This review by Summerfield and Stachenfeld surveys how the dialog between neuroscience and AI research has evolved over the past decade. They highlight continued opportunities for synergy between these disciplines.
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Breast Cancer Chemotherapy Linked to Faster Biological Aging
Researchers used blood levels of the senescence biomarker p16 to model biological aging after breast cancer chemotherapy, estimating greater long-term effects from more cytotoxic regimens.
The Surprising Origin of Uranus’ Moons and Rings
New infrared observations tie the ice giant’s small moons and narrow rings to a past encounter with a visiting object from the Kuiper belt.
A suspected black hole turns out to be a rapidly spinning star
Sometimes massive stars can mimic the behavior of a black hole and trick astronomers into misinterpreting their nature. Such is the case with a strange pair of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) cluster NGC 1850. The system was initially thought to contain a star about five times the mass of the sun orbiting a stellar-mass black hole. Now, a new study led by Rhys Seeburger of Liverpool John Moores University demonstrates that this is a black hole “impostor” system. The research paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 27.
It is common for massive stars to be born and live in binary systems. When one star runs out of fuel and explodes, the resulting neutron star or black hole remains in the binary system with its companion. If the dead star’s remnant is a black hole and it barely emits any X-rays, it is called a dormant black hole. Such systems are hard to find because the only way they can be found is through the black hole’s effect on the visible star’s motion.
Models predict around 100,000 such systems in our galaxy. Only a few dormant black holes are confirmed, including VFTS 243 in the LMC and HD 130,298 in the Milky Way. But pairs of ordinary stars can also mimic the signal, especially after mass transfer leaves one star stripped and bloated, which can outshine its companion. So, these impostor systems can infiltrate the sample.
Earth’s orbital asymmetries share recurring rhythms with El Niño, study finds
Every few years, an unusual warming of surface waters across the central and eastern tropical Pacific—known as El Niño—reorganizes atmospheric circulation worldwide, bringing severe droughts to some continents and torrential rainfall to others. For decades, oceanographers and meteorologists have mapped the intricate internal machinery behind the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), from shifting trade winds to subsurface ocean waves.
Yet one fundamental question has always intrigued me: Why does ENSO recur on the specific timescales that it does? In my recent study, published in Frontiers in Earth Science, I explored whether subtle astronomical rhythms in Earth’s orbit provide an underlying background tempo for this climate cycle.
I approached this question through the lens of astroclimatology, an interdisciplinary bridge connecting celestial mechanics, statistical signal processing and climate dynamics.
Engineered atomic interactions help microwave sensor capture three times as much information
Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (UW) and the Center for Optical Quantum Technologies at the University of Warsaw’s Center for New Technologies (CeNT UW) have developed a method for ultrasensitive microwave sensing. Using cold, strongly interacting Rydberg atoms as a microwave detector, the researchers observed that carefully engineered interactions between the atoms make the atomic state resistant to loss.
As a result, the measurement provided three times more information about the field under study (measured in terms of so-called Fisher information) than a corresponding measurement without interactions. The research results were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Matter–antimatter asymmetry still provides no evidence of new physics
The universe’s dominance by ordinary matter is compelling evidence that matter and antimatter are not perfect reflections of each other. However, known differences do not explain the scale of this imbalance, leaving open the possibility that unknown physics is responsible. A new analysis of meson decays, conducted by the LHCb collaboration, has narrowed the scope of the search for such a scenario while paving the way for more precise measurements in the future.
Over the past decade, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider have focused their efforts on searching for differences between particles of matter and antimatter produced in proton-proton collisions. The latest and exceptionally thorough analysis of data collected between 2016 and 2018 as part of the LHCb experiment was carried out by a team of physicists from the universities of Warwick, Manchester and Oxford in the U.K., TU Dortmund University in Germany, and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.
Five lifespan-extending treatments boost the same antioxidant in mice
Aging is about far more than wrinkles and gray hair, despite what social media and advertisements might have us believe. The real concern lies beneath the surface, where the biology of aging is intertwined with a host of diseases, from heart disease to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to metabolic disorders and cancer. Targeting the processes that make the body age could have effects far beyond any single disease, potentially easing the burden of several age-related conditions at once.
A recent Frontiers in Aging study examines how different treatments that extend lifespan change the collection of small molecules and chemical signals in cells that dictate the body’s metabolism. The researchers started with five approaches that had already shown lifespan-extending effects in mice, introducing them when the male animals were 4 months old. The treatments included four drugs—rapamycin, acarbose, 17α-estradiol and canagliflozin—and caloric restriction.
At 12 months of age, the researchers analyzed the mice’s metabolites using a machine-learning method called XGBoost. They found that mice receiving lifespan-extending treatments had a different metabolic fingerprint from untreated mice, and this difference emerged well before their survival began to diverge.
Molecular mapping of 8 million cells brings cerebral architecture into focus
University of California, Irvine researchers have mapped approximately 8 million cells in regions deep within the human brain, identifying 60 distinct types and revealing how they form cellular communities. The work offers a foundational reference for investigating brain systems affected by Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and other neurological and psychiatric disorders.
The atlas focuses on the basal ganglia, a group of interconnected structures involved in movement, motivation, habits and decision-making. By examining both the molecular characteristics of cells and their locations, scientists are building a more precise picture of how these areas are organized and creating a basis for exploring what changes in disease.
The study, published in Cell, is one of two led by UC Irvine’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping in a coordinated publication package from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network. The university’s team also contributed to four additional Cell papers on brain cells’ molecular features and their similarities across species.
Experimental blood test detects early breast cancer and predicts recurrence
One of the great hopes of cancer medicine over the past decade has been a simple blood test that would detect cancer at its earliest stages, help physicians choose the right treatment and even predict the risk of recurrence. Known as liquid biopsies, these tests work by identifying traces of cancer cells in the bloodstream. Although they are already used to tailor treatment for some patients, they still struggle to detect cancer early in the general population or predict whether the disease will return after treatment.
One reason is that, in the early stages, genetic traces of cancer in the blood are extremely scarce and hard to detect without triggering false alarms—results suggesting cancer when none is present.
Now researchers from the laboratories of Guy Ron at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Efrat Shema at the Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a blood test that distinguishes with high accuracy between women with early-stage breast cancer and healthy women. The test also outperforms conventional tissue biopsies in predicting the risk of recurrence after treatment.