Tested in large cohorts, a predictive model including 34 blood circular RNAs predicts progression to symptomatic AD, outperforming pTau217 and amyloid-PET.
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Scientists just measured the smallest possible contacts for future computer chips
The rise of AI has created an almost insatiable appetite for computing power. Training and running AI systems requires vast numbers of transistors, and engineers are now racing to pack more of them onto every chip. With their existing designs, however, silicon transistors are rapidly running up against physical limits on how small they can get.
Through new research published in Nature, a team led by Ya-Ping Chiu at National Taiwan University has uncovered new details about next-generation transistors that could help push past these limits.
Scientists discover new method of defense against solar storms to help protect Earth
A recent study is shedding light on how we handle geomagnetic storms, offering a way to reduce their severity.
Experts at Advancing Earth and Space Sciences (AGU) have dug into the essentials of solar storms and how they can affect our planet.
Solar storms occur when the sun creates an entangled mess of magnetic fields, similar to a messy head of hair after a long night of sleep.
University of Chicago Confirmed Quantum Reach Its Transistor Moment?—Classical Computing Is Now 1947
Researchers at University of Chicago continue to make significant contributions to quantum science, helping advance quantum computing, quantum networking, and quantum materials. Headlines claiming that quantum computing has reached its \.
Gut microbiota can predict risk of type 2 diabetes years before it develops
The presence of certain bacteria in the gut microbiota, and fluctuations in a person’s metabolism, can be seen in people who go on to develop type 2 diabetes years later. This has been shown in a large Swedish study led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology. The study is published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.
The discovery paves the way for identifying people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes at an early stage, enabling preventive measures to be introduced.
“Our study was able to show changes in the gut microbiota several years before the disease developed. This could indicate that the composition of the microbiome plays a role in the development of diabetes, and not the other way around,” says Gaël Toubon, a postdoctoral researcher in food science at Chalmers’ Department of Life Sciences.
JWST finds the most distant barred galaxy candidate in the early universe
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified what may be the most distant barred spiral galaxy ever discovered, dating to a time less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The paper outlining its properties was posted to the arXiv preprint server on June 23.
Stellar bars are elongated formations of stars that stretch across a galaxy’s central region, spinning together as a single, unified structure. Through this rotation, they function much like a funnel, channeling gas toward the galactic center. This can ignite bursts of star formation, supply material to the central black hole and contribute to the buildup of a compact core. Such structures are common among galaxies in the local universe, and our own Milky Way is one example of a barred galaxy.
But bars don’t just form anywhere. They take shape in galaxies where stars move in smooth and orderly fashion, with something called a dynamically “cold” disk. Early-universe galaxies were the opposite: turbulent and gas-rich, constantly disrupted by mergers and bursts of star formation, conditions that should keep disks “hot” and unsettled for billions of years.
Programmable metasurface generates dozens of holograms at once
Over the past few decades, engineers have developed various devices that can create holograms, three-dimensional (3D) or two-dimensional (2D) images produced by precisely controlling the shape and direction of traveling light waves. Holograms are now widely used to produce visual representations of objects and to measure their physical properties, authenticate documents or bank cards, and serve as visualization tools in some educational settings.
While the quality of the holograms that can be produced has improved significantly in recent years, most existing technologies can generate only one hologram at a time. To simultaneously generate several independent holograms, one would need to increase a device’s so-called holographic channels (i.e., separate streams of independently controlled holograms), which tends to reduce the quality of the produced images or the speed at which they can be refreshed.
Researchers at Southeast University in China recently developed a new programmable metasurface, an engineered ultrathin material that can manipulate waves in unique ways, which reliably generates dozens of holograms at once. This metasurface, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, consists of 6,000 elements that can be individually controlled, both in terms of their spatial arrangement and how they change over time.
Dysregulated calcium signaling underlies hyposalivation and microbial dysbiosis in Down syndrome
People with Down syndrome (DS) show reduced saliva flow and high periodontal disease burden. In Dp16 mice, a model of DS, Son et al. show that deficient calcium signaling in salivary glands underlies hyposalivation and is associated with oral and gut microbial dysbiosis and altered succinate levels.