Every day our brains strive to optimize a trade-off: With lots of things happening around us even as we also harbor many internal drives and memories, somehow our thoughts must be flexible yet focused enough to guide everything we have to do. In a new paper in Neuron, a team of neuroscientists describes how the brain achieves the cognitive capacity to incorporate all the information that’s relevant without becoming overwhelmed by what’s not. The authors argue that the flexibility arises from a key property observed in many neurons: “mixed selectivity.” While many neuroscientists used to think each cell had just one dedicated function, more recent evidence ...

The HIV variant dominant in Indonesia was introduced from Thailand over multiple events. The Kobe University study traces where it came from and how it spread from there, offering insights of possible value to the development of treatments against the disease. HIV is the virus causing AIDS, but one of the things that make it so difficult to treat is that there are many variants of it. Kobe University virologist KAMEOKA Masanori says, “The diversity is increasing every day and the prevalent virus strains differ from region to ...

Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shed new light on the changes in metabolism that occur between birth and the presentation of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) later in childhood. The researchers discovered that a small number of biochemical pathways are responsible for the majority of these changes, which could help inform new early detection and prevention strategies for autism. “At birth, the physical appearance and behavior of a child who will develop autism over the next few years are indistinguishable from that of a neurotypical child. Indeed, in most cases the fate of the child with regard to autism is not ...

Advancements in large language models, robotics, and software such as text-to-speech, have made it possible to develop robots that can understand language, interact physically, and communicate verbally. These breakthroughs have opened up possibilities for robots to be used for educational purposes. However, this raises the question of whether robots are as good as human tutors. While robots offer certain benefits, they cannot replicate the nuanced interactions and personalized feedback human tutors provide. To determine the suitability of using ...

Extreme exercise doesn’t seem to shorten the lifespan as is widely believed, suggest the findings of a study on the longevity of the first 200 athletes to run a mile in under 4 minutes, and published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. They outlive the general population by several years, shows the study, which marks the 70th anniversary of the seminal achievement of Roger Bannister, who was the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes in May 1954. While regular moderate exercise is considered a pillar of healthy ageing, ...

The British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six further articles authored by former editor, Dr Paul McCrory, and corrected another two, following an extensive investigation of his sole authored content in the journal.* The retractions comprise four ‘warm up’ editorials and one book review due to plagiarism. A letter has also been retracted because of duplicate publication. And a research article and a review article have been corrected due to inappropriate reuse of content. This latest tranche of retractions and corrections completes BMJ’s 2-year investigation ...

A new study released to mark the 70th anniversary of Sir Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile record has revealed the first 200 runners to follow in his footsteps also share another remarkable trait. The study from investigators in Australia and Canada found the 200 elite runners live on average almost five years longer than the general population. Professor Mark Haykowsky, the Research Chair in Aging and Quality of Life in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta, says the findings published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine demonstrate the vital importance of aerobic fitness. Professor Haykowsky says: “Breaking ...

1. A research team from NIMS and Nagoya University has demonstrated that an iron-based amorphous alloy, widely used as a soft magnetic material in transformers and motors, can be transformed into a "transverse" thermoelectric conversion material that converts electric and thermal currents in orthogonal directions, with just a short period of heat treatment. This is the first example that highlights the importance of microstructure engineering in the development of transverse thermoelectric conversion materials, and provides new design guidelines for materials development to realize environmentally friendly power generation and thermal management technologies ...

What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off. A new class of synthetic materials could herald the next revolution of wireless technologies, enabling devices to be smaller, require less signal strength and use less power. The key to these advances lies in what experts call phononics, which is similar to photonics. Both take advantage of similar physical laws and offer new ways to advance technology. While photonics takes advantage of photons – or light – phononics does the same with phonons, which are the physical particles that transmit mechanical vibrations ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 9, 2024) – New research from Penn Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) – recently published online in the journal Research in Nursing & Health – has successfully validated a new, streamlined version of the Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI), originally authored in 2002 by Eileen T. Lake, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing, the Edith Clemmer Steinbright Professor in Gerontology, and Associate Director of CHOPR, who is also lead author on this publication. This innovative tool, known as the PES-5, is designed to revolutionize how nurse work environments are measured across ...

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cracks down on insidious “forever chemical” pollution in the environment, military and commercial aviation officials are seeking ways to clean up such pollution from decades of use of fire suppressant foams at military air bases and commercial airports. Fire-suppression foams contain hundreds unhealthful forever chemicals, known by chemists as PFAS or poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances. These compounds have stubbornly strong fluorine-to-carbon bonds, which allow them to persist indefinitely in the environment, hence the moniker “forever chemicals.” ...

UC Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane had to double check his calculations. He wasn’t sure the planet he was studying could be as extreme as it seemed.  Kane never expected to learn that a planet in this faraway star system is covered with so many active volcanoes that seen from a distance it would take on a fiery, glowing-red hue. “It was one of those discovery moments that you think, ‘wow, it’s amazing this can actually exist,” Kane said. A paper detailing the discovery has been published in The Astronomical Journal.  Launched in 2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A team led by the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) has developed a vaccine approach that works like a GPS, guiding the immune system through the specific steps to make broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV.   Publishing in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, the study describes an approach that provides step-by-step directions for the immune system to generate the elusive, yet necessary antibodies for a successful HIV vaccine.   “HIV is the fastest-evolving virus known. So it’s been a long-standing goal in HIV research to create ...

