WEEKLY REVIEW (SEPT. 6-12)
World's Longest Cable-stayed Bridge Opens to Traffic
On September 9, the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge — the world's longest cable-stayed bridge — officially opened to traffic. Spanning 10.03 kilometers across the river, the bridge integrates expressway, intercity railway and ordinary highway functions. It reportedly holds six world records, including being the longest span cable-stayed bridge.
Brain-inspired Large Models Issued
Researchers from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, released SpikingBrain, a family of brain-inspired models designed for efficient long-context training and inference. The model achieves performance comparable to open-source Transformer baselines while using only about 150B tokens for continual pre-training. The full training and inference process of the model was done on a domestic GPU computing platform.
AI-powered BCI Helps Paralysis Patients Use Devices
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) using AI as a co-pilot to help people with paralysis to complete tasks. The BCI helps infer user intent and complete tasks by moving a robotic arm or a computer cursor. It could pave the way for a variety of assistive technologies that would enable people with limited physical capabilities to handle and move objects more easily and precisely.
First Complete Animal Brain Activity Map Unveiled
A large international collaboration of neuroscientists unveiled the first complete activity map of decision-making in the animal brain. The findings were published in two papers in Nature, revealing how decision-making unfolds across the entire brain in mice at the resolution of single cells. This brain-wide activity map challenges the traditional hierarchical view of information processing and demonstrates that decision-making is distributed across multiple regions in a highly coordinated manner.