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Medicine 2026-03-03

TweetyBERT: How a Self-Supervised AI Trained on Canary Songs Could Help Decode the Human Brain

University of Oregon researchers developed TweetyBERT, a self-supervised transformer model adapted from the BERT architecture, to automatically segment and classify canary song syllables without human-labeled training data. The system matches expert annotator performance and offers a scalable platform for studying how the brain learns and produces complex vocal sequences. The work appears in the journal Patterns.
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Science 2026-03-03

Max Planck Epigeneticist Alexander Meissner Wins 2026 ISSCR Momentum Award

The ISSCR named Alexander Meissner, director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, recipient of the 2026 Momentum Award, citing his work on epigenetic regulation of pluripotency, the development of the ScoreCard assay, and institutional leadership at the Max Planck Institute. Kathrin Plath and Joseph Wu received honorable mentions.
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Science 2026-03-03

UCLA's Sylvia Hurtado Elected AERA President-Elect in 2026 Vote

Sylvia Hurtado, Distinguished Professor at UCLA and longtime AERA fellow, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association. Her research focuses on campus racial climate, equity for historically marginalized groups, and STEM pathways. She will assume the presidency after AERA's 2027 Annual Meeting.
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Science 2026-03-03

GPT-4o Summaries of Historical Events Pushed Readers Toward More Liberal Conclusions Than Wikipedia

Yale researcher Daniel Karell and colleagues tested 1,912 participants who read GPT-4o or Wikipedia summaries of two historical events and then reported political opinions. Default GPT-4o summaries produced more liberal responses than Wikipedia (3.57 vs 3.47 on a 5-point scale), with explicitly liberal framings pushing scores to 3.67. The paper raises questions about AI bias shaping public historical understanding.
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Medicine 2026-03-03

Prenatal Opioid Exposure Linked to Higher Healthcare Costs and Worse School Outcomes Through Age 18

Analyzing administrative records for 897,668 births in British Columbia over two decades, researchers found children with prenatal opioid exposure incurred higher healthcare expenditures, received more special education services, performed worse academically, and had more child welfare interactions through age 18 than unexposed peers, even after adjusting for sociodemographic factors.
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Technology 2026-03-03

Small Dogs Release More Airborne Particles; Big Dogs Release More Microbes

A controlled laboratory study comparing four small dogs (Chihuahuas) to three large dogs (mastiffs) found small dogs produced more airborne fine particles, likely from activity, while large dogs released more bacteria and fungi - including outdoor microorganisms not typically present from humans. The work appears in Environmental Science and Technology.
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Science 2026-03-03

This Bacterium Survived 30,000 Atmospheres of Pressure - Then Kept Functioning

Johns Hopkins scientists fired projectiles at Deinococcus radiodurans to simulate Mars-ejection pressures up to 2.4 gigapascals - 30 times the deepest ocean pressure - and found 60 percent of bacteria survived, with gene expression showing active cellular repair. The result supports the theoretical possibility of microbial transfer between planets.
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Space 2026-03-03

Ryugu Asteroid Particles Carry a 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Magnetic Memory

Paleomagnetic measurements of 28 particles from the asteroid Ryugu reveal magnetic signatures acquired during ancient water-driven mineral growth, offering a direct record of the solar nebula's magnetic field within the first 7 million years after solar system formation. The findings appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
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