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Blog – Page 181

Focaccia, with its flaky crust and rich olive oil flavor, is a beloved staple—but just how far back does the delicious bread’s history stretch?

While experts know it was made in ancient Rome, new research suggests that its origins may be even older: According to a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports, Neolithic communities were making their own focaccia-like bread between 7,000 and 5,000 B.C.E.

“Studying past dietary behaviors can provide valuable information about the social and cultural aspects of ancient populations,” first author Sergio Taranto, an archaeologist at UAB Barcelona, tells ZME Science’s Rupendra Brahambhatt. “This is particularly useful for studying prehistoric communities about which we have limited knowledge due to the lack of written records.”

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Universal transformer memory optimizes prompts using neural attention memory models (NAMMs), simple neural networks that decide whether to “remember” or “forget” each given token stored in the LLM’s memory.

“This new capability allows Transformers to discard unhelpful or redundant details, and focus on the most critical information, something we find to be crucial for tasks requiring long-context reasoning,” the researchers write.

NAMMs are trained separately from the LLM and are combined with the pre-trained model at inference time, which makes them flexible and easy to deploy. However, they need access to the inner activations of the model, which means they can only be applied to open-source models.

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Imagine your lungs, those essential organs responsible for getting oxygen into your blood, suddenly tasked with a new job: making blood itself. It sounds almost unbelievable, right? For centuries, we’ve been taught that bone marrow is the powerhouse of blood production. Yet, a groundbreaking discovery has just turned that conventional wisdom upside down.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have found that our lungs do far more than help us breathe—they’re also busy creating millions of platelets every hour, playing an unexpected and crucial role in our blood supply. This discovery not only challenges what we thought we knew about the body but also opens the door to new possibilities in understanding blood production and its implications for human health.

Continue reading “Scientists Found an Unexpected Lung Function — Our Lungs Make Blood” | >

Benonisdottir et al. review the genetics of reproductive traits and examine how these associate with links to health, behavior, aging and longevity as well as outcomes for offspring.

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In a recent study, more than 90% of participants whose stomachs had been surgically removed to prevent cancer experienced a least one chronic complication 2 years out from their surgery. For some, the complications are life-altering.

Findings from a recent study will help clinicians counsel people who are considering preventive gastrectomy about the long-term impacts of the surgery.

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Students learning quantum mechanics are taught the Schrodinger equation and how to solve it to obtain a wave function. But a crucial step is skipped because it has puzzled scientists since the earliest days—how does the real, classical world emerge from, often, a large number of solutions for the wave functions?

Each of these wave functions has its individual shape and associated , but how does the “collapse” into what we see as the classical world—atoms, cats and the pool noodles floating in the tepid swimming pool of a seedy hotel in Las Vegas hosting a convention of hungover businessmen trying to sell the world a better mousetrap?

At a high level, this is handled by the “Born rule”—the postulate that the probability density for finding an object at a particular location is proportional to the square of the wave function at that position.

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Exploiting an ingenious combination of photochemical (i.e., light-induced) reactions and self-assembly processes, a team led by Prof. Alberto Credi of the University of Bologna has succeeded in inserting a filiform molecule into the cavity of a ring-shaped molecule, according to a high-energy geometry that is not possible at thermodynamic equilibrium. In other words, light makes it possible to create a molecular “fit” that would otherwise be inaccessible.

“We have shown that by administering to an , a molecular self-assembly reaction can be prevented from reaching a thermodynamic minimum, resulting in a product distribution that does not correspond to that observed at equilibrium,” says Alberto Credi.

“Such a behavior, which is at the root of many functions in living organisms, is poorly explored in artificial because it is very difficult to plan and observe. The simplicity and versatility of our approach, together with the fact that visible light—i.e., sunlight—is a clean and sustainable energy source, allow us to foresee developments in various areas of technology and medicine.”

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Combining metallic glass with the Berreman mode of epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) thin films achieves a dual-function system for infrared camouflage and thermal management within an identical wavelength region of the atmospheric window. In recent research, metallic glasses were selected for their tunable optical properties, providing adjustable emissivity for versatile thermal camouflage while maintaining effective thermal management.

Thermal infrared camouflage aims to reduce the detectability of a target using thermal imaging devices. Given the typically high thermal emissivity in everyday environments, the thermal emissivity of the background environment must be considered. The conventional low-emissivity strategy for thermal camouflage is only effective for targets at extremely high temperatures, making it unsuitable for applications near room-to-medium-high temperature range (350 °C).

In a study published in Materials Horizons, Professor Hsuen-Li Chen from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at National Taiwan University led his research team in designing an innovative multilayer thin-film structure. This structure introduces metallic glass into infrared thermal camouflage technology, exploiting its adjustable emissivity to accommodate diverse infrared thermal camouflage scenarios.

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