH ones not especially specific to their particular experiment. No real meaningful discussion of mechanisms. The domain itself doesn't have anything other than this page. Granted, whatever, there's no rules in this world, do what you want. But so far there's precious little in the traditional signals we typically rely on to distinguish this from misinformation.
This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.
I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.
This is exceptionally cool!
It looks like this post isn’t getting much love though. I’ll see if I can get this post added to the second chance pool[1] and get it added to the front page!
All: if you seen a particularly good submission that has fallen through the cracks, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look and maybe put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random re-upment on HN's front page.
(Yes, it's permissible to request this for your own stuff, but we like it better when it's something you just ran across randomly and realized was interesting—as mmulet did in this case!)
As someone who was born without a sense of smell this is incredibly intriguing to me.
I've always wondered if there's gonna be a time in my life where I'd be able to experience *any* kind of smell through some new scientific discovery. And maybe this is it.
Could I shoot you guys a message when I make my way down to Caltech to try this out someday? :)
Out of curiosity, does lacking the sense of smell influence your sense of taste? Do some things taste wildly differently to you versus how your friends would describe them? I have a very weak sense of smell that comes and goes (sometimes I get weeks without being able to smell anything other than the strongest scents) and it definitely has an impact on my appetite and how much I enjoy certain foods. I have noticed that I'm much more sensitive to texture and mouth feel than others and I suspect it's because of this, but I also have AuDHD so I can't be sure.
The condition is called Anosmia and can stem from different sensor and brain conditions. It would be interesting to try the technique on people with these conditions to map the different kinds of olfactory failures.
If you get in contact with the researchers, please let us know how it went.
Since you never had any sense of smell, would this help you in developing memories about smell ? I am curious on how your brain react to smell sensation when it does not have any memory associated with it.
Smells really get embedded into your conscience from early days. I remember as a kid really loving the "Smell-O-Vision" movie they had set up at La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris. As you watched they had little aerosol cans labeled with different scents ("baking bread" etc) that a mechanism would squirt towards the viewer.
I found this History of Smell-O-Vision paper too today:
I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost always seemed to be bad smelling stuff.
Still have it, intermittently. A sort of nameless-but-familiar "chemical" smell that comes and goes, along with any sense of taste. That is, I have bad days with no taste, just a chemical smell. Other days I have a pretty good sense of smell, generally with a good sense of taste.
Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).
That was exactly my thought when reading the article and my personal experience with Covid. For a couple weeks, I perceived a persistent smell of something burning.
Super interesting! That would make sense, because a lot of the nose is presumably dedicated to smelling evolutionarily-relevant smells, most of which are "smells bad, avoid this". The method is very crude right now, but maybe with more fine-grained targetting we could better tune the smell profile.
I wonder if we search for the worst smell, via optimization, is does this make it a big, not very steep optimum? Or maybe all unknown smells are a little bad, but the worst smell is some familiar badness.
Oh god, do we really want to have the smells of sex when watching porn?
On the other hand, I see an opportunity even without tech: porn star perfume collabs: Spray some Gukki Bloom and press play on that video to smell what the star was wearing on the day.
But I guess high-end perfume brands don't want to be associated with actors of the flesh.
You're getting downvoted, likely for prudish reasons, but in all seriousness it doesn't seem unlikely that you're right.
The porn industry has historically been very quick to adopt new technologies, it's easy to see how this could benefit that industry, so it's a logical enough conclusion to draw. They'll very likely be the first commercial application of this, once viable.
Woah I didn't know about that theory, that's really interesting! If I understand correctly, it's that the ligand needs to both fit "physically" and also have the right vibrational mode to have high binding affinity / trigger the receptor? Sounds like the relevant frequencies would be in IR range, or roughly 10-100 terahertz. We're at 300 kHz, so 9 orders of magnitude lower, so we're likely not activating the receptors directly with that mechanism. But, maybe the acoustic radiation force from the ultrasound gives existing molecules in the air enough energy to increase the coupling? And nobody seems to really know how ultrasound neurostimulation really works, so who knows—maybe something similar even happens with neurotransmitters in cortex...
Well, if it’s waves, perhaps principles of consonance and dissonance might apply.
Robert Hooke thought so…
“Now as we find that musical strings will be moved by Unisons and Eighths, and other harmonious chords, though not in the same degree; so do I suppose that the particles of matter will be moved principally by such motions as are Unisons, as I may call them, or of equal Velocity with their motions, and by other har∣monious motions in a less degree.
