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Blocking how cancer cells acquire and use energy, or their metabolism, as a treatment has been challenging, Dr. Lyssiotis explained. But a better understanding of how cancer cells adapt their metabolism in the often oxygen-and nutrient-deprived environments in which they exist, he said, may open other avenues for attacking them.

Identifying alternative sources of energy for cancer cells

Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of death from cancer. Not only does its stark microenvironment thwart the entry of drugs designed to kill tumors, but numerous studies have shown that other residents in and around the tumors create an ecosystem that help the tumors thrive.

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In particular, many have griped over their original work being used to train these AI models — a use they never opted into, and for which they’re not compensated.

But what if artists could “poison” their work with a tool that alters it so subtly that the human eye can’t tell, while wreaking havoc on AI systems that try to digest it?

That’s the idea behind a new tool called “Nightshade,” which its creators say does exactly that. As laid out in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by MIT Technology Review, a team of researchers led by University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao built the system to generate prompt-specific “poison samples” that scramble the digital brains of image generators like Stable Diffusion, screwing up their outputs.

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Quantum materials hold the key to a future of lightning-speed, energy-efficient information systems. The problem with tapping their transformative potential is that in solids, the vast number of atoms often drowns out the exotic quantum properties electrons carry.

Rice University researchers in the lab of quantum materials scientist Hanyu Zhu found that when they move in circles, atoms can also work wonders: When the in a rare-earth crystal becomes animated with a corkscrew-shaped vibration known as a chiral phonon, the crystal is transformed into a magnet.

According to a new study published in Science, exposing cerium fluoride to ultrafast pulses of light sends its atoms into a dance that momentarily enlists the spins of electrons, causing them to align with the atomic rotation. This alignment would otherwise require a powerful magnetic field to activate, since cerium fluoride is naturally paramagnetic with randomly oriented spins even at zero temperature.

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Researchers at the University of Barcelona have made a sweet discovery: Honeybees make great subjects when studying the dynamic of group behavior and decision-making.

In a recently released study, Professor M. Carmen Miguel, who has previously studied leadership activity among schooling fish and social interactions among flocks of birds, said a group of mini robots were trained to reach a consensus on tasks by mimicking processes displayed by .

The intricate behavior of bees has long been a subject of great interest among researchers. There are more than 4,000 species of the insect, and they have been around for more than 100 million years.

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The human mind does not like to make mistakes—and makes time to avoid repeating them. A new study from University of Iowa researchers shows how the human brain, in just one second, can distinguish between an outcome caused by human error and one in which the person is not directly to blame.

Moreover, the researchers found that in cases of human error, the brain takes additional time to catalog the error and inform the rest of the body about it to avoid repeating the mistake.

“The novel aspect about this study is the brain can very quickly distinguish whether an undesirable outcome is due to a (human) error, or due to something else,” says Jan Wessel, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Iowa and the study’s corresponding author. “If the brain realizes an error was the cause, it will then start additional processes to avoid further errors, which it won’t do if the outcome wasn’t due to its own action.”

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