Drug addiction carries an extremely high risk of relapse, as cravings can be reignited by minor stimuli even long after one has stopped using. Previously, this phenomenon was attributed to a decline in the function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which regulates impulses. However, a joint international research team has recently revealed that the cause of addiction relapse is not a simple decline in brain function, but rather an imbalance in specific neural circuits.
New research on 175,000 women—the largest NHS study to date—on the use of AI in breast cancer screening shows that AI detected more cases of invasive cancer, more cases overall, had fewer false positives, and recalled fewer women having their first scan than humans did. For one part of the study, AI reduced the time spent reading scans by almost a third.
Through their study, the researchers tracked fluorescently tagged resident tissue macrophages in mouse eyes. When they selectively removed these cells, the eye’s drain, or outflow, became clogged, fluid built up, and eye pressure increased.
The discovery could lead to the development of future glaucoma treatments. The next step will be research to identify these resident macrophages in human eye tissue. “This research helps us understand the role of the immune system in regulating eye pressure,” said Katy Liu, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the department of ophthalmology at Duke University School of Medicine. “Our findings show that resident macrophages are essential for maintaining healthy eye pressure,” said Liu. “Disruption of this system may contribute directly to the development of glaucoma.”
Added W. Daniel Stamer, PhD, the Joseph A.C. Wadsworth Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology, and co-vice chair for basic science research, “Now we have a specific target for developing new therapies that can normalize the eye pressure and stop vision loss, in contrast to current medications that do not target the source of disease.”
Do we need better ways to detect clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP)?
In this Research Letter, Alexander G. Bick & team find epidemiology studies underestimate the strength of the association between clonal hematopoiesis and disease due to false negatives from shallow, whole-genome versus deep targeted sequencing.
Address correspondence to: Alexander Bick, 2,200 Pierce Ave., 550 RRB, Nashville, Tennessee, 37,232, USA. Email: [email protected].
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1Department of Internal Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
A fleet of NASA missions has likely uncovered a collision between two ultradense stars in a tiny galaxy buried in a huge stream of gas. Astronomers have never seen this type of explosive event in an environment like this before—and it may help solve two outstanding cosmic mysteries. A paper describing these results is forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and currently available on the arXiv preprint server.
Neutron stars are the cores left behind after a star much heavier than the sun runs out of fuel, collapses on itself, and then explodes. They are small (only a dozen or so miles across) but slightly more massive than the sun, making them amazingly dense. Astronomers consider them to be some of the most extreme objects in the universe.
In recent years, astronomers have collected data on collisions, or mergers, of two neutron stars inside of moderately sized or large galaxies. This latest discovery, however, shows that a neutron star collision may take place inside a tiny galaxy.
High-temporal-resolution fluorescence measurements reveal how quickly proteins cross energy barriers separating unfolded and folded states.
Proteins are the active molecules of life. To carry out their functions, they adopt specific structures, or “folds.” Biophysicists have long been fascinated by the “protein-folding problem”: How does the sequence of amino-acid building blocks encode the protein’s ultimate fold, and how can folding occur so quickly and reliably? The folding process can be understood as a diffusive random walk through the large space of possible configurations, culminating in the crossing of an energy barrier to reach the folded state. The time spent exploring unfolded configurations can span many orders of magnitude and has been measured with various experimental techniques. By contrast, the comparatively short time to ultimately cross the energy barrier—known as the transition-path time—had never been measured in a naturally occurring protein under biologically relevant conditions.
The future for our computers will literally be at the speed of light. Extremely short light pulses can perform ultrafast logical operations: these are the findings of a study recently published in the journal Nature Photonics. The study represents an important step toward developing a new generation of information processing technologies, potentially hundreds of times faster than what we have at present.
Today’s computers rely on the movement of electrical charges inside transistors; however, these can only achieve a maximum frequency whose physical limits are hard to overcome. Unlike traditional electronics, based on the movement of electric charges, this innovative approach manipulates the state of electrons in matter by the use of oscillating light.
As Giulio Cerullo of the Politecnico di Milano explained, “We have shown that light can be used not only to transmit information, but also to process it. With the use of ultra-short laser pulses, we can control the quantum states of matter on time scales of a few millionths of a billionth of a second, i.e. at the same frequencies as light oscillations, speeds previously unknown in electronics.” These operations are performed at rates above 10 terahertz, over a hundred times faster than the best modern electronic devices.
The molecular-scale design of materials is one of the major frontiers in modern science. Flat, highly conjugated organic molecules are already used in advanced technologies such as chemical sensors, optoelectronic devices, and energy conversion systems. One of the most promising strategies to enhance their performance involves “linking” multiple units together, extending their electronic structure and thereby modifying their properties.
However, as these architectures grow in complexity, their synthesis becomes extremely challenging. In many cases, the molecules lose solubility and become nearly inaccessible through traditional solution-based methods. This limitation has hindered the construction of increasingly large and functional molecular structures for years.
Research led by Luis M. Mateo and Diego Peña at the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS) has overcome this barrier using a hybrid strategy. First, they synthesize carefully designed phthalocyanine units in solution. These units are then deposited onto a metal surface, where they react with each other to form a new extended structure composed of five cross-shaped, fused phthalocyanines. This approach combines the precision of classical solution chemistry with the possibilities offered by on-surface synthesis under controlled conditions.
Researchers from the Department of Physics and the University Institute of Materials at the University of Alicante (UA) and the Low Temperature and High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) have succeeded in measuring, for the first time, the electrical conductance of gold and silver atomic contacts subjected to extreme magnetic fields of up to 20 teslas, an intensity equivalent to 400,000 times Earth’s magnetic field.
The team observed that, when applying these fields, the conductance of the gold contacts decreases by around 15%, an unexpected result in noble metals such as gold (Au) and silver (Ag). Furthermore, they detected modifications in the formation process of the atomic contact itself, which were particularly marked in silver. These findings contradict previous theoretical predictions, which anticipated a practically non-existent magnetic dependence in pure Au and Ag.
The discovery, published in Physical Review Research, adds a new piece to the knowledge of electronic transport physics at the atomic scale. Achieving a noticeable response to a magnetic field from a conductor consisting of a single atomic channel, as occurs in these metals, is extremely difficult. The results suggest that functional materials can be designed by combining noble metals with magnetically active systems.