I do further suppose, A subtil matter that incom∣passeth and pervades all other bodies, which is the Menstruum in which they swim which maintains and continues all such bodies in their motion, and which is the medium that conveys all Homogenious or Har∣monical motions from body to body.
Further I suppose, that all such particles of matter as are of a like nature, when not separated by others of a differing nature will remain together, and strengthen the common Vibration of them all against the differing Vibrations of the ambient bodies.
According to this Notion I suppose the whole Universe and all the particles thereof to be in a con∣tinued motion, and every one to take its share of space or room in the same, according to the bulk of its body, or according to the particular power it hath to receive, and continue this or that peculiar motion.
Two or more of these particles joyned immediately together, and coalescing into one become of another nature, and receptive of another degree of motion and Vibration, and make a compounded particle differing in nature from each of the other par∣ticles.
All bulky and sensible bodies whatsoever I suppose to be made up or composed of such particles which have their peculiar and appropriate motions which are kept together by the differing or dissonant Vibrations of the ambient bodies or fluid“
It’s just a blog post. No academic is going to read it as more than a very promising early result.
The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.
Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.
Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.
Certainly! We didn't get a chance to test it on more people before we had to take it apart, but we thought the result was too cool to share. Would love to see other folks run with the idea!
Reminiscent of a finding reported at a neurology conference in the 1960s that served as the epigraph to J.H. Prynne’s collection of poems Wound Response:
“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode… One patient reported gustatory sensations.”
You write that "The olfactory bulb can vary in size by up to 3x, depending on "age and olfactory experience", so perhaps (we're making this up) with more usage your olfactory bulb might actually get bigger" which certainly does not seem out of the question. What we can assume with even greater likelihood is that the sense of smell works better when regularly stimulated. Even if your method did not have any commercial applications in entertainment it could likely (at least if this method scales beyond 4 distinct sensations) have therapeutic potential for people who suffer from blocked noses, chronic sinusitis, allergies or other conditions that block their sense of smell for physical reasons. It might even be used by Sommeliers to retain the capacity for their tradecraft while unable to use their actual nose while suffering from a cold. As we know that there is a strong association between smell and memory there are many other useful therapeutic and educational applications that come to mind if this technology can be made safe for broader consumer use. Right now, regardless of protocols used, you are somewhere on the spectrum between shining nascent lasers at your eyes to determine whether they work and emit light output (which doesn't scale with an increase in power) and the nobel prize worthy quadrant of Jonas Salk and Barry Marshall. While I do hope you succeed and I'd hate for you to be overly cautious I also hope your (olfactory) neurons survive!
Sorry it's unclear in the post, they weren't exactly the same! The numbers reported were on Lev, and we swept them around that range for me (Albert). But we didn't take down the exact values, so unfortunately I don't know how similar the maps were. iirc they were pretty different.
I had the same thought - I guess it's similar to that idea that if you had someone else's eyes, you might not perceive specific colours to be the same?
But actually it sort of makes sense since (from what I understand) is stimulating an external interface (the receptors), so you're mimicing what the effect a smell would have on you rather than the electrical signal created by the response to a stimulus?
That's a really interesting concept! The wiki page right now ends in "example of a combination of smells that neutralise each other", which makes me wonder if the "olfactory white" combinations are actually tuned to neutralize? I suspect what we're hitting is a bunch of receptors, and the brain is interpretting it as a common strong and evolutionarily important smell (which I assume has stronger pathways by default).
Woah, that would be wild! It seems like most neonatal ultrasound reaches peak internal pressures of few-hundred kPa to 2 MPa. We ranged from 150-250 kPa. So, a little lower than the lower end of prenatal diagnostic imaging.
So, the pressures are high enough to be stimulating them! But most diagnostic imaging happens at 1-20 MHz, while most neurostimulation seems to occur at few-hundred kHz (we were at 300 kHz, on the mid-high end). So I don't think it's likely that babies are being sent smells?
Finally a solution to long term nuclear warning messages! [1] All we have to do is merely create an ultrasound emitter that works over a distance of meters and lasts several thousand years. Then assail our post apocalyptic adventurers with a stench so vivid it elicits ancient racial memories of global thermonuclear war.
