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Realistic and complex models of brain cells, developed at Cedars-Sinai with support from our scientists and our #openscience data, could help answer questions a… See more.

Cedars-Sinai investigators have created bio-realistic and complex computer models of individual brain cells—in unparalleled quantity.

Their research, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports, details how these models could one day answer questions about neurological disorders—and even human intellect—that aren’t possible to explore through biological experiments.

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When Carnegie Mellon University doctoral candidates I-Hsuan Kao and Ryan Muzzio started working together a switch flicked on. Then off.

Working in the Department of Physics’ Lab for Investigating Quantum Materials, Interfaces and Devices (LIQUID) Group, Kao, Muzzio and other research partners were able to show proof of concept that running an electrical current through a novel two-dimensional material could control the magnetic state of a neighboring magnetic material without the need of applying an external magnetic field.

The groundbreaking work, which was published in Nature Materials in June and has a related patent pending, has potential applications for data storage in consumer products such as digital cameras, smartphones and laptops.

Skyrmions are ultra-stable atomic objects first discovered in real materials in 2009, which have more recently also been found also to exist at room temperatures. These unique objects have a number of desirable properties, including a substantially small threshold voltage, nanoscale sizes and easy electrical manipulation.

While these properties could be advantageous for the creation of a wide range of electronics, developing functional all–electrical devices using skyrmions has so far proved to be very challenging. One possible application for skyrmions is in neuromorphic computing, which entails the creation of artificial structures that resemble those observed in the human brain.

With this in mind, researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have recently investigated the possibility of using skyrmions to replicate mechanisms observed in the human brain. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, shows that these ultra-stable atomic structures can be used to mimic some behaviors of biological synapses, which are junctions between neurons through which nerve impulses are passed on to different parts of the human brain.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a detection method that could revolutionize cancer treatment by showing how cancers metastasize and what stage they are.

Cancer spreads via circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that travel through the blood to other organs, and they are nearly impossible to track. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a detection method that could revolutionize cancer treatment by showing how cancers metastasize and what stage they are. This could lead to earlier and more targeted treatment, beginning with a simple blood test.

When a tumor starts metastasizing, it sheds its cell into the blood. An individual cell often doesn’t survive the bloodstream on its own, but clusters of cells are much more robust and can travel to other organs, effectively pushing the cancer to a metastatic state.

A component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer, MIT researchers have found.

Modern computer processors contain many computing units, called cores, which share the same hardware resources. The on-chip interconnect is the component that enables these cores to communicate with each other. But when programs on multiple cores run simultaneously, there is a chance they can delay one another when they use the interconnect to send data across the chip at the same time.

By monitoring and measuring these delays, a malicious agent could conduct what is known as a “side-channel attack” and reconstruct secret information that is stored in a program, such as a cryptographic key or password.

Some signed third-party bootloaders for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) could allow attackers to execute unauthorized code in an early stage of the boot process, before the operating system loads.

Vendor-specific bootloaders used by Windows were found to be vulnerable while the status of almost a dozen others is currently unknown.

Threat actors could exploit the security issue to establish persistence on a target system that cannot be removed by reinstalling the operating system (OS).

Optics, technologies that leverage the behavior and properties of light, are the basis of many existing technological tools, most notably fiber communication systems that enable long-and short-distance high-speed communication between devices. Optical signals have a high information capacity and can be transmitted across longer distances.

Researchers at California Institute of Technology have recently developed a new device that could help to overcome some of the limitations of existing optical systems. This device, introduced in a paper published in Nature Photonics, is a lithium niobate-based device that can switch ultrashort light pulses at an extremely low optical pulse energy of tens of femtojoules.

“Unlike electronics, optics still lacks efficiency in required components for computing and signal processing, which has been a major barrier for unlocking the potentials of optics for ultrafast and efficient computing schemes,” Alireza Marandi, lead researcher for the study, told Phys.org. “In the past few decades, substantial efforts have been dedicated to developing all–optical switches that could address this challenge, but most of the energy-efficient designs suffered from slow switching times, mainly because they either used high-Q resonators or carrier-based nonlinearities.”

I’ll admit that I didn’t see this one coming: Retraction Watch is reporting that the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center (CCDC), the world’s main repository of small-molecule crystal data, is on the way to pulling nearly a thousand deposited crystal structures because they appear to have been faked. A preprint from earlier this year from David Bimler flagged what seems to be a paper-mill operation flooding out bogus papers on metal-organic frameworks: hundreds and hundreds of weirdly worded manuscripts on nonexistent MOFs and their imaginary applications, full of apparently randomly selected “references” to the rest of the literature. And these things depositited crystal data with the CCDC, which is the step that I really didn’t expect.

After all, anyone who studies the scientific literature has (especially in recent years) seen these auto-generated papers full of crap. But faked crystal structure files? That’s nasty. The record of these papers shows a sudden jump in 2020 and 2021, leading Bimler to wonder:

The dates paint a picture of accelerating publication, as if a small-scale cottage industry had been scaled up to a production line with a larger staff. One can imagine crystallographers initially ghostwriting manuscripts as a favour for friends, moonlighting from their day job, and becoming progressively more professional, though this must remain speculation.

Summary: Researchers say they have created the most bio-realistic and complex computer models of individual brain cells.

Source: Cedars Sinai.

Cedars-Sinai investigators have created the most bio-realistic and complex computer models of individual brain cells—in unparalleled quantity.