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There’s no replacement for displacement. An adage that’s been around as long as the combustion engine, really. But these age-old sayings don’t really apply anymore when it comes to electric motors.

Earlier this year, we talked about Koenigsegg’s Light Speed Tourbillon Transmission (LSTT). We explored how it couples the 5-liter, 1,500 horsepower (1,119 kW), 1,106 lb-ft (1,500 Nm) of torque, “Hot V8” engine shoed into the rear of the Gemera hypercar and the 850-volt Dark Matter electric motor mounted in the front – but we never got into the specifics of this insane electric powerplant and what makes it so remarkable.

Unveiled in 2023 and stuffed into the Koenigsegg Gemera, the Dark Matter motor created an entirely new league of high-performance electric motor that didn’t quite exist before. Most of its details are still hidden away in a secret Koenigsegg vault while awaiting patent protection.

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The study is “really pretty remarkable,” said Christopher Whyte at the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the work, to Nature. One of the first to simultaneously record activity in both deep and surface brain regions in humans, it reveals how signals travel across the brain to support consciousness.

Consciousness has teased the minds of philosophers and scientists for centuries. Thanks to modern brain mapping technologies, researchers are beginning to hunt down its neural underpinnings.

At least half a dozen theories now exist, two of which are going head-to-head in a global research effort using standardized tests to probe how awareness emerges in the human brain. The results, alongside other work, could potentially build a unified theory of consciousness.

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A perfect storm of range restrictions and suboptimal weather seems to finally be clearing for Firefly Aerospace. After delaying the flight of their sixth Alpha rocket for more than a month, the company announced a new launch window, which opens on Sunday.

Onboard the rocket, designated FLTA006 by Firefly Aerospace, is a technology demonstration for Lockheed Martin’s LM400 satellite bus. The mission, dubbed ‘Message in a Booster,’ has its first launch opportunity during a window that runs from 6:37–7:29 a.m. PDT (9:37–10:29 a.m. EDT, 1337–1429 UTC).

That roughly one-hour window is the first opportunity in a five-day stretch approved by the Western Range. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 2 West (SLC-2W) at Vandenberg Space Force Base is contingent upon good weather and Firefly Aerospace said it will “continue to evaluate wind conditions” as the planned launch day approaches.

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“When weather conditions become more favorable, collection of new gas data will help us improve this assessment,” it added.

Cloudy weather has rendered AVO planes, helicopters and satellites useless for data collection since March 21, the agency said.

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Certain DNA sequences can form structures other than the canonical double helix. These alternative DNA conformations—referred to as non-B DNA—have been implicated as regulators of cellular processes and of genome evolution, but their DNA tends to be repetitive, which until recently made reliably reading and assembling their sequences difficult.

Now, a team of researchers, led by Penn State biologists, has comprehensively predicted the location of non-B DNA structures in great apes. It’s the first step in understanding the functions and evolution of such structures, known to contribute to genetic diseases and cancer, the team said.

The work depends on newly available telomere-to-telomere (T2T), or end-to-end, genomes of humans and other great apes that overcame sequencing and assembly difficulties associated with repetitive DNA to fill in any remaining gaps in the genomes. A paper describing the study, which shows that non-B DNA is enriched in the newly sequenced segments of the genomes and suggests potential new functions, was published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

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Patients in the early stages of psychosis respond to treatments differently than those who have developed a chronic version of the disorder. Understanding the neurobiological changes from early to chronic stages is essential for developing targeted prevention and treatment strategies. But how symptoms change during this transition—and what role the brain plays—is unclear.

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) have now examined patients with early and chronic forms of psychosis to map symptom evolution and identify relevant brain networks. They published their findings in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

“We are interested in how psychosis and psychiatric disorders develop,” says Maya Foster, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the lab of Dustin Scheinost, Ph.D., associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at YSM.

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A new study investigated the brain circuits involved in psychosis—a condition characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and detachment from reality.

Andrew Pines, MD, MA, a resident in the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a researcher in the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics, is the lead author of the paper published in JAMA Psychiatry titled “Mapping Lesions That Cause Psychosis to a Human Brain Circuit and Proposed Stimulation Target.”

Psychosis is the classic symptom of schizophrenia, a that causes marked disability in otherwise young and healthy patients. The researchers analyzed published cases in which focal brain damage caused psychosis, with the idea that if damaging a brain circuit causes a symptom, then mapping that circuit might tell us about how to treat that symptom.

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For individuals with Alzheimer disease (AD), the emergence of psychosis is associated with elevations in levels of plasma tau phosphorylated at threonine 181 (p-tau181), according to a study published online June 26 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Jesus J. Gomar, Ph.D., and Jeremy Koppel, M.D., from the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, examined the longitudinal dynamics of p-tau181 and neurofilament light chain protein (NfL) levels in association with the emergence of psychotic symptoms. Patients with (MCI) and AD (with psychosis [AD+P] and without psychosis [AD−P]) and participants who were cognitively unimpaired (CU) were compared at baseline.

For the longitudinal analysis, participants with MCI and AD were categorized into those with evidence of psychosis at baseline and those who showed incidence of psychosis over the course of the study. The cohort included 752 participants with AD and 424 CU participants.

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