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Blog – Page 11

A team of researchers at UCL and UCLH have identified the key brain regions that are essential for logical thinking and problem solving.

The findings, published in Brain, help to increase our understanding of how the human brain supports our ability to comprehend, draw conclusions, and deal with new and novel problems—otherwise known as reasoning skills.

To determine which are necessary for a certain ability, researchers study patients with brain lesions (an area of damage in the brain) caused by stroke or . This approach, known as “lesion-deficit mapping,” is the most powerful method for localizing function in the human brain.

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Penn Engineers have developed the first programmable chip that can train nonlinear neural networks using light—a breakthrough that could dramatically speed up AI training, reduce energy use and even pave the way for fully light-powered computers.

While today’s AI chips are electronic and rely on electricity to perform calculations, the new chip is photonic, meaning it uses beams of light instead. Described in Nature Photonics, the chip reshapes how light behaves to carry out the nonlinear mathematics at the heart of modern AI.

“Nonlinear functions are critical for training ,” says Liang Feng, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), and the paper’s senior author. “Our aim was to make this happen in photonics for the first time.”

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The development and spread of antibiotic resistance represents one of the greatest threats to global health. To overcome these resistances, drugs with novel modes of action are urgently needed.

Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) have now uncovered the mode of action of a promising class of natural products—the chlorotonils. These molecules simultaneously target the bacterial cell membrane and the bacteria’s ability to produce proteins, enabling them to break through resistance. The team published its findings in Cell Chemical Biology.

The more frequently antibiotics are used, the faster pathogens evolve mechanisms to evade their effects. This leads to against which common antibiotics are no longer effective. To ensure that effective treatments for bacterial infections remain available in the future, antibiotics that target different bacterial structures than currently approved drugs are essential.

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The room is crowded and noisy. There are conversations all around, and the residual smell of popcorn and beer hangs in the air. Yet two women meeting for the first time can judge within minutes whether they have the potential to be friends—guided as much by smell as any other sense, according to new Cornell psychology research.

“People take a lot in when they’re meeting face to face. But , which people are registering at some level, though probably not consciously, forecasts whether you end up liking this person,” said Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “It’s amazing, our attunement to other people, even without being consciously aware of how in tune we are.”

In a study of heterosexual women, Zayas and first author Jessica Gaby, Ph.D., found that personal, idiosyncratic preferences based on a person’s everyday scent, captured on a T-shirt, predicted how much women liked their interaction partner following four-minute chats across a table in a crowded room. These face-to-face conversations, in turn, influenced how participants later judged the T-shirt scent alone.

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The first metal 3D-printed part ever manufactured in orbit has returned to Earth.

Produced using ESA’s Metal 3D Printer aboard the International Space Station.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a habitable artificial satellite that orbits Earth, serving as a space environment research laboratory where scientific research is conducted across multiple fields, including astrobiology, astronomy, and meteorology. Launched in 1998, the ISS is a joint project involving space agencies from the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe, and Canada. It functions both as a testament to international cooperation in space exploration and as a platform for extensive scientific experiments conducted in the unique conditions of space.

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Earth rotates, the Sun rotates, the Milky Way rotates – and a new model suggests the entire Universe could be rotating. If confirmed, it could ease a significant tension in cosmology.

The Universe is expanding, but exactly how fast is a contentious question. Two different methods of measurement return two very different speeds – and as the measurements become more precise, each becomes more certain. This discrepancy is known as the Hubble tension, and it’s reaching crisis levels in physics.

So for a new study, physicists in Hungary and the US added a small rotation to a model of the Universe – and this mathematical massage seemed to quickly ease the tension.

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