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Brainwave study sheds light on cause of ‘hearing voices’

A new study led by psychologists from UNSW Sydney has provided the strongest evidence yet that auditory verbal hallucinations—or hearing voices—in schizophrenia may stem from a disruption in the brain’s ability to recognize its own inner voice.

In a paper published today in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, the researchers say the finding could also be an important step toward finding biological indicators that point to the presence of . This is significant, as there are currently no blood tests, , or lab-based biomarkers—signs in the body that can tell us something about our health—that are uniquely characteristic of schizophrenia.

Professor Thomas Whitford, with the UNSW School of Psychology, has been examining the role of inner speech in the cognition of healthy people and people living with schizophrenia spectrum disorders for some time.

How happy do we need to be to have lower chronic disease mortality risk?

Heart disease, cancer, asthma, and diabetes: All are chronic or non-communicable diseases (NCD), which accounted for about 75% of non-pandemic related deaths in 2021. They may result from genetic, environmental, and behavioral factors, or a combination thereof. But can other factors also influence disease risk?

Now, a new Frontiers in Medicine study has investigated the relationship between and health to find out if happier always means healthier and to determine if happiness and co-occurring health benefits are linear or follow a specific pattern.

“We show that subjective well-being, or happiness, appears to function as a population health asset only once a minimum threshold of approximately 2.7 on the Life Ladder scale is surpassed,” said first author Prof Iulia Iuga, a researcher at 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia. “Above this tipping point, increased happiness is associated with a decrease in NCD mortality.”

Chemical networks can mimic nervous systems to power movement in soft materials

What if a soft material could move on its own, guided not by electronics or motors, but by the kind of rudimentary chemical signaling that powers the simplest organisms? Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering have modeled just that—a synthetic system that on its own directly transforms chemical reactions into mechanical motion, without the need for the complex biochemical machinery present in our bodies.

Just like jellyfish, some of the simplest organisms do not have a centralized brain or . Instead, they have a “nerve net” which consists of dispersed nerve cells that are interconnected by active junctions, which emit and receive . Even without a central “processor,” the chemical signals spontaneously travel through the net and trigger the autonomous motion needed for organisms’ survival.

In a study published in PNAS Nexus, Oleg E. Shklyaev, research assistant, and Anna C. Balazs, Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and the John A. Swanson Chair of Engineering, have developed computer simulations to design a with a “nerve net” that links chemical and mechanical networks in a way that mimics how the earliest and simplest living systems coordinate motion.

What goes up must come down: The ‘universal thermal performance curve’ that shackles evolution

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have unearthed a universal thermal performance curve (UTPC) that seemingly applies to all species and dictates their responses to temperature change. This UTPC essentially shackles evolution as no species seem to have broken free from the constraints it imposes on how temperature affects performance.

All living things are affected by temperature, but the newly discovered UTPC unifies tens of thousands of seemingly different curves that explain how well species work at different temperatures. And not only does the UTPC seem to apply to all species, but also to all measures of their performance with regard to temperature variation—whether measuring lizards running on a treadmill, sharks swimming in the ocean, or recording cell division rates in bacteria.

Crucially, the new UTPC shows that as all organisms warm, performance slowly increases until they reach an optimum (where performance is greatest), but then, with further warming, performance quickly declines.

Optical system achieves terabit-per-second capacity and integrates quantum cryptography for long-term security

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has created unprecedented demand for data traffic. But the infrastructure needed to support it faces mounting challenges. AI data centers must deliver faster, more reliable communication than ever before, while also confronting their soaring electricity use and a looming quantum security threat, which could one day break today’s encryption methods.

To address these challenges, a recent study published in Advanced Photonics proposes a quantum-secured architecture that involves minimal digital signal processing (DSP) consumption and meets all the stringent requirements for AI-driven data center optical interconnect (AI–DCI) scenarios. This system enables data to move at terabit-per-second speeds with while defending against future quantum threats.

“Our work paves the way for the next generation of secure, scalable, and cost-efficient optical interconnects, protecting AI-driven data centers against quantum security threats while meeting the high demands of modern data-driven applications,” the researchers state in their paper.

A mathematical ‘Rosetta Stone’ translates and predicts the larger effects of molecular systems

Penn Engineers have developed a mathematical “Rosetta Stone” that translates atomic and molecular movements into predictions of larger-scale effects, like proteins unfolding, crystals forming and ice melting, without the need for costly, time-consuming simulations or experiments. That could make it easier to design smarter medicines, semiconductors and more.

In a recent paper in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, the Penn researchers used their framework, stochastic thermodynamics with internal variables (STIV), to solve a 40-year problem in phase-field modeling, a widely used tool for studying the shifting frontier between two states of matter, like the boundary between water and ice or where the folded and unfolded parts of a protein join.

“Phase-field modeling is about predicting what happens at the thin frontier between phases of matter, whether it’s proteins folding, crystals forming or ice melting,” says Prashant Purohit, Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) and one of the paper’s co-authors. “STIV gives us the mathematical machinery to describe how that frontier evolves directly from first principles, without needing to fit data from experiments.”

How a human ‘jumping gene’ targets structured DNA to reshape the genome

Long interspersed nuclear element-1 (LINE-1 or L1) is the only active, self-copying genetic element in the human genome—comprising about 17% of the genome. It is commonly called a “jumping gene” or “retrotransposon” because it can “retrotranspose” (move) from one genomic location to another.

Researchers from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have now unveiled the molecular mechanisms that underlie L1’s retrotransposition and integration into genomic DNA. Their study was published in Science on October 9.

L1 is the only autonomously active retrotransposon in the and serves as the primary vehicle for the mobilization of most other retrotransposons. Its retrotransposition process is mediated by the reverse transcriptase ORF2p through a mechanism known as target-primed reverse transcription (TPRT). Until now, the manner in which ORF2p recognizes DNA targets and mediates integration had remained unclear.

Vortices in ultralight dark matter halos could reveal new clues to cosmic structure

The nature of dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in cosmology. Within the standard framework of non-collisional cold dark matter (CDM), various models are considered: WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, with masses of around 100 GeV/c2), primordial black holes, and ultralight axion-like particles (mass of 10-22 to 1 eV/c2). In the latter case, dark matter behaves like a wave, described by a Schrödinger equation, rather than as a collection of point particles. This generates specific behaviors at small scales, while following standard dynamics (CDM) at large scales.

Philippe Brax and Patrick Valageas, researchers at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, studied models of ultralight cold dark matter with repulsive self-interactions, whose dynamics are described by a non-linear variant of the Schrödinger equation, known as the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, also encountered in the physics of superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates. In their work, the authors follow the formation and dynamics of particular structures, called “vortices” (whirlpools) and “solitons” (cores in hydrostatic equilibrium), within halos of rotating ultralight dark matter.

The papers are published in the journal Physical Review D.

Tiny droplets that bounce for minutes without bursting might be able to do so indefinitely

EPFL researchers have discovered that a droplet of liquid can bounce for several minutes—and perhaps indefinitely—over a vibrating solid surface. The seemingly simple observation has big implications for physics and chemistry.

If you’ve ever added liquid to a hot frying pan, maybe you noticed how the bubbled up and skittered across the sizzling surface, rather than immediately flattening and wetting. This happens because the pan’s heat starts boiling the undersides of the droplets, producing vapor that acts as an insulating cushion on which they can—momentarily—dance.

Previously, scientists have produced a version of this phenomenon—known as the Leidenfrost effect—by replacing the hot surface with a rapidly vibrating liquid bath. In these experiments, the vibrations produced a thin film of air on which the liquid droplets could bounce and hover perpetually.

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