What is happening in the cerebral cortex when someone hears a melody?
Music has been central to human cultures for tens of thousands of years, but how our brains perceive it has long been shrouded in mystery.
Continue reading “To appreciate music, the human brain listens and learns to predict” »
A new study led by Stanford Medicine scientists demonstrates a simple way of studying organ aging by analyzing distinct proteins, or sets of them, in blood, enabling the prediction of individuals’ risk for diseases.
Polireddi developed a chatbot to help detect autism spectrum disorder and evaluates the accessibility of private and government websites.
Using spent lead acid batteries, Chinese researchers have achieved two goals in one move, finding a way to recycle them and fix CO2 at the same time.
To synthesize potential drugs or natural products, you need natural substances in specific mirror-image variants and with a high degree of purity. For the first time, chemists at the University of Bonn have succeeded in producing all eight possible variants of polypropionate building blocks from a single starting material in a relatively straightforward process. Their work has now been published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Polypropionates are natural products that can help save lives. They are needed to make reserve antibiotics, compounds that are only ever used to treat infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria. In nature, chiral compounds exist in two different variants that share the same molecular formula but are mirror images of each other, like a right and a left hand. Chemists call this “chirality,” which literally means “handedness.”
“What’s interesting is that the mirror-image forms can have very different properties,” explains Professor Andreas Gansäuer from the Kekulé Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Bonn. “One well known example is undoubtedly carvone. The dextro-, or ‘right-handed,’ form of this molecule smells of caraway, while its levo-, or ‘left-handed,’ form is what gives peppermint its distinctive odor.”
Sandia National Laboratories researchers have developed a fundamentally new type of rotary electrical contact. The technology is called Twistact, and it will eliminate the need for expensive rare-earth magnets in large wind turbines.
Sandia is now ready to partner with the energy industry to develop the next generation of direct-drive wind turbines.
Sandia’s Twistact is a novel approach to transmitting electrical current between a stationary and rotating frame, or between two rotating assemblies having different speeds or rotational directions. This method is ideal for use in wind turbines.
New research posits that life originated somewhere in the cosmos — and that it traveled through space on tiny particles of cosmic dust.
This is very cool. I didn’t know that something could hold so much more water than than our Earth. I can see something having more water but trillions of times?
The water is in the form of vapor distributed around a black hole said to be 20 billion times more massive than the sun.
Scientists have proposed an intriguing theory on our universe’s rapid expansion.
For years, scientists have grappled with the enigma of the universe expanding rapidly.
Observations like the redshift of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background hint at this cosmic phenomenon, but a complete explanation remains elusive.
Continue reading “Universe expands by merging with ‘baby’ universes, theory suggests” »
