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Infant Heart Surgery Mends Brain Networks Too

Infants born with congenital heart disease (CHD) often have neurodevelopmental impairments that affect them later in life, including their ability to regulate their emotions and movements. As CHD is the most prevalent congenital disorder in the United States, researchers are eager to find new ways to treat it.

To better understand how CHD affects an infant’s developing nervous system, researchers at Children’s National Hospital used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to evaluate how healthy infants and those with CHD differed. They recently reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that babies with CHD had altered brain activity in their sensorimotor and limbic networks, but after neonatal heart surgery, these brain networks looked more like those of healthy children.

“Using fMRI, we can identify brain networks that are vulnerable to altered oxygen and blood flow from congenital heart disease, which could help guide interventions to improve care for children,” said Jung-Hoon Kim, a brain researcher at Children’s National Hospital and a coauthor of the study, in a press release.

In their study, the researchers analyzed rs-fMRI data from 448 neonates. They first analyzed publicly available data from the Developing Human Connectome Project, which contains a large amount infant brain development MRI data.3 They identified 15 different resting state networks, which represented different regions of brain activity, in the healthy neonate brains.

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Babies with congenital heart disease have altered brain activity in regions involved in movement and emotions, but heart surgery restored these brain networks to healthy connectivity.

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Scientists discover new heavy proton-like particle at CERN

Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc ⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark.

The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership from Manchester.

The newly observed Ξcc ⁺ is a heavier relative of the proton, which was famously discovered in Manchester by Ernest Rutherford and colleagues in 1917–1919. The proton contains two up quarks and a down quark. Details of the Ξcc ⁺ discovery were presented at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference.

AI model predicts chemical effects on gene expression, speeding drug discovery

Inside a diseased cell, the genes are in chaos. Some are receiving signals to overproduce a protein. Others are reducing activity to abnormal levels. Up is down and down is up. The right molecule could restore order, reversing dysregulation in specific genes. But finding the ideal compound could require examining millions of chemicals for their influence on hundreds or thousands of genes.

An MSU-led team of researchers has demonstrated a better way. Using machine learning trained on enormous amounts of published data, they were able to predict how chemicals will influence gene expression, based solely on the structure of the chemical.

Their study, recently published in the journal Cell, has discovered compounds that are promising for treatment of two difficult diseases: the most aggressive form of liver cancer and a chronic lung disease with no curative options.

Bell-bottoms today, miniskirts tomorrow: Math reveals fashion’s 20-year cycle

Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the “20-year-rule”—the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades. According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn’t just anecdotal. It’s a mathematical reality.

In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women’s clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal. Along with supporting common perceptions about the life cycles of fads, the researchers say these results could help explain how new ideas spread in society.

The study’s lead author, Emma Zajdela, will present these findings on Tuesday, March 17, at the American Physical Society (APS) Global Physics Summit in Denver. Her talk, “Back in Fashion: Modeling the Cyclical Dynamics of Trends,” is part of the session “Statistical Physics of Networks and Complex Society Systems.”

Experiment challenges hypothesis of cell-like membranes on Titan

New experimental results have cast doubt on earlier proposals suggesting that spherical, cell-like membranes could form in the methane lakes of Saturn’s largest moon. Through results published in Science Advances, Tuan Vu and Robert Hodyss at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggest that exobiologists will likely need to explore alternative routes when considering the possibility of life on Titan.

Despite frigid surface temperatures of around −180 °C during the day, Titan is widely considered to be one of the most Earth-like bodies in the solar system. With a dense atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen, its surface hosts lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane, which flow, evaporate, and fall as rain in much the same way as water does on Earth.

For decades, this striking similarity to our own water cycle has inspired exobiologists to consider whether exotic forms of life could have evolved under these conditions. In 2015, researchers at Cornell University took this idea a step further through molecular-dynamics simulations designed to recreate Titan’s environment.

Discrete time crystal acts as a usable sensor for weak magnetic oscillations

The bizarre properties of discrete time crystals could be harnessed to detect extremely subtle oscillations of magnetic fields, physicists in the US and Germany have revealed. Publishing their results in Nature Physics, a team led by Ashok Ajoy at the University of California, Berkeley, show for the first time that these exotic materials could have practical uses far beyond their current status as an impractical curiosity.

Discrete time crystals (DTCs) are an exotic phase of matter which break entirely from the rules which apply to classical materials. Whereas an ordinary crystal is made up of atomic or molecular patterns that repeat at regular intervals in space, DTCs have structures that constantly oscillate in repeating cycles when driven by an external protocol, without ever reaching thermal equilibrium.

“Since their initial experimental demonstrations in 2017, there has been enormous excitement surrounding these states,” explains co-author Paul Schindler at the Max Planck Institute of Complex Systems. “Yet a persistent question has remained unanswered: can this exotic order be harnessed for practical applications?”

Nano 3D metallic parts turn out to be surprisingly strong despite defects

Scientists at Caltech have figured out how to precisely engineer tiny three-dimensional (3D) metallic pieces with nanoscale dimensions. The process can work with any metal or metal alloy and yields components of surprising strength despite having a porous and defect-ridden microstructure, making it potentially useful in a wide range of applications, including medical devices, computer chips, and equipment needed for space missions.

The scientists describe their method in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The work was completed in the lab of Julia R. Greer, the Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering at Caltech, and Huajian Gao of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The researchers use a technique called two-photon lithography that allows them to sequentially build an object of a desired size and shape by carefully controlling the geometry at the level of individual voxels, the smallest distinguishable volumes, or features, in a 3D image. Beginning with a light-sensitive liquid, the scientists use a tightly focused femtosecond laser beam—a femtosecond is 1 quadrillionth of a second—to build a desired shape out of a gel-like material called hydrogel. After infusing the miniature hydrogel sculpture with metallic salts, such as copper nitrate or nickel nitrate, they heat the structure twice in a specialized furnace to produce a shrunken metallic replica of the original shape.

A ‘consortium’ of bacteria cooperates to eat phthalate plasticizers that single microbes can’t stomach

Plastic trash has reached the world’s most remote locations, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Hundreds of plastic-eating microbes that could help us clean up have been discovered over the past quarter of a century, but there is a long way to go before they can be put to work in natural environments: Microbial digestion of plastic is still slow, requires high temperatures, and only proceeds efficiently in bioreactors. Moreover, most plastic-eating microbes discovered so far can only digest a single kind of plastic.

One solution would be to combine different microbes to tackle plastic pollution as a team. This allows them to share tasks, compensate for each other’s weaknesses, and continue working even when environmental conditions change.

Now, scientists in Germany have discovered such a synergistic “consortium” of plastic-eating bacteria, which can eat phthalate esters (PAEs)—plasticizers that are often found in building materials, food packages, and personal care products, but have been implicated in hormonal, metabolic, and developmental disorders and some cancers. The results are published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

Scientists create a new state of matter at room temperature using light and nanostructures

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have created a new and unusual state of matter—known as a supersolid—by engineering how light and matter interact inside a nanoscale device. The work, published in Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrates that this exotic quantum phase can exist at room temperature, overcoming a long-standing limitation in the field.

Supersolids are unusual because they combine two seemingly incompatible properties: Like a solid, they form an ordered, crystal-like structure. At the same time, they behave like a fluid, meaning they can flow without resistance. Until now, such states have only been observed under extremely cold conditions, close to absolute zero.

“Our work shows that you can create and control this exotic state using light,” said Wei Bao, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at RPI and senior author of the study. “What’s especially exciting is that it happens at room temperature, in a platform that can be engineered and potentially scaled.”

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