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Category: computing – Page 3

How the brain can selectively focus attention on one voice among others in a noisy environment

MIT neuroscientists have figured out how the brain is able to focus on a single voice among a cacophony of many voices, shedding light on a longstanding neuroscientific phenomenon known as the “cocktail party problem.”

This attentional focus becomes necessary when you’re in any crowded environment, such as a cocktail party, with many conversations going on at once. Somehow, your brain is able to follow the voice of the person you’re talking to, despite all the other voices that you’re hearing in the background.

Using a computational model of the auditory system, the MIT team found that amplifying the activity of the neural processing units that respond to features of a target voice, such as its pitch, allows that voice to be boosted to the forefront of attention.

Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines

* A “Bouncer” Made of Motion: New high-resolution microscopy and computational modeling (notably a study from late 2025) reveal that the NPC’s function is driven by this very flexibility. The disordered tails constantly rearrange themselves, creating a dynamic barrier that recognizes and ushers through specific molecules while blocking harmful enzymes or misfolded RNA.

* Scientific Breakthrough: By moving beyond static “snapshots” of the pore to observing it in motion at millisecond resolution, researchers have realized that disorder, not order, is the secret to the nuclear pore’s speed and precision.

In essence, the article highlights a paradigm shift in biology: the realization that one of life’s most complex and essential machines functions not like a rigid mechanical valve, but like a flexible, chaotic filter that uses “wiggle room” to maintain the integrity of the genetic code.

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

California’s OS-based age verification law challenges open-source community

How Linux and BSD Distros Are Responding to the New Age Verification Laws https://itsfoss.com/news/distros-response-age-verification-laws/

California’s new online safety bill, AB 1,043 (the Digital Age Assurance Act), adopts a declared age model for operating systems. Under the law, which is set to take effect on January 1, 2027, when a user sets up a new device, the operating system is required to ask for their age or date of birth. This declared age will be used to curate what’s available on the app store, and can be shared with developers on request to ensure age-appropriate experiences.

An article in PC Gamer points out that this “sounds incompatible with many of today’s open source software, including Linux.” The open source community is wrestling with the problem of how to comply with the laws while also not violating core privacy principles.

The piece muses on technical solutions, quoting Jef Spaleta, project leader for popular Linux distribution, The Fedora Project, who says “this might be as simple as extending how we currently map uid to usernames and group membership and having a new file in /etc/ that keeps up with age.”

Local droplet etching yields more symmetric quantum dots for integrated photonics

Light-based quantum technologies, such as quantum communication and photonic quantum computing, require reliable sources of individual photons and, ideally, pairs of entangled photons. Semiconductor quantum dots are promising candidates for this purpose. These nanostructures have electrical conductivity between that of insulators and conductors and are capable of confining electrons and holes. This property causes them to emit light at well-defined frequencies when excited by a laser.

Atom-thin material could help solve chip manufacturing problem

Making computer chips smaller is not just about better design. It also depends on a critical step in manufacturing called patterning, where nanoscale structures are carved into materials to form the circuits inside everything from smartphones to advanced sensors.

To create these patterns, engineers use a hard mask, a thin, durable material layer that protects selected regions while the exposed areas are etched away.

“As chips get smaller, the manufacturing process becomes much more demanding,” said Saptarshi Das, Penn State Ackley Professor of Engineering Science and professor of engineering science and mechanics. “The mask used to define these patterns must survive extremely harsh processing conditions. If the mask degrades, the patterns cannot be transferred reliably.”

Low-cost, high-performance plastic heat exchanger rivals traditional metal systems

A recent study in Advanced Science reports an innovative, low-cost polymer heat exchanger that could transform how industries manage heat. The device was developed by a Rice University research team led by Daniel J. Preston, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Heat exchangers are essential to modern technology. They improve and reduce waste by transferring heat between fluids, enabling safe and effective operation of everyday appliances like computers, cars and refrigerators as well as large-scale systems such as industrial plants and rockets.

Made of metal, current heat exchangers are heavy and bulky, prone to rusting and clogging and costly to buy and maintain. As heat-generating infrastructure grows—from data centers and desalination plants to compact electronics and space technologies—engineers are seeking lighter, more compact and affordable alternatives.

Twisted bilayer photonic crystals dynamically tune light’s handedness

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a chip-scale device that can dynamically control the “handedness” of light as it passes through—also known as its optical chirality—with a simple twist of two specially designed photonic crystals. The study is published in the journal Optica.

The work, led by graduate student Fan Du in the lab of Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, describes a reconfigurable twisted bilayer photonic crystal that can be tuned in real time using an integrated micro-electromechanical system (MEMS). The breakthrough opens new possibilities for advanced chiral sensing, optical communication, and quantum photonics.

“Chirality is very important in many fields of science—from pharma to chemistry, biology, and of course, physics and photonics,” Mazur said. “By integrating twisted photonic crystals with MEMS, we have a platform that is not only powerful from a physics standpoint, but also compatible with the way modern photonics are manufactured.”

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