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Summary: Neuroimaging study reveals how light-sensitive signals reach the brain and how regions associated with mood process those signals. Some regions of the cerebral cortex associated with cognitive and mood processing show sensitivity to light intensity.

Source: Brown University.

From changes in daylight across seasons to the artificial lighting choices in workplaces, it’s clear that the quantity and quality of light that a person encounters can significantly impact mood.

After analyzing data gathered when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample from asteroid Bennu in October 2020, scientists have learned something astonishing.

Analyses of seismic waves picked up by NASA’s InSight lander shed new light on the planet’s core and give clues to the thickness of the crust.

Mars has had its first CT scan, thanks to analyses of seismic waves picked up by NASA’s InSight lander. Diagnosis: The Red Planet’s core is at least partially liquid, as some previous studies had suggested, and is somewhat larger than expected.

InSight reached Mars in late 2018 and soon afterward detected the first known marsquake (SN: 11/26/18; SN: 4/23/19). Since then, the lander’s instruments have picked up more than a thousand temblors, most of them minor rumbles. Many of those quakes originated at a seismically active region more than 1,000 kilometers away from the lander. A small fraction of the quakes had magnitudes ranging from 3.0 to 4.0, and the resulting vibrations have enabled scientists to probe Mars and reveal new clues about its inner structure.

Simon Stähler, a seismologist at ETH Zurich, and colleagues analyzed seismic waves from 11 marsquakes, looking for two types of waves: pressure and shear. Unlike pressure waves, shear waves can’t pass through a liquid, and they move more slowly, traveling side to side through solid materials, rather than in a push-and-pull motion in the same direction a wave is traveling like pressure waves do.

This video explains discovery of DNA.

DNA was discovered in 1,869 by German researcher Friedrich Miescher, who was originally trying to study the composition of lymphoid cells (white blood cells). Instead, he isolated a new molecule he called nuclein (DNA with associated proteins) from a cell nucleus.

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As training regimes go, being forced to watch eight years’ worth of someone else playing Minecraft feels pretty harsh. When the revolution comes I fear OpenAI could be first against the wall after the Robot uprising after what it’s put its latest AI through in order to get it to play the standard version of Minecraft.

OpenAI neural network can now craft a diamond pickaxe off its own back. The detailed blog post on the OpenAI site explains how it managed to teach the network to play Minecraft, and it’s some fascinating stuff. Not least how, of those 70,000 hours of Minecraft gameplay footage, it paid $160,000 to a team of contractors to create and tag up 2,000 hours of footage with labels so the AI could understand what it was looking at and how that related to its actions in the game.

The method is called Video PreTraining (VPT) and it claims its model can learn to craft diamond tools, which it says takes a proficient human around 20 minutes.

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Infinite sums are among the most underrated yet powerful concepts in mathematics, capable of linking concepts across math’s vast web.

These sustainable sneakers are molded from liquid cellulose—and the process can work for other items of clothing as well.

As our devices get smaller and smaller, the use of molecules as the main components in electronic circuitry is becoming ever more critical. Over the past 10 years, researchers have been trying to use single molecules as conducting wires because of their small scale, distinct electronic characteristics, and high tunability. But in most molecular wires, as the length of the wire increases, the efficiency by which electrons are transmitted across the wire decreases exponentially. This limitation has made it especially challenging to build a long molecular wire—one that is much longer than a nanometer—that actually conducts electricity well.

Columbia researchers announced that they have built a nanowire that is 2.6 nanometers long, shows an unusual increase in conductance as the wire length increases, and has quasi-metallic properties. Its excellent conductivity holds great promise for the field of molecular electronics, enabling electronic devices to become even tinier.

The study is published in Nature Chemistry (“Highly conducting single-molecule topological insulators based on mono-and di-radical cations”).

It could help scientists learn more about memory formation and storage and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.