The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body. These electrical signals are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical ...

Astronomers from McGill University are part of an international team that has discovered 25 new sources of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs), these explosions in the sky that come from far beyond the Milky Way. This discovery brings the total number of confirmed FRB sources to 50. Based on data gathered by the CHIME/FRB collaboration, the new study, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal, may also bring scientists closer to understanding the origins of these mysterious phenomena. A new way of identifying FRBs Thanks to the radio telescopes such as those at CHIME, which scan the entire northern sky every day, the number of detected FRBs has grown exponentially in recent years. ...

The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body. These electrical signals are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical charges can exist between microdroplets of water ...

Research led by a team of scientists from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences puts to bed the heated scientific debate regarding the history of mammal diversification as it relates to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Their work provides a definitive answer to the evolutionary timeline of mammals throughout the last 100 million years. The study, published in Science, is part of a series of articles released by the Zoonomia Project, a consortium of scientists from around the globe that is using the largest mammalian genomic dataset in history to determine the evolutionary history of the human genome in the context of mammalian evolutionary history. ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. –Twelve accomplished science and health journalists have been awarded a highly competitive fellowship in the Logan Science Journalism Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Now in its 36th year, the Logan Science Journalism Program provides journalists with immersive, hands-on research training, giving them invaluable insight into the practice of science as well as some of the major news stories of today. The program, which offers a Biomedical course and an Environmental course, will run May 30-June 9 in Woods Hole. Biographies ...

PHILADELPHIA— A new approach to the genetic engineering of cells promises significant improvements in speed, efficiency, and reduction in cellular toxicity compared to current methods. The approach could also power the development of advanced cell therapies for cancers and other diseases, according to a study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In the study, which appeared this week in Nature Biotechnology, researchers found that protein fragments used by some viruses to help them get into cells could ...

“[...] developing targeted therapies that specifically inhibit ATAD3A in cancer cells while sparing normal cells will be a challenging but critical task.” BUFFALO, NY- April 28, 2023 – A new research perspective was published in Oncoscience (Volume 10) on April 4, 2023, entitled, “Mitochondrial regulator ATAD3A: a molecular determinant favoring head and neck cancer development.” In addition to their role in energy metabolism, mitochondria play important roles in other cellular processes, such as apoptosis, calcium signaling and the synthesis of certain biomolecules. Mitochondria have also been ...

The colonization and expansion of plants on land represent a defining landmark for the path of life on Earth. Terrestrial colonization has been attributed to a series of major innovations in plant body plans, anatomy, and biochemistry that transformed global biogeochemical cycles and climates. It is crucial to identify the onset and track the expansion of those earliest land plants. However, the precise timing of land colonization by vascular plants remains controversial due to the sparseness of early land plant megafossils, poor stratigraphic controls ...

Researchers have figured out a way to predict bacteria’s environmental pH preferences from a quick look at their genomes, using machine learning. Led by experts at the University of Colorado Boulder, the new approach promises to help guide ecological restoration efforts, agriculture, and even the development of health-related probiotics. “We know that in any environment, there’s a ton of bacteria with important ecological functions, but their environmental preferences often remain unknown,” said Noah Fierer, a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental ...

The Zhurong rover has found evidence of water on dune surfaces on modern Mars by providing key observational proof of liquid water at low Martian latitudes, according to a study led by Prof. QIN Xiaoguang from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The study was published in Science Advances on April 28. Researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of CAS and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of CAS were also involved in the study. Previous ...

Vallia Antoniou, an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas Tech, has been awarded observing time on the powerful Chandra X-Ray Telescope to explore some of the deepest recesses of the universe. It marks the second major Chandra program led by Antoniou, who is also a research associate with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Each year, astronomers from around the world follow a rigorously competitive process to receive Chandra time. The telescope was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1999 and orbits Earth, offering previously unavailable views of deep space at wavelengths that are not accessible from ground telescopes. During ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Emerging AI applications, like chatbots that generate natural human language, demand denser, more powerful computer chips. But semiconductor chips are traditionally made with bulk materials, which are boxy 3D structures, so stacking multiple layers of transistors to create denser integrations is very difficult. However, semiconductor transistors made from ultrathin 2D materials, each only about three atoms in thickness, could be stacked up to create more powerful chips. To this end, MIT researchers have now demonstrated a novel technology that can effectively ...

The green hydrogen economy is a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. However, one of the challenges of constructing a global hydrogen economy is hydrogen transportation by sea. A new paper proposes solid air as a medium for recycling cold energy across the hydrogen liquefaction supply chain. The world is undergoing an energy transition to reduce CO2 emissions and mitigate climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have further increased the interest of Europe and Western countries to invest in the hydrogen economy as an alternative to fossil fuels. Hydrogen can significantly reduce geopolitical risks ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Maybe you can’t tell a book from its cover, but according to researchers at MIT you may now be able to do the equivalent for materials of all sorts, from an airplane part to a medical implant. Their new approach allows engineers to figure out what’s going on inside simply by observing properties of the material’s surface. The team used a type of machine learning known as deep learning to compare a large set of simulated data about materials’ external force fields and the corresponding internal structure, and used that to generate a ...

