Can you trust your senses? Do animals have morals? Is your mind deceiving you?

Find out in BRAIN JOB: Perception, where we explore mind-bending phenomena like change blindness, the Trolley Problem, time travel, and more.

Thanks to museum of illusions chicago.

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A new Tulane University study suggests the Mediterranean diet’s brain-boosting benefits may work by changing the balance of bacteria in the gut.

In a study published in Gut Microbes Reports, researchers at Tulane University School of Medicine found that subjects following a Mediterranean diet developed distinctly different gut bacteria patterns compared to those eating a typical Western diet. These bacterial changes correlated with better memory and cognitive performance.

“We’ve known that what we eat affects brain function, but this study explores how that could be happening,” said lead author Rebecca Solch-Ottaiano, Ph.D., neurology research instructor at Tulane’s Clinical Neuroscience Research Center. “Our findings suggest that dietary choices can influence cognitive performance by reshaping the gut microbiome.”

Visualizing cells after editing specific genes can help scientists learn new details about the function of those genes. But using microscopy to do this at scale can be challenging, particularly when studying thousands of genes at a time.

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with collaborators at Calico Life Sciences, have developed an approach that brings the power of microscopy imaging to genome-scale CRISPR screens in a scalable way.

PERISCOPE—which stands for perturbation effect readout in situ via single-cell optical phenotyping—combines two technologies developed by Broad scientists: Cell Painting, which can capture images and key measures of subcellular compartments at scale, and Optical Pooled Screening, which “barcodes” cells and uses CRISPR to systematically turn off individual genes to study their function in those cells.

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Through his research, the physician believes there are clues hinting at our reality being a simulation, an has even suggested that mutations are not random — which would debunk the theory of evolution.

The abstract of Vopson’s study read: The simulation hypothesis is a philosophical theory, in which the entire universe and our objective reality are just simulated constructs.

Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.

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Scientists at a university in the UK are in the midst of creating a breakthrough vaccine that could stop cancer in its tracks.

— Kim, et al.

The goal of the present study was to identify potential pivotal molecules with implications for novel and efficacious treatment options for pancreatic cancer, a disease with limited treatments available and notorious for its aggressive nature.

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Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer and is the seventh leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) accounts for over 90% of pancreatic cancers. Most pancreatic cancers are recalcitrant to radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, highlighting the urgent need for novel treatment options for this deadly disease. To this end, we screened a library of kinase inhibitors in the PDAC cell lines PANC-1 and BxPC-3 and identified two highly potent molecules: Aurora kinase inhibitor AT 9,283 (AT) and EGFR kinase inhibitor WZ 3,146 (WZ). Both AT and WZ exhibited a dose-dependent inhibition of viability in both cell lines.

Yale physicists have discovered a sophisticated, previously unknown set of “modes” within the human ear that put important constraints on how the ear amplifies faint sounds, tolerates noisy blasts, and discerns a stunning range of sound frequencies in between.

By applying existing mathematical models to a generic mock-up of a cochlea—a spiral-shaped organ in the inner ear—the researchers have revealed a new layer of cochlear complexity. The findings, which appear in PRX Life, offer fresh insight into the remarkable capacity and accuracy of human hearing.

“We set out to understand how the ear can tune itself to detect faint sounds without becoming unstable and responding even in the absence of external sounds,” said Benjamin Machta, an assistant professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Science and co-senior author of the new study. “But in getting to the bottom of this we stumbled onto a new set of low frequency mechanical modes that the cochlea likely supports.”

Researchers from Oakland University have made a significant breakthrough in the field of optical materials, unveiling the exceptional capabilities of Ba₃(ZnB₅O₁₀)PO₄ (BZBP). Although this transparent crystal closely resembles ordinary window glass, it exhibits extraordinary properties that set it apart from others.

Already renowned for its exceptional qualities, such as excellent heat dissipation, minimal uneven expansion when exposed to temperature changes, and the ability to transmit ultraviolet light (a type of light that comes from the sun and other sources like special lamps, but it’s invisible to the human eye), BZBP has emerged as an ideal choice for laser systems operating in deep ultraviolet ranges. These systems are crucial in fields such as medical diagnostics, semiconductor production, and cutting-edge scientific research.

In a study recently published in Advanced Functional Materials, researchers explored how BZBP performs under extreme pressure.

Inspired by butterfly wings, a team of German researchers have developed a new kind of robotic wings that can work using only magnetic fields. The new wings created by the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf researchers need no batteries or electronics.

They could have interesting applications from search and rescue to medical sciences. The researchers drew inspiration from the remarkable efficiency and endurance of monarch butterflies, known to have incredibly long migrations between Canada and Mexico.

The world of quantum physics is experiencing a second revolution, which will drive an exponential leap in the progress of computing, the internet, telecommunications, cybersecurity and biomedicine.

Quantum technologies are attracting more and more students who want to learn about concepts from the subatomic world—such as quantum entanglement or quantum superposition —to explore the innovative potential of quantum science.

In fact, understanding the non-intuitive nature of quantum technology concepts and recognizing their relevance to technological progress is one of the challenges of 2025, declared the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology by UNESCO.