This is a draft version of the Brain Emulation Challenge video.
This version is intended for an audience with some neuroscience background or interest.
This video is provided with the hope to generate useful critical feedback for improvements.
Why take the brain emulation challenge? Why take a challenge that is providing virtual brain data from generated neural tissue?
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Physicists think that our universe started out as just a lot of quantum fluctuations. That means, if you’re able to calculate wave-function of those quantum fluctuations, you can learn how the universe ended up the way it is now. In a pre-print, a group of physicists around Nima Arkani-Hamed say they’ve worked out a new powerful method to calculate the wave function of the early universe, and they’re calling it the “cosmohedra.” Let’s take a look.
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Phages are viruses that attack bacteria by injecting their DNA, then usurping bacterial machinery to reproduce. Eventually, they make so many copies of themselves that the bacteria burst. By looking at this process in a unique type of virus called a jumbo phage, scientists hope to learn how to make new antibiotics that can address the growing crisis of resistance.
The jumbo phage has more than four times the DNA of an average phage. It uses this genetic material to create a restricted space inside bacteria where it can copy its DNA while surrounded by a protective shield made of protein.
Researchers at UC San Francisco have discovered that the shield works via a set of “secret handshakes.” They allow only a specific set of useful proteins to pass through.
Understanding where Earth’s essential elements came from—and why some are missing—has long puzzled scientists. Now, a new study reveals a surprising twist in the story of our planet’s formation.
A new study led by Arizona State University’s Assistant Professor Damanveer Grewal from the School of Molecular Sciences and School of Earth and Space Exploration, in collaboration with researchers from Caltech, Rice University, and MIT, challenges traditional theories about why Earth and Mars are depleted in moderately volatile elements (MVEs).
MVEs like copper and zinc play a crucial role in planetary chemistry, often accompanying life-essential elements such as water, carbon, and nitrogen. Understanding their origin provides vital clues about why Earth became a habitable world. Earth and Mars contain significantly fewer MVEs than primitive meteorites (chondrites), raising fundamental questions about planetary formation.
Professor Kwang-Hyun Cho’s research team of the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering at KAIST has captured the critical transition phenomenon at the moment when normal cells change into cancer cells and analyzed it to discover a molecular switch hidden in the genetic network that can revert cancer cells back into normal cells.
The team’s findings are published in the journal Advanced Science.
A critical transition is a phenomenon in which a sudden change in state occurs at a specific point in time, like water changing into steam at 100℃. This critical transition phenomenon also occurs in the process in which normal cells change into cancer cells at a specific point in time due to the accumulation of genetic and epigenetic changes.
A large team of researchers working on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Collaboration, which has been analyzing eleven years’ worth of data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station, has found trends in the number of particles moving around in the heliosphere and in the way they interact with one another.
The team has published two papers in the journal Physical Review Letters; one describing trends they found surrounding antiproton and elementary particle behavior over a single solar cycle and the other covering solar modulation of cosmic nuclei behavior, also over a single solar cycle.
Prior research has shown that the sun follows a cycle that repeats itself every 11 years. The AMS has been running for more than 11 years, but the researchers working on both efforts focused on conditions during just one cycle. They wanted to know how the sun impacted energy particles in the heliosphere and beyond.
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental health disorder associated with persistent, intrusive thoughts (i.e., obsessions), accompanied by repetitive behaviors (i.e., compulsions) aimed at reducing the anxiety arising from obsessions. Past studies have showed that people diagnosed with OCD can present symptoms that vary significantly, as well as distinct brain abnormalities.
A team of researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University recently carried out a study aimed at further exploring the well-documented differences among patients with OCD. Their findings, published in Translational Psychiatry, allowed them to identify two broad OCD subtypes, which are associated with different patterns in gray matter volumes and disease epicenters.
“OCD is a highly heterogeneous disorder, with notable variations among cases in structural brain abnormalities,” wrote Baohong Wen, Keke Fang and their colleagues in their paper. “To address this heterogeneity, our study aimed to delineate OCD subtypes based on individualized gray matter morphological differences.”
A new climate modeling study published in the journal Science Advances by researchers from the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea presents a new scenario of how climate and life on our planet would change in response to a potential future strike of a medium-sized (~500 m) asteroid.
The solar system is full of objects with near-Earth orbits. Most of them do not pose any threat to Earth, but some of them have been identified as objects of interest with non-negligible collision probabilities. Among them is the asteroid Bennu with a diameter of about 500 m, which—according to recent studies—has an estimated chance of 1 in 2700 of colliding with Earth in September 2182. This is similar to the probability of flipping a coin 11 times in a row with the same outcome.
To determine the potential impacts of an asteroid strike on our climate system and on terrestrial plants and plankton in the ocean, researchers from the ICCP set out to simulate an idealized collision scenario with a medium-sized asteroid using a state-of-the-art climate model.
Can copper be turned into gold? For centuries, alchemists pursued this dream, unaware that such a transformation requires a nuclear reaction. In contrast, graphite—the material found in pencil tips—and diamond are both composed entirely of carbon atoms; the key difference lies in how these atoms are arranged. Converting graphite into diamond requires extreme temperatures and pressures to break and reform chemical bonds, making the process impractical.
A more feasible transformation, according to Prof. Moshe Ben Shalom, head of the Quantum Layered Matter Group at Tel Aviv University, involves reconfiguring the atomic layers of graphite by shifting them against relatively weak van der Waals forces. This study, led by Prof. Ben Shalom and Ph.D. students Maayan Vizner Stern and Simon Salleh Atri, all from the Raymond & Beverly Sackler School of Physics & Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, was recently published in the journal Nature Review Physics.
While this method won’t create diamonds, if the switching process is fast and efficient enough, it could serve as a tiny electronic memory unit. In this case, the value of these newly engineered “polytype” materials could surpass that of both diamonds and gold.
Researchers have made a significant step in the study of a new class of high-temperature superconductors: creating superconductors that work at room pressure. That advance lays the groundwork for deeper exploration of these materials, bringing us closer to real-world applications such as lossless power grids and advanced quantum technologies.
Superconductivity, the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance, typically occurs at extremely low temperatures, or in some cases, under high pressures. For decades, researchers have focused on a class of materials called cuprates, known for their ability to achieve superconductivity at relatively high temperatures.
About five years ago, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University discovered superconductivity in nickelates, materials chemically similar to cuprates—and last summer, another group of researchers reported superconductivity in a new class of nickel oxides at temperatures comparable to cuprates.