According to computational complexity theory, mathematical problems have different levels of difficulty in the context of their solvability. While a classical computer can solve some problems (P) in polynomial time — i.e., the time required for solving P is a polynomial function of the input size — it often fails to solve NP problems that scale exponentially with the problem size and thus cannot be solved in polynomial time. Classical computers based on semiconductor devices are, therefore, inadequate ...

TORONTO, April 28, 2023 — Is an equitable world that includes humans and machines possible? York University researchers believe it must be and have set out to make it so through a first of its kind interdisciplinary research initiative called Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society. From universities to industries, hospitals and policymakers, artists and Indigenous communities, York’s Connected Minds will engage 50+ community partners and research collaborators over seven years supported by a historic $318.4 million in funding. Connected Minds has received a combined $105.7 million from the Canada First Research ...

Betting on tailless sperm that evolved from brave swimmers to hapless floaters seems like a crazy evolutionary gamble, but a group of fish seems to have done just that. Understanding that tradeoff holds promise to shed light on human disease and shake up biology lessons on traditional gender roles. Michigan State University associate professor of integrative biology Jason Gallant and colleagues are using nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation to understand the implications from a small African fish which ...

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”) will present at the 9th LSX World Congress happening in London May 3 and May 4. Zhavoronkov, an expert in generative artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery, will present on May 3, 2:45pm (London time) on “‘Death By Pilot’” to Asset Licensing – the Evolution of Pharma-AIDD Partnerships” as part of the Biotech Growth CEO Forum and on May 4, 9:30am (London time) on “Building a Galvanizing ...

MINNEAPOLIS – The American Academy of Neurology (AAN), the world’s largest professional association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, has elected as its 38th president Carlayne E. Jackson, MD, FAAN, a neurologist, researcher and professor of neurology and otolaryngology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Jackson succeeds Orly Avitzur, MD, MBA, FAAN, who completed her two-year term as president during the recent AAN Annual Meeting. “It’s humbling to have been chosen by my colleagues to follow such talented and dedicated individuals ...

Recommendations for high-risk expecting parents and health care providers to promote the prevention of preeclampsia, a leading cause of pregnancy-related death in the United States SAN FRANCISCO - April 28, 2023 – A new special report published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG) provides a groundbreaking approach to preeclampsia, one of the most pressing issues in maternal health today, and will translate the prediction of risk into prevention of disease.  The report, ...

For text categorization, it is necessary to select a set of features(terms) with high discrimination by using feature selection. In text feature selection, Accuracy2（ACC2）treats terms with same absolute document rate difference but different discrimination equally, which is unreasonable. Existing improved methods (normalized difference measure（NDM）, max-min ratio（MMR）and trigonometric comparison measure（TCM）) based on ACC2 may confuse the importance of rare and sparse terms on account of challenge for parameter selection. To solve the problems, a research team led by Li Zhang published their new research on 15 February 2023 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published ...

The University of Toronto has been awarded a $200-million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) to revolutionize the speed and impact of scientific discovery through its Acceleration Consortium. The funding – the largest federal research grant ever awarded to a Canadian university – will support the consortium’s work on “self-driving labs” that combine artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced computing to discover new materials and molecules in a fraction of the usual time and cost. Applications include everything from life-saving medications ...

A new study has identified potential broad-spectrum antiviral agents that can target multiple families of RNA viruses that continue to pose a significant threat for future pandemics. The study, led by Gustavo Garcia Jr. in the UCLA Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, tested a library of innate immune agonists that work by targeting pathogen recognition receptors, and found several agents that showed promise, including one that exhibited potent antiviral activity against members of RNA viral families. The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which ...

La Jolla, Calif. (April 28, 2023) — There has been widespread speculation about how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT could be used in medicine.  A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine led by Dr. John W. Ayers from the Qualcomm Institute within the University of California San Diego provides an early glimpse into the role that AI assistants could play in medicine. The study compared written responses from physicians and those from ChatGPT to real-world health questions. A panel of licensed healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT’s responses 79% of the time and rated ChatGPT’s responses as higher quality ...

Neuroscientists have uncovered how exploratory actions enable animals to learn their spatial environment more efficiently. Their findings could help build better AI agents that can learn faster and require less experience. Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL found the instinctual exploratory runs that animals carry out are not random. These purposeful actions allow mice to learn a map of the world efficiently. The study, published today in Neuron, describes how ...