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
Scientists at Université Laval and the University of Lethbridge have succeeded in reversing certain cognitive manifestations associated with Alzheimer’s disease in an animal model of the disease. Their results have been published in the scientific journal Brain.
Although this has yet to be demonstrated in humans, we believe that the mechanism we have uncovered constitutes a very interesting therapeutic target, because it not only slows down the progression of the disease but also partially restores certain cognitive functions.
Many of the bacteria that ravage crops and threaten our food supply employ a shared tactic to induce disease: they inject a cocktail of harmful proteins directly into the plant’s cells.
For 25 years, biologist Sheng-Yang He and his senior research associate Kinya Nomura have been investigating this set of molecules that plant pathogens use to cause diseases in hundreds of crops globally, from rice to apple orchards.
Now, thanks to a team effort between three collaborating research groups, they may finally have an answer to how these molecules make plants sick — and a way to disarm them.
A study published in the journal PLOS Biology looked at the underlying pathways involved in breast cancer recurrence.
Researchers reported that a common chemotherapy treatment encouraged connective tissue cells to produce cytokines that helped reawaken dormant cancer cells.
The researchers say the results offer possible direction on adding other therapies to chemotherapy treatment to reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence.
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