Light pollution, or artificial light at night (ALAN), is a widespread phenomenon in areas with dense human populations. Normally, animals use natural external cues, like sunlight and temperature, to synchronize their biological rhythms with the day-night cycle. However, ALAN is known to affect the biological rhythms of animals living within its range by altering physiological, molecular and behavioral mechanisms related to sleep-wake cycles (circadian rhythms).
To build a modern-day electrical grid with the flexibility and resilience to handle ebbing and flowing energy sources like solar and wind power, West Virginia University engineers have designed and successfully tested a fuel cell that can switch between storing or making electricity and also generate hydrogen from water.
Neuroscientists want to understand how individual neurons encode information that allows us to distinguish objects, like telling a leaf apart from a rock. But they have struggled to build computational models that are simple enough to allow them to understand what individual neurons are doing.
To address this challenge, researchers in the Stringer and Pachitariu labs at Janelia set out to create a simpler model to explain what’s going on in the primary visual cortex —the first stop in the brain for visual data. Their paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.
“We are trying to build a model that can predict the visual responses of each individual neuron,” says Fengtong Du, a graduate student in the Stringer Lab who led the new research.
Behavioral scientists have been trying to uncover the patterns that humans follow when making decisions for decades. The insights gathered as part of their studies can help shape public policies and interventions aimed at prompting people to make better decisions, both for society and for their own well-being.
In many cases, humans are known to make decisions that they think will maximize the rewards they receive while minimizing their losses. Sometimes, however, people’s choices are guided by automatic processes that they are unaware of and can be adversely impacted by so-called biases, systematic tendencies to fall into specific patterns of thought or behavior.
Researchers at TUD Dresden University of Technology recently carried out a study exploring the possibility that repeating specific decisions over time could bias decision-making, even in instances in which people’s actions affect the rewards they will receive. Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that when making sequential decisions (i.e., when asked to make a series of choices back-to-back), humans often tend to repeat familiar actions, even if alternative ones would yield greater rewards.
For the first time, astronomers have obtained visual evidence that a star met its end by detonating twice. By studying the centuries-old remains of supernova SNR 0509–67.5 with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), they have found patterns that confirm its star suffered a pair of explosive blasts.
In a review just published in Nature Materials, researchers take aim at the oldest principle in electronics: Ohm’s law.
Their article, “Nonlinear transport in non-centrosymmetric systems,” brings together rapidly growing evidence that, when a material lacks inversion symmetry, the familiar linear relation between current and voltage can break down, giving rise to striking quadratic responses.
The study was led by Manuel Suárez-Rodríguez—working under the guidance of Ikerbasque Professors Fèlix Casanova and Luis E. Hueso at CIC nanoGUNE, together with Prof. Marco Gobbi at the Materials Physics Center (CFM, CSIC-UPV/EHU).
During the COVID-19 pandemic when many were stuck at home, people adopted more pets than average, but then struggled to find adequate veterinary care. Kayla Pasteur of Purdue University, U.S., and colleagues reported these findings and other pandemic pet trends, which were published in a study in the open-access journal PLOS One.
In the U.S., about 58 million U.S. households keep one or more dogs and 40 million keep at least one cat. These animals often provide a source of enjoyment, stress relief and social support in the home, so it’s no surprise that during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in pet purchases and adoptions.
In the new study, researchers investigated trends in pet ownership during the pandemic to understand which groups were acquiring pets and how the pandemic impacted their ability to access veterinary care. The team analyzed answers to an online survey of 751 U.S. residents – of which 79% were pet owners – conducted in late 2021.
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.
This is the first-ever evidence of a “planet with a death wish.” Though it was theorized to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.
The work is published in the journal Nature.
The motion of snakes has long fascinated humans: they undulate, they sidewind, they crawl, they even fly.
Together with herpetologists, researchers in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have discovered and quantified a new type of locomotion in juvenile anacondas.
As adults, these large snakes are better known for their slow, lumbering gait, but the researchers discovered that young anacondas are much more spry—capable of a quick, one-off, skating movement the researchers dubbed the “S-start” due to the shape the snake makes with its body.
Imagine a liquid that flows freely one moment, then stiffens into a near-solid the next, and then can switch back with a simple change in temperature. Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and NYU Tandon have now developed such a material, using tiny particles that can change their shape and stiffness on demand.
Their research paper, “Tunable shear thickening, aging, and rejuvenation in suspensions of shape-memory endowed liquid crystalline particles,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates a new way to regulate how dense suspensions—mixtures of solid particles in a fluid—behave under stress.
These new particles are made from liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), a material that combines the structure of liquid crystals with the flexibility of rubber. When heated or cooled, the particles change shape: they soften and become round at higher temperatures, and stiffen into irregular, angular forms at lower ones. This change has a dramatic effect on how the suspension flows.