Plus a monkey who took a selfie and ignited a years-long legal battle and crow pooping antics, and more weird things we learned this week.
A team of scientists took a bunch of macaque monkeys, made them into alcoholics, and then successfully weaned them off the sauce after injecting their brains with a special gene — an experiment, detailed in a new paper published in Nature Medicine, that could potentially provide a compelling new treatment for addiction.
“Drinking went down to almost zero,” Oregon Health and Science University professor and co-author Kathleen Grant told The Guardian. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether.”
The researchers set out with the premise that continued alcohol use causes changes to neurons and hampers the dopamine “reward circuitry” in the brain.
SHINE Technologies
Posted in nuclear energy
Cherenkov radiation achieved in faster than light reactions by SHINE.
SHINE has demonstrated clearly visible Cherenkov radiation produced by fusion for what is believed to be the first time in history. This visible evidence provides further proof that fusion can produce neutrons on par with some nuclear fission reactors.
Here, the authors demonstrate an analogue reversed Cherenkov radiation at mid-infrared frequencies in MoO3, a natural hyperbolic material, and show that the radiation angle and the quality factor can be increased by stacking hBN layers on the MoO3 surface.
In the latest controversial change at Elon Musk’s social network, the service formerly named Twitter reportedly added a five-second delay when users load links to certain news sites and rival social networks. The New York Times and Reuters were affected by the delay with the t.co link-shortening service used by X, according to several news reports published yesterday.
X eliminated the delay in links to news sites yesterday afternoon, according to Reuters and The Washington Post. “When contacted for comment, X confirmed the delay was removed but did not elaborate,” Reuters wrote.
Links from X to the NYT and Reuters loaded almost instantly for us today. But we still found delays of three to five seconds in links to Substack, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads today in our tests.
Since this book is about what I consider intellectual subject matter, I think it’s relevant to keep brains in top shape and thought it would be important to share this. You probably know about this sort of thing but I didn’t know the specific nutrients needed and what was lacking in people with Alzheimer’s. Best wishes.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease estimated to affect 6 million Americans and 33 million people worldwide. Large numbers of those affected have not yet been diagnosed.
A new study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by a Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine faculty member shows that brain levels of dietary lutein, zeaxanthin, lycopene, and vitamin E in those with Alzheimer’s disease are half those in normal brains. Higher dietary levels of lutein and zeaxanthin have been strongly linked to better cognitive functions and lower risk for dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
“This study, for the first time, demonstrates deficits in important dietary antioxidants in Alzheimer’s brains. These results are consistent with large population studies that found risk for Alzheimer’s disease was significantly lower in those who ate diets rich in carotenoids, or had high levels of lutein and zeaxanthin in their blood, or accumulated in their retina as macular pigment,” said C. Kathleen Dorey, professor in the Department of Basic Science Education at the medical school. “Not only that, but we believe eating carotenoid-rich diets will help keep brains in top condition at all ages.”
We’re just at the beginning of an AI revolution that will redefine how we live and work. In particular, deep neural networks (DNNs) have revolutionized the field of AI and are increasingly gaining prominence with the advent of foundation models and generative AI. But running these models on traditional digital computing architectures limits their achievable performance and energy efficiency. There has been progress in developing hardware specifically for AI inference, but many of these architectures physically split the memory and processing units. This means the AI models are typically stored in a discrete memory location, and computational tasks require constantly shuffling data between the memory and processing units. This process slows down computation and limits the maximum achievable energy efficiency.
Dunno if anyone has already posted this.
The chip showcases critical building blocks of a scalable mixed-signal architecture.
A new study led by Vinod M. Menon and his group at the City College of New York shows that trapping light inside magnetic materials may dramatically enhance their intrinsic properties. Strong optical responses of magnets are important for the development of magnetic lasers and magneto-optical memory devices, as well as for emerging quantum transduction applications.
In their new article in Nature, Menon and his team report the properties of a layered magnet that hosts strongly bound excitons—quasiparticles with particularly strong optical interactions. Because of that, the material is capable of trapping light—all by itself.
As their experiments show, the optical responses of this material to magnetic phenomena are orders of magnitude stronger than those in typical magnets. “Since the light bounces back and forth inside the magnet, interactions are genuinely enhanced,” said Dr. Florian Dirnberger, the lead-author of the study.
A functioning warp drive would allow humans to reach the far ends of the cosmos in the blink of an eye.
Are fools happy and geniuses disorganized — or is that a mistaken stereotype? A study of two million people yields intriguing insights.