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Memory bumps across the lifespan in personally meaningful music

You know that feeling when a song from your teenage years comes on, and suddenly you’re right back in your old bedroom, feeling everything as vividly as you did decades ago? Scientists call this the “reminiscence bump”—our strange tendency to form the most powerful, lasting emotional bonds with music we hear between ages 15 and 25. But until now, no one knew if this was just a Western phenomenon or if it looked the same for everyone, everywhere.

The study also revealed we’re not limited to just one “memory bump.” Three distinct patterns emerge: we connect with music our parents loved (cross-generational), music from our own coming-of-age years (the classic reminiscence bump), and music from recent years (the recency effect). Age and gender act like equalizers, turning up some bumps while fading others.

From the “reminiscence bump” to cross-generational musical connections, we’ll unpack the psychology and neuroscience behind your most meaningful playlists.

Some songs stay with us for a lifetime. Even decades later, a few familiar notes can unlock vivid memories. Yet the life periods from which these songs originate and their prominence across age and gender remain underexplored. This study examines lifespan patterns in music-related memory, focusing on age trends, gender differences, and the global presence of the “reminiscence bump”, a peak in emotional connection to music from adolescence and early adulthood. While this phenomenon is well-documented in Western samples, its global manifestation, gendered dimensions and variation across life stages remains unexplored. Using responses collected from 1891 participants across diverse geographical backgrounds, we analysed the release years of personally meaningful songs.

Scientists Discover a Diet That Can Prevent and Reverse a Key Type of Heart Disease

Researchers discovered that a nutrient-matched, plant-based diet could prevent and reverse a hidden form of heart disease in hypertensive rats. A new study from researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University reports that a diet centered on fruits, vegetables, nut

New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities

It would take nearly a century for mathematicians to prove him right. In the early 1930s, Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó independently showed that the answer to the “Plateau problem” is yes: For any closed curve (your wire frame) in three-dimensional space, you can always find a minimizing two-dimensional surface (your soap film) that has the same boundary. The proof later earned Douglas the first-ever Fields Medal.

Since then, mathematicians have expanded on the Plateau problem in hopes of learning more about minimizing surfaces. These surfaces appear throughout math and science — in proofs of important conjectures in geometry and topology, in the study of cells and black holes, and even in the design of biomolecules. “They’re very beautiful objects to study,” said Otis Chodosh (opens a new tab) of Stanford University. “Very natural, appealing and intriguing.”

Mathematicians now know that Plateau’s prediction is categorically true up through dimension seven. But in higher dimensions, there’s a caveat: The minimizing surfaces that form might not always be nice and smooth, like the disk or hourglass. Instead, they might fold, pinch or intersect themselves in places, forming what are known as singularities. When minimizing surfaces have singularities, it becomes much harder to understand and work with them.

Intel’s ‘Advanced Packaging’ Attracts Attention From Apple and Qualcomm, Potentially Opening a New Frontier for the Foundry Business

Intel might have been lagging significantly behind in the chip business, but when it comes to advanced packaging, the firm has competitive options.

Ever since high-performance computing became the norm in the industry, the demand for robust compute solutions has increased at a pace that surpasses the improvements brought about by relying solely on Moore’s Law. But, to meet the industry’s demand, manufacturers like AMD and NVIDIA adopted advanced packaging technologies, which essentially brought in ‘multiple chips’ in a single package, boosting chip densities as well as platform performance. Advanced packaging solutions have become an integral part of the supply chain, and TSMC has dominated this segment for several years now, but this could change.

In new job listings by Qualcomm and Apple, it appears that both companies are seeking talent with expertise in Intel’s EMIB advanced packaging technology. The Cupertino giant is hiring a DRAM packaging engineer, requiring experience in “advanced packaging technologies such as CoWoS, EMIB, SoIC, and PoP”. Similarly, Qualcomm is recruiting a Director of Product Management for its Data Center Business Unit, which requires familiarity with Intel’s EMIB as well, indicating that interest is defintely there.

Cascaded nonlinear down-conversion in poling-free lithium niobate nanophotonic waveguides

Cascaded nonlinear optics has long enabled advances in short-wavelength generation, but equivalent approaches for long wavelengths remain underdeveloped. Here, the authors demonstrate a chip-based lithium niobate platform that delivers tunable mid-infrared light, opening new possibilities for sensing, spectroscopy, and communications.

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