The National Science Foundation awarded $630,444 to Kathleen Paul, an assistant professor of anthropology at the U of A, to provide a comprehensive outline of dental genetic architecture for two primate species of tamarins and macaques.  Paul's research team’s ultimate goal is to harness this information to advance bioanthropological practice, including the use of teeth for reconstructing evolutionary processes and experiences of stress and illness.  No live animals will be used in the research. Instead, skeletonized individuals from collections ...

Discrimination may speed up the biological processes of aging, according to a new study led by researchers at the NYU School of Global Public Health.    The research links interpersonal discrimination to changes at the molecular level, revealing a potential root cause of disparities in aging-related illness and death.   “Experiencing discrimination appears to hasten the process of aging, which may be contributing to disease and early mortality and fueling health disparities,” said Adolfo Cuevas, assistant professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at NYU’s ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Systems controlled by next-generation computing algorithms could give rise to better and more efficient machine learning products, a new study suggests.  Using machine learning tools to create a digital twin, or a virtual copy, of an electronic circuit that exhibits chaotic behavior, researchers found that they were successful at predicting how it would behave and using that information to control it. Many everyday devices, like thermostats and cruise control, utilize linear controllers – which use ...

University of Leeds news release  Embargoed until 1900 BST, 9 May 2024  How climate change will affect malaria transmission  A new model for predicting the effects of climate change on malaria transmission in Africa could lead to more targeted interventions to control the disease according to a new study.  Previous methods have used rainfall totals to indicate the presence of surface water suitable for breeding mosquitoes, but the research led by the University of Leeds used several climatic and hydrological models to include real-world processes of evaporation, infiltration and flow through rivers.  This ...

Machine learning enables cheaper and safer low-power magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) without sacrificing accuracy, according to a new study. According to the authors, these advances pave the way for affordable, patient-centric, and deep learning-powered ultra-low-field (ULF) MRI scanners, addressing unmet clinical needs in diverse healthcare settings worldwide. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has revolutionized healthcare, offering noninvasive and radiation-free imaging. It holds immense promise for advancing medical diagnoses through artificial intelligence. However, despite its five decades of development, MRI remains largely inaccessible, particularly ...

Areas at risk for malaria transmission in Africa may decline more than previously expected because of climate change in the 21st century, suggests an ensemble of environmental and hydrologic models. The combined models predicted that the total area of suitable malaria transmission will start to decline in Africa after 2025 through 2100, including in West Africa and as far east as South Sudan. The new study’s approach captures hydrologic features that are typically missed with standard predictive models of malaria transmission, offering a more nuanced view that could inform malaria control efforts in a warming world. Most of the burden of malaria falls on people living ...

Sea surface temperature anomalies in the Indian Ocean predict the magnitude of global dengue epidemics, according to a new study. The findings suggest that the climate indicator could enhance the forecasting and planning for outbreak responses. Dengue – a mosquito-borne flavivirus disease – affects nearly half the world’s population. Currently, there are no specific drugs or vaccines for the disease, and outbreaks can have serious public health and economic impacts. As a result, the ability to predict the risk of outbreaks and prepare accordingly is crucial for many regions where ...

Using more than 1.4 petabytes of electron microscopy (EM) imaging data, researchers have generated a nanoscale-resolution reconstruction of a millimeter-scale fragment of human cerebral cortex, providing an unprecedented view into the structural organization of brain tissue at the supracellular, cellular, and subcellular levels. The human brain is a vastly complex organ and, to date, little is known about its cellular microstructure, including the synaptic and neural circuits it supports. Disruption of these circuits is known to play a role in myriad brain disorders. Yet studying human brain ...

The highest performing countries across public health outcomes share many drivers that contribute to their success. That’s the conclusion of a new study published May 9  in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Dr. Nadia Akseer, an Epidemiologist-Biostatistician at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-author of the study and colleagues in the Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) program. In recent years, the EGH program has begun to identify and study positive outliers when it comes to global health programs around the world, with an aim of uncovering not only which health interventions work, ...

As the world is transitioning from a fossil fuel-based energy economy, many are betting on hydrogen to become the dominant energy currency. But producing “green” hydrogen without using fossil fuels is not yet possible on the scale we need because it requires iridium, a metal that is extremely rare. In a study published May 10 in Science, researchers led by Ryuhei Nakamura at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan report a new method that reduces the amount of iridium needed for the reaction by 95%, without altering the rate of hydrogen production. This breakthrough could revolutionize our ability to produce ecologically ...

An international team of researchers has discovered that the quantum particles responsible for the vibrations of materials—which influence their stability and various other properties—can be classified through topology. Phonons, the collective vibrational modes of atoms within a crystal lattice, generate disturbances that propagate like waves through neighboring atoms. These phonons are vital for many properties of solid-state systems, including thermal and electrical conductivity, neutron scattering, and quantum phases like charge density waves and superconductivity. The spectrum of phonons—essentially ...

A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something enormous.    A Harvard team led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and newly appointed dean of science, has co-created with Google researchers the largest synaptic-resolution, 3D reconstruction of a piece of human brain to date, showing in vivid detail each cell and its web of neural connections in a piece of human ...