Interesting that burning was one of the smells. AFAIK that often comes up in neurological problems like strokes and epilepsy, so is it a particularly coarse sensation (like exciting all the different specialised neuerons at once)?. I imagine there's going to be a long challenge of targeting this to elicit more refined scents.
Me wonders if this can be applied to other parts of the brain, perhaps recalling long buried memories? In my case, "a 12‑lexeme mnemonic constellation that operates as a cognitive entropy incantation, each syllabic particle mapping onto a quantized shard of an authorization singularity’s randomness reservoir. This ordered cascade of linguistic quanta serves as a deterministic bootstrap constant, re‑materializing access to a distributed transactional continuum avatar via recursive derivation algorithms. In practice, it’s a compact neuro‑linguistic checksum spell, a bridge where human cortex patterns resonate with machine‑level information‑integrity archetypes, conjuring identity from chaos like a linguistic particle accelerator, aka ₿" ;)
OK, I want to meet these guys. This writeup has several breathtaking (if you will) passages. Like:
> "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm."
> "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space."
This just makes me grin with total delight. Completely freaking fascinating.
> The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space. A bit of ultrasound, a breath in - and you understood a paragraph.
Translation: We’re very concerned that the only projects getting funding right now have to use AI.
Given that people can remember smell for years, this might be very useful for learning aid. Hook it up to an IDE and let people literally smell bad code as garbage.
Totally! We think this is because the brain is hard-wired evolutionarily to interpret smells by danger level first. So maybe there's just more "bad smell" receptors, or maybe the brain treats unknown smells as "uh oh, danger". Lots of cool stuff to test!
This would be very cool within a game setting. Just imagine feeling the sensation of fresh air as you go through a door. Even if it were small effects it could add a huge leap in realism and immersion. Smell is a very powerful sense.
I'm intrigued by the neuromodulation possibilities of this method, but I don't really understand how far can that ideally go. Since the authors are here, can you go a bit deeper in this? Thanks!
I cant wait for the day when the perfume and food shops in the mall use this for truly targeted advertisement. Cue rise of ultrasound-proof hats and lawsuits by people who report feeling sick due to such ads.
The adult videos industry must be already closely looking at this, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't finance related research soon in the future, it will be VHS vs betamax all over again.
If they’re using enough ultrasound energy to create a physical reaction inside the subjects head strong enough to smell like a burning camp fire, I can’t imagine they’d survive long enough to report it. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your implication?
The natural progression of this technology is probably miniaturized transducer arrays on a chip, which would enable non-invasive write access to the entire brain.
This kind of tech should be developed as open-source projects, even for the firmware and hardware. A sufficiently advanced version of this, if widely deployed as proprietary blackboxes like smartphones are, would allow one consciousness to take over multiple bodies without their original owners knowing.
My prediction is that in the not-to-distant future, we’re all going to live indefinitely in simulations that optimized for human experience. To do this, AIs will “highjack” our nervous systems and feed generated worlds to use to experience. This kind of thing makes it seem like it’s pretty realistic.
> The scans are painless, have no known side effects on mothers or babies, and can be carried out at any stage of pregnancy.
If you read the linked article, you'd see that most of it focused on how extremely hard it was to get the ultrasound to do anything - it required an MRI and exact positioning of the ultrasound transducer. I doubt that 5 minutes of being gently prodded through the skin and fat is going to harm a child. Also, ultrasounds (and waves and radiation of all sorts) are passing into your body at all times, so it's not like they are exposing the fetus to something rare or unusual.
This is absolutely my question as well - curious if it's legal to do this, I'm guessing yes as it's an existing ultrasound device? But is there possibility of permanent damage?
It's objectively cool, but very curious about the safety as well.
Sxubas|3 months ago
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).
Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.
Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.
exomonk|3 months ago
These are exactly the types of smells people report when they get head CT scans (I've experienced it myself). Always thought it was ozone forming but perhaps it's more interesting than that.
pygy_|3 months ago
It looks like independent hackers with a strong technical background and little regard for decorum.
Their methodology seems reasonable, and their results are plausible.
I’m reserved about the final part of the post where they moot about applications, but the core result seems solid. They elicited osmosphenes like one can elicit phosphènes by targeting the visual cortex.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_focused_ultrasoun...
stinos|3 months ago
There's quite a lot of research in this direction (stimulation, be it ultrasound or otherwise) to tackle exactly things you mention. Not completely sure but probably stimulators to suppress epilepsy are the most common. It has been proven in animal research stimulating the right area induces visual stimuli - IIRC this has been tested and confirmed in humans as well, i.e., make people see again. And there's more going on.
