Elon Musk’s neurotech startup announced that it is now seeking patients with paralysis to test a brain-computer interface.
New research indicates that butterflies and moths share “blocks” of DNA
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).
In a paper published today (Sept. 18) in Nature Communications, researchers from the Paul-Drude-Institut in Berlin, Germany, and the Instituto Balseiro in Bariloche, Argentina, demonstrated that the mixing of confined quantum fluids of light and GHz sound leads to the emergence of an elusive phonoriton quasi-particle—in part a quantum of light (photon), a quantum of sound (phonon) and a semiconductor exciton. This discovery opens a novel way to coherently convert information between optical and microwave domains, bringing potential benefits to the fields of photonics, optomechanics and optical communication technologies.
The research team’s work draws inspiration from an everyday phenomenon: the transfer of energy between two coupled oscillators, such as, for instance, two pendulums connected by a spring. Under specific coupling conditions, known as the strong-coupling (SC) regime, energy continuously oscillates between the two pendulums, which are no longer independent, as their frequencies and decay rates are not those of the uncoupled ones. The oscillators can also be photonic or electronic quantum states: the SC regime, in this case, is fundamental for quantum state control and swapping.
In the above example, the two pendulums are assumed to have the same frequency, i.e., in resonance. However, hybrid quantum systems require coherent information transfer between oscillators with largely dissimilar frequencies. Here, one important example is in networks of quantum computers. While the most promising quantum computers operate with microwave qubits (i.e., at few GHz), quantum information is efficiently transferred using near infrared photons (100ds THz).
Astronomers have, for the first time, detected radio waves from a Type Ia supernova, uncovering new clues about white dwarf.
A white dwarf star is the remnant of star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel, but it lacks the mass to become a neutron star. A typical white dwarf is only slightly bigger than Earth, yet it is 200,000 times as dense.
Numerous natural language processing (NLP) applications have benefited greatly from using large language models (LLMs). While LLMs have improved in performance and gained additional capabilities due to being scaled, they still have a problem with “hallucinating” or producing information inconsistent with the real-world facts detected during pre-training. This represents a significant barrier to adoption for high-stakes applications (such as those found in clinical and legal settings), where the generation of trustworthy text is essential.
The maximum likelihood language modeling target, which seeks to minimize the forward KL divergence between the data and model distributions, may be to blame for LMs’ hallucinations. However, this is far from certain. The LM may assign a non-zero probability to phrases that are not fully consistent with the knowledge encoded in the training data if this goal is pursued.
From the perspective of the interpretability of the model, studies have shown that the earlier layers of transformer LMs encode “lower level” information (such as part-of-speech tags). In contrast, the later levels encode more “semantic” information.
A study showing how electrons flow around sharp bends, such as those found in integrated circuits, has the potential to improve how these circuits, commonly used in electronic and optoelectronic devices, are designed.
It has been known theoretically for about 80 years that when electrons travel around bends, they tend to heat up because their flow lines get squished locally. Until now, however, no one had measured the heat, for which imaging the flow lines is first needed.
The research team, led by Nathaniel M. Gabor at the University of California, Riverside, imaged streamlines of electric current by designing an “electrofoil,” a new type of device that allows for the contortion, compression, and expansion of streamlines of electric currents in the same way airplane wings contort, compress, and expand the flow of air.
The properties of nanoribbon edges are important for their applications in electronic devices, sensors, and catalysts. A group of scientists from Japan and China studied the mechanical response of single-layer molybdenum disulfide nanoribbons with armchair edges using in situ transmission electron microscopy.
They showed that the nanoribbon Young’s modulus varied inversely with its width below the width of 3nm, indicating a higher bond stiffness for the armchair edges. Their work, published in the journal Advanced Science, was co-authored by Associate Professor Kenta Hongo and Professor Ryo Maezono from JAIST and Lecturer Chunmeng Liu and Lecturer Jiaqi Zhang from Zhengzhou University, China.
Sensors have become ubiquitous in the modern world, with applications ranging from detecting explosives, measuring physiological spikes of glucose or cortisol non-invasively to estimating greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
Life on a faraway planet—if it’s out there—might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe’s pantry, and only so many ways to mix them. A team led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has exploited those limitations to write a cookbook of hundreds of chemical recipes with the potential to give rise to life.
Their ingredient list could focus the search for life elsewhere in the universe by pointing out the most likely conditions—planetary versions of mixing techniques, oven temperatures and baking times—for the recipes to come together.
The process of progressing from basic chemical ingredients to the complex cycles of cell metabolism and reproduction that define life, the researchers say, requires not only a simple beginning but also repetition.
Integrated information theory is seen by some people as a leading theory of consciousness, but now over 100 neuroscientists have signed an open letter calling it untestable pseudoscience.
By Clare Wilson
