Scientists have discovered that senescent sensory neurons accumulate with age and nerve injury, releasing inflammatory molecules that heighten pain sensitivity. The findings suggest that targeting these dysfunctional cells could reduce chronic pain, particularly in older adults.
When two-dimensional electron systems are subjected to magnetic fields at low temperatures, they can exhibit interesting states of matter, such as fractional quantum Hall liquids. These are exotic states of matter characterized by fractionalized excitations and the emergence of interesting topological phenomena.
Researchers at Cavendish Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set out to better understand these fascinating states using machine learning, specifically employing a newly developed attention-based fermionic neural network (FNN).
The method they developed, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, was trained to find the lowest-energy quantum state (i.e., ground state) of fractional quantum Hall liquids.
Amjad Masad said startups are already using products like Replit instead of hiring a chief technology officer.
An international team of researchers has found a genetic link to long-term symptoms after COVID-19. The identified gene variant is located close to the FOXP4 gene, which is known to affect lung function. The study, published in Nature Genetics, was led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Finland.
Biological causes behind persistent symptoms after COVID-19 infection, known as long COVID or post-COVID, remain unclear. Common symptoms include fatigue, cognitive difficulties, and breathing problems, which can reduce quality of life.
In an international collaboration —the Long COVID Host Genetics Initiative—researchers have analyzed genetic data from 6,450 long COVID patients and more than a million controls across 24 studies from 16 countries.
A study led by a physician-scientist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine–Tucson’s Sarver Heart Center identified a drug candidate that appears to reverse the progression of a type of heart failure in mouse models, which could lead to expanded treatment options for humans. The results are published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Heart failure occurs when the heart doesn’t pump blood properly. In about half of cases, the muscle is weak and has difficulty pumping. The rest result from a stiff muscle, a type called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF.
The research team found that a key ingredient in triggering heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is an enzyme that escapes into an area of the cell where it’s not normally found. Once there, it reacts with another enzyme to convert glucose, a type of sugar, into harmful byproducts that set off a chain reaction, ultimately reducing the heart’s elasticity.
A new laser-based cooling scheme approaches the maximum efficiency that is theoretically achievable.
Much of the progress in 20th-century physics has centered around understanding the interaction between light and matter. The availability of well-controlled light sources—lasers—enabled experimental exploration of controlled light–matter interactions and, specifically, methods to cool atoms close to absolute zero temperatures [1, 2]. Several laser-cooling methods, such as Doppler cooling and resolved sideband cooling, are used routinely to prepare controlled quantum states of atoms. Brennen de Neeve of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and his colleagues now show just how efficient a laser-cooling process can be [3] (Fig. 1). They demonstrate a laser-cooling method that uses a “spin-dependent force” to transfer motional entropy from the atom into the entropy of its internal degrees of freedom.
A precision measurement of cosmic rays at the International Space Station finds that lithium-7 is produced by the fragmentation of heavier nuclei.
A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy.
The research, published in Science Advances, describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.
The interdisciplinary team includes Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE); Amish Patel, Professor in CBE; Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author; and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich.
The indoor environment contains multiple sources of chemical compounds. These include continuous emissions from housing materials such as furniture, floors and furnishings, but also periodic intense emissions from human activities such as cooking, smoking, and cleaning.
Outdoor air chemicals can also enter indoor environments through infiltration and ventilation. Ozone (O3) from outdoors can react with compounds indoors to create a complex chemical cocktail within the indoor living space. Since people spend up to 90% of their time indoors, exposure to this diverse array of chemical compounds over extended periods is cause for concern, particularly as the human-health impacts of many such chemicals remain poorly understood.
On the basis of their findings in 2022, Jonathan Williams’s research group from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry took a closer look at how the human oxidation field might be influenced by personal care products. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
Rutgers University–New Brunswick researchers have discovered a new class of materials—called intercrystals—with unique electronic properties that could power future technologies.
Intercrystals exhibit newly discovered forms of electronic properties that could pave the way for advancements in more efficient electronic components, quantum computing and environmentally friendly materials, the scientists said.
As described in a report in the science journal Nature Materials, the scientists stacked two ultrathin layers of graphene, each a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal grid. They twisted them slightly atop a layer of hexagonal boron nitride, a hexagonal crystal made of boron and nitrogen. A subtle misalignment between the layers that formed moiré patterns—patterns similar to those seen when two fine mesh screens are overlaid—significantly altered how electrons moved through the material, they found.