Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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When we listen to a song or musical performance, out-of-tune singers or instruments are generally perceived as unpleasant for listeners. While it is well-established that mistuning can reduce the enjoyment of music, the processes influencing how humans perceive mistuning have not yet been fully delineated.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding factors influencing the extent to which individuals can perceive mistuning in natural music. Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, highlight acoustic elements that influence the perception of dissonance when hearing out-of-tune singing voices or instruments.

“An out-of-tune singer or instrument can ruin the enjoyment of music,” Sara M. K. Madsen and Andrew J. Oxenham wrote in their paper. “However, there is disagreement on how we perceive mistuning in natural music settings. To address this question, we presented listeners with in-tune and out-of-tune passages of two-part music and manipulated the two primary candidate acoustic cues: beats (fluctuations caused by interactions between nearby frequency components) and inharmonicity (non-integer harmonic frequency relationships) across seven experiments.”

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Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are neuromorphic transistors made of carbon-based materials that combine both electronic and ionic charge carriers. These transistors could be particularly effective solutions for amplifying and switching electronic signals in devices designed to be placed on the human skin, such as smart watches, trackers that monitor physiological signals and other wearable technologies.

In contrast with conventional neuromorphic transistors, OECTs could operate reliably in wet or humid environments, which would be highly advantageous for both medical and wearable devices. Despite their potential, most existing OECTs are based on stiff materials, which can reduce the comfort of wearables and thus hinder their large-scale deployment.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have developed a new wearable device based on stretchable OECTs that can both perform computations and collect signals from the surrounding environment. Their proposed system, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could be used to realize in-sensor edge computing on a flexible wearable device that is comfortable for users.

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The Tewksbury earthquake’s minimal local damage but widespread impact was due to its rupture direction, funneling shaking from New Jersey towards New York City, with the anomaly highlighted in studies on seismic energy distribution.

A magnitude 4.8 earthquake in Tewksbury startled millions across the U.S. East Coast, marking the strongest recorded tremor in New Jersey since 1900.

But researchers noted something else unusual about the earthquake: why did so many people 40 miles away in New York City report strong shaking, while damage near the earthquake’s epicenter appeared minimal?

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A recent study from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, investigating meditation as a treatment for chronic lower back pain, has revealed that men and women use different biological mechanisms for pain relief. Men primarily rely on the release of endogenous opioids, the body’s natural painkillers, whereas women depend on alternative, non-opioid pathways to manage pain.

Synthetic opioid drugs, such as morphine and fentanyl, are the most powerful class of painkilling drugs available. Women are known to respond poorly to opioid therapies, which use synthetic opioid molecules to bind to the same receptors as naturally occurring endogenous opioids. This aspect of opioid drugs helps explain why they are so powerful as painkillers, but also why they carry a significant risk of dependence and addiction.

“Dependence develops because people start taking more opioids when their original dosage stops working,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., professor of anesthesiology and Endowed Professor in Empathy and Compassion Research at UC San Diego Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. “Although speculative, our findings suggest that maybe one reason that females are more likely to become addicted to opioids is that they’re biologically less responsive to them and need to take more to experience any pain relief.”

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Just as we mimicked birds and fish to model cars and planes, we may gain inspiration for deep dive vehicles.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is greater than the weight of an elephant on every square inch of your body. Yet Earth’s deepest places are home to life uniquely suited to these challenging conditions. Scientists have studied how the bodies of some large animals, such as anglerfish and blobfish, have adapted to withstand the pressure. But far less is known about how cells and molecules stand up to the squeezing, crushing weight of thousands of feet of seawater.

“The animals that live down in the deep sea are not ones that live in surface waters,” said Itay Budin, who studies the biochemistry of cell membranes at the University of California, San Diego. “They’re clearly biologically specialized. But we know very little, at the molecular level, about what is actually determining that specialization.”

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Anikeeva added, “Yes, it is a record-breaking particle, but it’s not as record-breaking as it could be.”

Although that is still a work in progress, the team has ideas about how to move forward.

Large-scale safety studies are one of the additional steps that would be necessary to move these nanodiscs from basic research using animal models to clinical use in humans, “which is something academic researchers are not necessarily most well-positioned to do,” according to Anikeeva.

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