How is it that we all see the world in a similar way? Imagine sitting with a friend in a café, both of you looking at a phone screen displaying a dog running along the beach. Although each of our  brains is a world unto itself, made up of billions of neurons with completely different connections and unique activity patterns, you would both describe it as: “A dog on the beach.” How can two such different brains lead to the same perception of the world?

A new commentary by Professor Qiming Qin of Peking University, recently published in the Journal of Geo-information Science, delivers an independent review of AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF), a large-scale remote sensing foundation model from Google DeepMind. The article discusses how AEF fuses diverse data — including optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), LiDAR, climate simulations, and text — into a single 64-dimensional embedding field to improve data integration, semantic alignment, and analytical efficiency. It points to AEF’s potential to advance land cover mapping, geoscientific modeling, and the creation of future spatial intelligence infrastructure, while warning that limited interpretability, uncertain robustness in extreme environments, and the need for independent performance validation remain major challenges.

LLMs and the Brain, a symposium featuring researchers from Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Montreal and other institutions explored the intersection between neuroscience and AI. The conversation around brain research extends beyond the university and is unfolding at the state level. On Nov. 4, Texas voters will decide on Proposition 14, which would fund the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT) with $3 billion over 10 years, creating the largest state-funded dementia research program in the country.