In green are VTA neurons receiving inputs from the lateral habenula, in red are VTA neurons projecting back to the lateral habenula, and in blue are dopaminergic (TH+) VTA neurons. Approximately 25% of VTA neurons exhibit both presynaptic and postsynaptic connectivity with the lateral habenula. Lateral habenula neurons projecting to the VTA encode unpleasant signals that are necessary for learning to avoid or respond to threats.
đ Use the link in our bio to see the article by Marina R. Ihidoype et al. in the July 8, 2026, issue of #JNeurosci for more information. ă € đž Cover image: Marina Ihidoype.
This week weâre talking about photonics. My guests are Tim McKenna and Ryo Yanagimoto from the Physics and Informatics Laboratories at NTT.
Tim and I chat about balancing theoretical physics with real-world applications at NTT, his most exciting photonics projects, and the primary obstacles to replacing traditional electronics with photonics technologies.
Ryo and I dig into the game-changing potential of NTTâs programmable photonics chips. We discuss how their unique reconfigurability is shaking up traditional hardware manufacturing, facilitating a move from power-hungry electrical processing toward light-driven computation, even allowing chips to self-correct for environmental shifts.
âWe canât win against technology. We are technology.â
Daniel H. Wilson said that to me in 2012. Robotics PhD out of Carnegie Mellon, New York Times bestselling novelist, the guy Spielberg optioned for Robopocalypse. Back then, the line landed like a sharp bit of science fiction.
Fourteen years later, it reads less like a provocation and more like a diagnosis.
His novel Amped was about what happens when technology stops being a tool you hold and becomes part of the body you are. In 2012, that was speculative. Now there are chips being implanted in human skulls, and companies are racing to sell you cognitive upgrades. The âsuperhumanâ future Daniel described is being built now, while most people are still debating whether it will show up at all.
What stuck with me most was that he refused the tidy doom story. He didnât buy that a superhuman AI would spend its existence trying to exterminate us. Thatâs a human fear projected onto something that owes us nothing. The harder question, the one worth sitting with, is what we become when the enhancement is not a gadget in our hand but us.
Pulled from the archive and worth another look. One of 300+ conversations on #SingularityFM about where #AI and human #enhancement actually lead, not where the marketing promises they will.
Geoscientists at the University of Glasgow have helped reveal new evidence about the formation of one of the highest mountainous areas on Earthâthe Tibetan Plateau. A study by an international team of Chinese and U.K. geoscientists shows that the unique topography at the summit of the plateau is shaped by processes going on deep in Earth.
These features clearly indicate how far the Indian continental plate, to the south, has been pushed beneath the Asian plate, to the north, highlighting the connection between Earthâs interior and its surface features.
Using geochronological analyses pioneered at the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center, the study team determined that the western and central parts of the Tibetan Plateau have distinct geological histories, reflected in their topography.
The epigenetic modifier MLL4 has an unassuming nameâthe 4, for instance, indicates itâs just one in a family of such modifiers. But MLL4 is quite special: In a specific type of leukemia, it drives disease progression, while in solid tumors, it acts as a suppressor.
The paradoxical nature of MLL4 made it a compelling enigma for Rockefeller Universityâs Robert Roeder, a pioneer in the field of genetic transcription. Now his Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Rockefeller University has used a combination of biochemistry, genetics and structural biology to find surprising new characteristics of MLL4 that expand our understanding of its range of functions, including its relationship to a tumor-suppressing protein. The findings, published in Molecular Cell, could illuminate how the MLL4 complex helps switch genes onâincluding cancer genes in leukemia.
âThis research demonstrates that MLL4 has functions in transcription that were entirely unknown before,â says Roeder. âAnd because MLL4 is a key regulator of gene activity, itâs important to understand how it worksâespecially in cancer cells.â
Decades-old experiments have now been enlisted to set new bounds on the properties of a hypothetical particle that bears a tiny fraction of the electronâs charge.
One candidate for the mysterious dark matter believed to pervade the Universe is a hypothetical form of matter called millicharged particles (mCPs), which carry a tiny fraction of the charge on an electron. A research team has now proposed that such particles, if they exist, might be detected by letting them accumulate in simple laboratory-scale devices already used for creating and measuring electric charge [1, 2]. The team has shown that previous measurements made with such devices can be used to set new limits on the properties of mCPs.
The standard model of particle physics accommodates the 17 particles that make up regular, visible matter, but researchers are seeking to extend it to include gravity or dark matter or both. Dark matter seems to be demanded by astronomical observations andâaside from its gravitational interactionsâshould interact minimally, if at all, with light and with other matter.
An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The newfound alien world, designated NGTS-39 b, is a Jupiter-sized planet with an equilibrium temperature of about 519 K. The discovery was detailed in a paper published July 2 on the preprint server arXiv.
NGTS-39 (also known as TIC-453147896) is a relatively bright star of spectral type F9 located some 910 light-years from Earth. The star was observed multiple times between 2019 and 2024 with NASAâs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which detected a transit signal in its light curve.
Now, a group of astronomers led by Ioannis Apergis of the University of Warwick, UK, have used NGTSâ 12 robotic Newtonian telescopes to perform follow-up photometric observations of NGTS-39. This, together with radial velocity measurements from CORALIE and HARPS spectrographs, allowed the team to confirm the planetary nature of the TESS-detected signal.
As we move closer to Election Day 2026, voting preferences are moving back into focusâand with them, analyses of what drives partisanship at the polls. However, less frequently asked is when Americans show evidence of partisan behavior: shortly or well after reaching the legal voting age? As teenagers? In elementary school?
A team of psychology researchers has found evidence of partisan behavior in children ages 5 to 9âthey frequently endorsed their own groupâs claims even when evidence suggested otherwise, indicating group affiliation influenced their responses. However, the scientists also uncovered a potential remedy to such responses: When incentivized to tell the truth about what they had seen or when they could provide answers under the veil of privacy, the children were much less likely to adopt their own groupâs claims. The paper is published in the journal Cognition.
âEven young children will side with their group over the evidence of their own eyes, but mainly when theyâre responding publicly and when being accurate doesnât count for much,â explains Andrei Cimpian, a psychology professor at New York University and the senior author of the paper. âHowever, if you allow them to respond in private or give them a reason to care about accuracy, the partisanship effect disappears.â
China successfully recaptured the first stage of a rocket after a launch on Friday in a breakthrough for the countryâs space program, state media said.
The first stage of a Long March-10B rocket separated from the second stage after liftoff and returned to a platform in the sea, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It was the first time China recovered the first stage of a rocket. Americaâs SpaceX has been doing so for several years to drive down launch costs by reusing the booster that helps lift the satellites or whatever the rocket is carrying into space.
A new study led by MIT researchers could drive the development of more energy-efficient digital displaysâsuch as flat-screen TVs, augmented and virtual reality headsets, smartphone screens, medical imaging devices and even large-area ambient lighting surfacesâthat also generate richer, brighter colors.
The MIT scientists, in collaboration with researchers at Samsung, studied the microscopic changes that occur inside LEDs that use electrically excited quantum dots, which are precisely shaped nanoscale semiconductor particles that emit extremely pure colored light. The research appears in Science Advances.
Quantum dots are currently used in some of the computer and television displays with the best picture quality available. The efficiency of these displays could be further improved, and their manufacturing process further simplified, if the quantum dots could be electrically excited, as was first demonstrated in the quantum dot LED (QD-LED) structures more than 20 years ago.
