Using cryo-electron microscopy and electrophysiology, this study explains the structural basis for Ca2+ permeation and Mg2+ block in NMDA receptors and identifies a surrounding lipid network that may tune Mg2+-dependent voltage sensitivity.
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Scientists used AI to crack one of water’s biggest mysteries
Now, researchers at the University of Osaka have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle that challenge. Their AI system provides a unified way to compare different methods of describing the structure of supercooled water, helping identify which ones capture the most important features. The research was published in Communications Chemistry.
Why Supercooled Water Behaves So Strangely
For liquid water to become ice, its molecules must arrange themselves into an orderly crystal lattice. That process begins at a nucleation site, a surface where ice crystals can start forming. Tiny impurities in the water or even microscopic scratches inside a container can provide those starting points.
Scientists discover learning and memory formation in model membranes
“Science is a conversation,” said John Katsaras, neutron scattering scientist at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility. “Many years ago, Pat [Collier] and I wanted to see what would happen when we combined our scientific interests. He wanted to explore soft matter systems for neuromorphic computing [computing systems designed to mimic how the brain processes information], and I’ve studied the structure and dynamics of lipid membranes over the past 40 years. We are now applying decades of our soft matter experience to a problem neither one of us would have imagined pursuing five years ago.”
Soft matter includes materials that readily change shape, such as membranes, gels and polymers. Although biological membranes vary in complexity, they all share a common foundation: a lipid bilayer, or double layer of molecules. Each lipid contains a hydrophilic (water-attracting) head and a hydrophobic (water-repelling) tail.
To study membrane properties under electrical stimulation, Katsaras and Collier used water droplets suspended in oil, known as a droplet interface bilayer. These early experiments showed unexpected electrical data, prompting them to shift their attention to membranes surrounding neurons, where many memory and learning processes occur.
Scientists Show That Water Has Memory
A new groundbreaking discovery has been made within the most basic of resources. Scientists have just discovered what they have called “The Discovery of The Millennium”, and a huge revelation in human consciousness.
Scientists from Germany now believe that water has a memory, meaning that what once was seen as a simple commodity has now been closely examined to reveal a scientific revelation, uncovering a mind-blowing truth.
By examining individual drops of water at an incredibly high magnification, scientists were able to physically see that each droplet of water has its own individual microscopic pattern, each distinguishable from the next and uniquely beautiful.
Walk through a 3D cyberpunk city built purely from ASCII characters metropolis runs on a 283KB Rust WebAssembly engine feeding a WebGL renderer
283KB Rust module and two compiled shaders sit behind the character grid.
Jacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices
I recorded this conversation ten months ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning label.
Jacob Ward wrote The Loop before ChatGPT made his argument obvious. His claim: AI is doing to our decision-making what Google Maps did to our sense of direction. You never notice the skill leaving. You notice, one day, that you cannot get home without the phone.
So I asked him what I thought was a simple question. What is a choice?
Jake’s answer took the rest of the hour, and it starts somewhere uncomfortable. He describes a dinner with addiction scientists, people who study compulsion for a living, hired by consumer app companies. Not to cure anything. To calibrate.
From there we got into the decisions we have already handed over without a vote: hiring, lending, bail, custody, welfare. Hard moral calls outsourced to systems nobody in the room can inspect, because the human version was exhausting and the machine version is fast and cheap.
He is not a doomer, which is why the conversation lands. He thinks the fight for #FreeWill is still winnable, and he pointed to two pieces of evidence I did not expect: teenagers calling AI “clankers,” and the return of film cameras.
The asteroid that may be three worlds
What shape is an asteroid? For (44) Nysa, the honest answer until now has been that nobody knew. It is one of the brightest and largest E-type asteroids in the main belt, a class with a surface rich in enstatite, and its oddness has made it a favorite target for well over a hundred years. Successive observations hinted that it was elongated, perhaps even two lumps stuck together, but the picture stayed frustratingly blurred.
An international team led by Kate Minker at Lowell Observatory has now brought two of the world’s heaviest instruments to bear on it: SHARK-VIS on the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, and SPHERE/ZIMPOL on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. With adaptive optics correcting for the churn of our atmosphere and purpose-built processing to sharpen what came back, they have produced the finest images of Nysa ever obtained. Minker describes them as close to spacecraft-quality, achieved without ever leaving the ground.
What those images show is two prominent valleys wrapping around the asteroid’s circumference. The team read them as necks, the pinched joints where separate bodies have come to rest against one another: Three lobes, gently welded into one.
