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Shining Science (@ShiningScience) on X

Shining Science on X: 🚹 A groundbreaking MIT brain-scan study shows relying on ChatGPT weakens critical thinking and memory wiring.

A recent MIT study, titled The Cognitive Cost of Using LLMs, monitored the brain activity of 54 students using electroencephalography (EEG) devices.

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab discovered that participants who consistently relied on ChatGPT for essay-writing tasks demonstrated significantly lower neural engagement in brain regions tied to memory and analytical reasoning.

Giant impact could have formed an intact moon within five hours, simulations suggest

New Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) modeling, conducted in collaboration with scientists at the University of Arizona, shows fundamental differences in how the moon may have formed from the giant impact that created the Earth–moon system. The new results used state-of-the-art computational techniques that factor in the material strength of the two colliding planets. These impact simulations could change how researchers understand moon formation and may help constrain the timing of the event. The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“We discovered that the preexisting geology of the Mars-sized proto-moon matters,” said Dr. Adeene Denton, formerly a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at SwRI and now a postdoctoral researcher in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division. “When you simulate the Earth and the moon as colliding bodies with geologic properties, it changes how the moon forms out of that impact—that’s something we considered unnecessary before.”

Earlier studies of the giant impact scenario included a foundational 2001 paper by Dr. Robin Canup, vice president of SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado, and Dr. Erik Asphaug, a professor at the University of Arizona and co-author of the current study.

Switching gravity on and off leaves particles behind, mathematical model finds

That gravity is a product of a time gradient, without spatial distortion. And what’s more — the presence of the variable “time” in practically all formulas of physics probably means that all other “forces” are also derivatives of time. And the speed of light is a speedometer for the speed of time, not an independent physical constant. Could this be the “great unification”?

Hawking radiation causes black holes to eventually evaporate. This is because particle pairs are spontaneously created near the event horizon (the position of the last ray of light that can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull). A particle and its antiparticle are created for a brief moment and disappear immediately afterward. But sometimes a particle falls into the black hole, allowing the other particle to escape: This is Hawking radiation. According to Stephen Hawking, this would ultimately mean that no black holes would remain in the universe.

Astronomer Heino Falcke, physicist Michael Wondrak and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom from Radboud University had previously demonstrated that the event horizon plays a subordinate role in the origin of the radiation. In an article published in Communications in Mathematical Physics, they have now also provided mathematical proof for a similar problem.

Van Suijlekom said, “We wanted to formulate a mathematically rigorous model as precisely as possible. We wanted hard mathematical proof in the case that only a temporal horizon exists and that the universe ultimately resembles its initial state.”

A new kind of AI that does its thinking cheaply without words

There may soon be a new kind of artificial intelligence in town, one that uses a novel approach to thinking that could save massive amounts of computing power and money.

The AI that most people use every day, like ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini, relies on large language models that can work through difficult problems step by step. While this may ultimately give us the answers we are searching for, the process can increase response times and use a lot of computing power.

So scientists at AI company Pathway decided to test an alternative approach. The research and technical foundations of the team’s work are in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server.

AI-informed AdaptiveFlow redefines large-scale cloud computing for drug discovery

Researchers today announced AdaptiveFlow, an AI-informed platform that can virtually screen billions of drug-like molecules with a 1,000-fold reduction in computational costs over existing methods. Developed and validated by scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, University of Pavia, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, AdaptiveFlow allows prohibitively expensive ultra-large virtual drug screens to be conducted routinely. The open-source platform was published today in Nature Biotechnology.

The platform’s framework demonstrated linear scaling up to 5.6 million virtual central processing units (CPUs)—a new benchmark for cloud-based drug discovery—allowing billions of molecules to be screened without loss of efficiency. As proof of concept, the team identified potent inhibitors for existing and emerging cancer targets for which few inhibitors are known.

“AdaptiveFlow is the next generation in automated drug discovery platforms for routine ultra-large virtual screenings,” said co-corresponding author Christoph Gorgulla, Ph.D., Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Discovery, St. Jude Department of Structural Biology. “With this platform, we are able to screen 69 billion molecules, representing the largest ready-to-dock library in the world.”

Experiment sees surprising result in search for dark matter

For the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter. This invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected. Determining exactly what it is remains one of the biggest questions about our world.

Now, a new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has recorded a single particle interaction that researchers have great difficulty explaining with known background signals from normal matter. The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery but is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date.

LZ is an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and operates nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. The experiment uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles.

Watching nanoparticles form in real time uncovers ‘missing link’ in microwave-assisted manufacturing

Advanced materials power everything from batteries and electronics to clean energy technologies. For years, engineers have known that microwave-assisted synthesis can dramatically accelerate the chemical reactions used to manufacture these materials. Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have provided new evidence challenging a long-held assumption about why, suggesting that microwaves speed chemical reactions in a fundamentally different way than many scientists believed.

The study, led by Reeja Jayan, a professor of mechanical engineering, and CMU alumnus Morgan Chen, challenges the long-held belief that microwaves accelerate chemical reactions by lowering the amount of energy needed for those reactions to occur. Instead, the team found evidence that microwaves increase how often molecules successfully rearrange themselves into new materials.

To reach that conclusion, Jayan and Chen studied the formation of tin oxide nanoparticles, a material used in batteries, catalysts and other electronic devices. Using high-energy X-rays, they watched the nanoparticles form in real time under both conventional and microwave-assisted heating, allowing them to compare how the atomic structure evolved throughout each reaction.

Scientists Discover a “Loose Cannon” Virus Enzyme That Rewires Nearly Every Protein in a Bacterial Cell

Scientists found that phages, viruses that infect bacteria, trigger widespread protein modifications inside host cells that help them evade bacterial immune defenses.

When a phage infects a bacterium, it must overcome the cell’s defenses before those defenses can destroy the invading virus. Researchers have now uncovered an unusual strategy used by T7 phage: a single enzyme triggers a massive wave of protein modifications inside the infected bacterium, helping disable its immune systems.

Phages, viruses that infect bacteria, are locked in a constant molecular arms race with their hosts. Bacteria evolve defenses against infection, while phages develop ways to evade or suppress those defenses. The new work shows for the first time how one phage protein can initiate a cascade of molecular changes capable of disarming multiple bacterial defense mechanisms.

Brain Scans Reveal a Surprising Dopamine Difference in Autism

Autism is associated with differences across several systems in the brain, but understanding how those differences connect has been difficult. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Odense University Hospital investigated that question in 60 adults using three forms of brain imaging.

For the first time, the researchers combined three advanced brain scanning techniques to examine the dopamine system, energy use, and communication among brain regions within the same study.

The Brain Makes New Neurons Even in Adulthood. Depression May Stop It

Depression was linked to stalled adult neurogenesis and widespread molecular changes in hippocampal memory circuits.

A small stream of new neurons continues to appear in the adult hippocampus even though most of the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons are formed before birth. Research from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggests that this limited adult neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, could play an important role in protecting against depression.

The researchers report for the first time that neurogenesis stalls in the brains of adults with major depressive disorder. They also identified molecular programs involved in controlling this process, providing potential targets for future treatments.

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