In the end: everything in the brain is electrical current. Meaning that in theory stimulating the right bits can do pretty much everything.
glenstein|3 months ago
This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.
I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.
NedF|3 months ago
[deleted]
mmulet|3 months ago
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
dang|3 months ago
All: if you seen a particularly good submission that has fallen through the cracks, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look and maybe put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random re-upment on HN's front page.
(Yes, it's permissible to request this for your own stuff, but we like it better when it's something you just ran across randomly and realized was interesting—as mmulet did in this case!)
RedAlakazam|3 months ago
Could I shoot you guys a message when I make my way down to Caltech to try this out someday? :)
macbem|3 months ago
Genbox|3 months ago
If you get in contact with the researchers, please let us know how it went.
technological|3 months ago
jayd16|3 months ago
twosdai|3 months ago
qingcharles|3 months ago
I found this History of Smell-O-Vision paper too today:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7691926/
doodlebugging|3 months ago
rvnx|3 months ago
The smelloscope, right ?
anonymousiam|3 months ago
https://www.wired.com/2006/12/a-brief-history-2-2/
dilawar|3 months ago
mzronek|3 months ago
generalizations|3 months ago
delichon|3 months ago
culi|3 months ago
bookofjoe|3 months ago
charlieflowers|3 months ago
krackers|3 months ago
jsrcout|3 months ago
robrain|3 months ago
Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).
teuobk|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
bee_rider|3 months ago
comrade1234|3 months ago
porn + vr + smell
netsharc|3 months ago
On the other hand, I see an opportunity even without tech: porn star perfume collabs: Spray some Gukki Bloom and press play on that video to smell what the star was wearing on the day.
But I guess high-end perfume brands don't want to be associated with actors of the flesh.
amarant|3 months ago
The porn industry has historically been very quick to adopt new technologies, it's easy to see how this could benefit that industry, so it's a logical enough conclusion to draw. They'll very likely be the first commercial application of this, once viable.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
onlypassingthru|3 months ago
jsrcout|3 months ago
jayd16|3 months ago
kirini|3 months ago
[deleted]
msuniverse2026|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
exr0n|3 months ago
dr_dshiv|3 months ago
Well, if it’s waves, perhaps principles of consonance and dissonance might apply.
Robert Hooke thought so…
“Now as we find that musical strings will be moved by Unisons and Eighths, and other harmonious chords, though not in the same degree; so do I suppose that the particles of matter will be moved principally by such motions as are Unisons, as I may call them, or of equal Velocity with their motions, and by other har∣monious motions in a less degree.
I do further suppose, A subtil matter that incom∣passeth and pervades all other bodies, which is the Menstruum in which they swim which maintains and continues all such bodies in their motion, and which is the medium that conveys all Homogenious or Har∣monical motions from body to body.
Further I suppose, that all such particles of matter as are of a like nature, when not separated by others of a differing nature will remain together, and strengthen the common Vibration of them all against the differing Vibrations of the ambient bodies.
According to this Notion I suppose the whole Universe and all the particles thereof to be in a con∣tinued motion, and every one to take its share of space or room in the same, according to the bulk of its body, or according to the particular power it hath to receive, and continue this or that peculiar motion.
Two or more of these particles joyned immediately together, and coalescing into one become of another nature, and receptive of another degree of motion and Vibration, and make a compounded particle differing in nature from each of the other par∣ticles.
All bulky and sensible bodies whatsoever I suppose to be made up or composed of such particles which have their peculiar and appropriate motions which are kept together by the differing or dissonant Vibrations of the ambient bodies or fluid“
Page 9: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A44322.0001.001/1:3?rgn=di...
analog8374|3 months ago
AndriyKunitsyn|3 months ago
So, N=2 and the people in question are co-authors. I'm not in this business, but isn't this too... early to publish?
1propionyl|3 months ago
The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.
Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.
Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.
exr0n|3 months ago
HeinzStuckeIt|3 months ago
“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode… One patient reported gustatory sensations.”
pbhjpbhj|3 months ago
ftrsprvln|3 months ago
bijant|3 months ago
dempedempe|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
maartin0|3 months ago
But actually it sort of makes sense since (from what I understand) is stimulating an external interface (the receptors), so you're mimicing what the effect a smell would have on you rather than the electrical signal created by the response to a stimulus?
