From reducing administrative workload to navigating ‘alien intelligence,’ this month’s column takes a practical look at integrating LLMs and LWMs in the lab
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The neural basis of laughter
However, by looking at data from invasive brain monitoring—such as direct electrical stimulation used in medical treatments—researchers in this review paper have mapped out the brain’s “laughter engine.”
Not all laughter comes from pure humor. We often laugh politely at a boss’s joke, chuckle to smooth over a tense moment, or use a “polite giggle” to signal friendliness during everyday conversation.
Laughter is a universal social signal and a defining clinical sign of various neurological disorders. Yet, its neural orchestration remains elusive, due in part to the challenge of reproducing its spontaneous nature in the laboratory. In this review, we showcase how recent invasive investigations—from direct electrical stimulation to intracranial recordings—unveil the underlying circuitry. We propose a dual-system framework: an evolutionarily ancient cingulo-temporal network that acts as the gateway for spontaneous, involuntary outbursts; and a lateral motor-opercular system that co-opts speech-production networks for volitional, conversational laughter.
Why does LaSc${}_{2}$H${}_{24}$ exhibit superior superconductivity compared with LaH${}_{10}$?
Here, the authors indicate that scandium not only distorts the hydrogen cage structure but also creates MgB${}_{2}$-like Sc-H states at the Fermi level. This synergy enhances electron-phonon coupling, unifies strongly coupled H-H states with widely distributed Sc-H states on the Fermi surface, and leads to isotropic single-gap superconductivity with a higher superconductivity.
Radiological response of primary central nervous system lymphoma after corticosteroid therapy and its predictive value on overall survival: a multicenter study
Primary Large-B-Cell Lymphoma of the CNS (PCNS-LBCL) is a rare, aggressive tumor often sensitive to corticosteroid therapy (CST). This multicenter study investigated the spectrum of radiological responses to routine CST and evaluated its impact on patient prognosis.
The researchers utilized a prospective cohort of 18 patients for volumetric MRI analysis and a combined prospective-retrospective cohort of 31 patients for 2D tumor analysis. Patients received CST post-biopsy, with follow-up MRIs performed on the seventh day (median) after surgery. The study correlated radiological responses with CST dosage, LDH levels, and overall survival (OS) using Kaplan-Meier and Firth-corrected Cox regression.
In the prospective cohort, 83.3% of tumors regressed with a median regression of 40%, while 16.7% progressed despite CST resulting in a median progression of 46%. These changes were not dose-dependent, but there were indications of a correlation with LDH levels. Patients showing regression had a median OS of 31.4 months, compared to 3.9 months for tumors progressing during CST (p = 0.015). Firth-corrected Cox regression showed, despite the small sample size, that radiological response (p = 0.02) could be a promising prognostic factor in a model including age, type of therapy and Karnofsky performance status.
Did the Unabomber Predict the Singularity? Ted Kaczynski’s Warning
16, he entered Harvard. At 25, he was the youngest assistant professor Berkeley had ever hired. At 27, he walked away from all of it into a Montana cabin with no electricity and no running water.
Then he started mailing bombs.
Ted Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others. Nothing excuses that, and this is not an attempt to.
But in 1995 he traded an end to the killing for the publication of his manifesto, and there are two passages in it I have not been able to shake. Not because they are unhinged. Because of when they were written and what they describe.
I am deliberately not quoting them here. You should read them cold, with no name attached, and work out for yourself what you are looking at.
Then the uncomfortable question arrives on its own. Was the Unabomber a murderous neo-Luddite whose ideas deserve to be buried with him, or was he among the first to see the #Singularity coming and recoil at it?
My answer will not satisfy either camp.
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.”