Lifeboat Foundation

Whether improperly closing a door or shanking a kick in soccer, our brains tell us when we’ve made a mistake because these sounds differ from what we expect to hear. While it’s long been established that our neurons spot these errors, it has been unclear whether there are brain cells that have only one job—to signal when a sound is unexpected or “off.”

A team of New York University neuroscientists has now identified a class of neurons—what it calls “prediction-error neurons”—that are not responsive to sounds in general, but only respond when sounds violate expectations, thereby sending a message that a mistake has been made.

“Brains are remarkable at detecting what’s happening in the world, but they are even better at telling you whether what happened was expected or not,” explains David Schneider, an assistant professor in NYU’s Center for Neural Science and the senior author of the study, which appears in JNeurosci. “We found that there are specific neurons in the brain that don’t tell you what happened, but instead tell you what went wrong.”

Researchers have developed a method that can reveal the location of errors in quantum computers, making them up to 10 times easier to correct. This will significantly accelerate progress towards large-scale quantum computers capable of tackling the world’s most challenging computational problems, the researchers said.

Led by Princeton University’s Jeff Thompson, the team demonstrated a way to identify when errors occur in quantum computers more easily than ever before. This is a new direction for research into quantum computing hardware, which more often seeks to simply lower the probability of an error occurring in the first place.

A paper detailing the new approach was published in Nature on Oct. 11. Thompson’s collaborators include Shruti Puri at Yale University and Guido Pupillo at Strasbourg University.

Scientists testing a new method of sequencing single cells have unexpectedly changed our understanding of the rules of genetics.

The genome of a protist has revealed a seemingly unique divergence in the 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).

Here is how the brain adapts to diverse styles.

Scientists at Yale and the Southwest Research Institute (SRI) say they’ve hit the jackpot with some valuable new information about the story of gold.

It’s a story that begins with violent collisions of large objects in space, continues in a half-melted region of Earth’s mantle, and ends with precious metals finding an unlikely resting spot much closer to the planet’s surface than scientists would have predicted.

Jun Korenaga, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Simone Marchi, a researcher at SRI in Boulder, Colorado, provide details in a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists studied genetic samples from more than 7,000 people and linked three genetic variants, inherited from Neanderthals, to increased pain sensitivity.

Summary: Researchers unveil the medial septum’s pivotal role in orchestrating memory storage and recall through managing rapid brain wave cycles in the hippocampus. Employing various research methodologies, including optogenetics, the team observes how gamma oscillations, embedded in theta rhythms, facilitate seamless switching between memory encoding and retrieval.

These fast and slow gamma waves, crucial for memory functions, are dictated through two primary pathways via the medial septum, showcasing a sophisticated coordination in memory processes. This insight illuminates potential avenues for understanding and eventually addressing memory-related illnesses like dementia.

Arithmetic, rooted in our biological perception, is a natural consequence of how we perceive and organize the world around us. This connection between perception and mathematical truths suggests that mathematics is both a uniquely human invention and a universal discovery, highlighting a profound unity between the mind and the physical universe…

The concept that we are all computer-generated characters occupying a world as real as the ones gamers explore on their PlayStation consoles isn’t exactly a new one.

As far back as 1999, Morpheus was entering “The Matrix” to break Neo and a few other chosen few out of a simulated reality created by advanced machines in order to use humans as an energy source. But as the idea permeates not just the realm of science fiction and popular culture, but academia as well, every now and then a philosopher or physicist has something new to say about it.

That’s what happened this week when a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom proposed that a new law of physics could support the theory that what we see as our reality is in fact a complex virtual simulation running on a cosmic computer. The theory stems from previous research that Dr. Melvin Vopson has conducted looking into whether information has mass.