BurningFrog|3 months ago
isoprophlex|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_white
exr0n|3 months ago
cellular|3 months ago
polishdude20|3 months ago
withinboredom|3 months ago
efitz|3 months ago
droideqa|3 months ago
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision
qlm|3 months ago
SV_BubbleTime|3 months ago
nick__m|3 months ago
bqmjjx0kac|3 months ago
metek|3 months ago
londons_explore|3 months ago
What are the chances baby ultrasounds are doing this unintentionally?
exr0n|3 months ago
So, the pressures are high enough to be stimulating them! But most diagnostic imaging happens at 1-20 MHz, while most neurostimulation seems to occur at few-hundred kHz (we were at 300 kHz, on the mid-high end). So I don't think it's likely that babies are being sent smells?
dbspin|3 months ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
omnicognate|3 months ago
SilentM68|3 months ago
Me wonders if this can be applied to other parts of the brain, perhaps recalling long buried memories? In my case, "a 12‑lexeme mnemonic constellation that operates as a cognitive entropy incantation, each syllabic particle mapping onto a quantized shard of an authorization singularity’s randomness reservoir. This ordered cascade of linguistic quanta serves as a deterministic bootstrap constant, re‑materializing access to a distributed transactional continuum avatar via recursive derivation algorithms. In practice, it’s a compact neuro‑linguistic checksum spell, a bridge where human cortex patterns resonate with machine‑level information‑integrity archetypes, conjuring identity from chaos like a linguistic particle accelerator, aka ₿" ;)
p1esk|3 months ago
virgil_disgr4ce|3 months ago
> "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm."
> "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space."
This just makes me grin with total delight. Completely freaking fascinating.
baddash|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
arresin|3 months ago
SV_BubbleTime|3 months ago
Translation: We’re very concerned that the only projects getting funding right now have to use AI.
nijuashi|3 months ago
koolala|3 months ago
heywoods|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
NooneAtAll3|3 months ago
is this like some second meaning or smth?
why is there a knife on the headset?
SV_BubbleTime|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
stretchwithme|3 months ago
Our fingertips feel using low frequency sound generated by our fingerprints passing over things.
arendtio|3 months ago
modeless|3 months ago
kylehotchkiss|3 months ago
Your TV will get a scent emitter, but Samsung will only activate it for their own ads. I'm not excited about the future of Glad trash bag ads.
cfn|3 months ago
darkwater|3 months ago
noisy_boy|3 months ago
neoden|3 months ago
AmbroseBierce|3 months ago
virgil_disgr4ce|3 months ago
......
...OH you probably mean for the purposes of stimulating things OTHER THAN SMELLS
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
a-dub|3 months ago
DrewADesign|3 months ago
nashashmi|3 months ago
verisimi|3 months ago
txrx0000|3 months ago
This kind of tech should be developed as open-source projects, even for the firmware and hardware. A sufficiently advanced version of this, if widely deployed as proprietary blackboxes like smartphones are, would allow one consciousness to take over multiple bodies without their original owners knowing.
rkj93|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
llIIllIIllIIl|3 months ago
petesergeant|3 months ago
baron816|3 months ago
faidit|3 months ago
_kb|3 months ago
zb3|3 months ago
jayd16|3 months ago
zoklet-enjoyer|3 months ago
kirini|3 months ago
[deleted]
4d4m|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
snvzz|3 months ago
Jemm|3 months ago
koolba|3 months ago
andrewrn|3 months ago
b800h|3 months ago
jasongill|3 months ago
https://www.nhs.uk/pregnancy/your-pregnancy-care/ultrasound-...
> The scans are painless, have no known side effects on mothers or babies, and can be carried out at any stage of pregnancy.
If you read the linked article, you'd see that most of it focused on how extremely hard it was to get the ultrasound to do anything - it required an MRI and exact positioning of the ultrasound transducer. I doubt that 5 minutes of being gently prodded through the skin and fat is going to harm a child. Also, ultrasounds (and waves and radiation of all sorts) are passing into your body at all times, so it's not like they are exposing the fetus to something rare or unusual.
polishdude20|3 months ago
Traubenfuchs|3 months ago
exr0n|3 months ago
buildsjets|3 months ago
foota|3 months ago
jasonjmcghee|3 months ago
It's objectively cool, but very curious about the safety as well.
jipsy|3 months ago
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