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Problems with the future of gaming.


A strange bug is removing people’s games on PlayStation 4 and 5, and Vita, and Sony doesn’t have a fix.

It wasn’t long ago that PlayStation sparked fan outrage when it said it would remove Discovery video content from people’s libraries, even though they had paid for it.

PlayStation later backtracked, but a similar, unintentional, issue has now come up: a random bug that’s wiping digital games from people’s libraries.

Researchers identify molecular cues that make developing neurons remodel their connections.

At this very moment, the billions of neurons in your brain are using their trillions of connections to enable you to read and comprehend this sentence.

Now, by studying the neurons involved in the sense of smell, researchers from Kyushu University’s Faculty of Medical Sciences report a new mechanism behind the biomolecular bonsai that selectively strengthens these connections.

Key synapse acts as a “smart teacher,” sending messages against the usual flow of information in the brain.

Information flows in a well-defined direction in the brain: Chemical and electrical signals are passed from one neuron to the other across the synapse, from the pre-synaptic to the post-synaptic neuron. Now, Peter Jonas and his group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) show that information also travels in the opposite direction at a key synapse in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for learning and memory.

At the so-called mossy fiber synapse, the post-synaptic CA3 neuron influences how the pre-synaptic neuron, the so-called mossy fiber neuron, fires. “We have shown, for the first time, that a retrograde information flow is physiologically relevant for pre-synaptic plasticity,” says Yuji Okamoto, a postdoc in the group of Peter Jonas at IST Austria and co-first author of the paper published in Nature Communications.