In Alzheimer’s disease, proteins like amyloid beta form clumps, known as plaques, that damage the brain.
But in some people, immune cells called microglia break down these proteins before they can cause harm. This leads to fewer and smaller clumps—and much milder symptoms.
Researchers at UC San Francisco identified a molecular receptor that enables microglia to gobble up and digest amyloid beta plaques. The findings are published in the journal Neuron.
USC scientists have developed a wearable system that enables more natural and emotionally engaging interactions in shared digital spaces, opening new possibilities for remote work, education, health care and beyond.
Touch plays a vital role in how humans communicate and bond. From infancy through adulthood, physical contact helps foster emotional bonds, build trust and regulate stress. Yet in today’s increasingly digital world, where screens mediate many of our relationships, it is often missing.
To bridge the gap, researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a wearable haptic system that lets users exchange physical gestures in virtual reality and feel them in real time, even when they’re miles apart. Their paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.
While the study is intriguing, additional observations will be essential to verify or challenge its findings.
Khalifa University is building the foundation for a smarter, more secure and more connected world, one silicon chip at a time.
In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence and smart devices, the System-on-Chip Lab (SoCL) at Khalifa University is emerging as a regional hub of innovation. Led by Baker Mohammad, a professor of Computer and Information Engineering and a veteran with 15 years of experience at tech giants Intel and Qualcomm, the lab is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between fundamental research and market-ready solutions.
“We’re the only facility in the region with comprehensive expertise across the full electronics design stack, from devices to circuits to systems,” Mohammad explains. This distinctive capability allows the lab to address critical challenges in energy-efficient, high-performance edge devices for data-intensive AI applications, while also integrating hardware security to protect sensitive user data.
This is a video of Dirac’s first lecture of four on quantum mechanics delivered in 1975 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The transcript of the lectures can be found in \.
Dr. Sung Mook Choi and his research team at the Energy & Environmental Materials Research Division of the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) have successfully developed a highly durable non-precious metal-based hydrogen evolution catalyst for use in a direct electrolysis system employing waste alkaline water and anion exchange membranes (AEM). This breakthrough enables the production of clean hydrogen by directly utilizing alkaline wastewater generated from industrial processes.
Crystals and glasses have opposite heat-conduction properties, which play a pivotal role in a variety of technologies. These range from the miniaturization and efficiency of electronic devices to waste-heat recovery systems, as well as the lifespan of thermal shields for aerospace applications.
The problem of optimizing the performance and durability of materials used in these different applications essentially boils down to fundamentally understanding how their chemical composition and atomic structure (e.g., crystalline, glassy, nanostructured) determine their capability to conduct heat. Michele Simoncelli, assistant professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia Engineering, tackles this problem from first principles — i.e., in Aristotle’s words, in terms of “the first basis from which a thing is known” — starting from the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics and leveraging machine-learning techniques to solve them with quantitative accuracy.
In research published on July 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Simoncelli and his collaborators Nicola Marzari from the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne and Francesco Mauri from Sapienza University of Rome predicted the existence of a material with hybrid crystal-glass thermal properties, and a team of experimentalists led by Etienne Balan, Daniele Fournier, and Massimiliano Marangolo from the Sorbonne University in Paris confirmed it with measurements.
Quantum stochastic rectification is a process observed in some physical systems, which entails the conversion of random quantum fluctuations (i.e., quantum noise) and a small oscillating signal, such as a weak alternating current or AC voltage, into a steady output (e.g., a direct current, or DC). This quantum effect has been previously reported in magnetic tunnel junctions that are driven by both quantum mechanics and randomness (i.e., stochastic processes).
Researchers at the University of California–Irvine recently showed that the quantum stochastic rectification observed in individual molecules can be leveraged to study their intrinsic relaxation dynamics. Their approach, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could inform the future study of molecular dynamics and advance the measurement of rapid processes that take place in single molecules at the atomic scale.
“A few years ago, I served on a Ph.D. Advancement committee and the graduate student discussed his thesis research involving stochastic processes in nm-scale magnetic tunnel junctions,” Wilson Ho, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “The signal in his experiment was affected by the thermal noise and showed a transition when the driving frequency was varied.
Immersing in virtual reality (VR) nature scenes helped relieve symptoms that are often seen in people living with long-term pain, with those who felt more present experiencing the strongest effects.
A new study led by the University of Exeter, published in the journal Pain, tested the impact of immersive 360-degree nature films delivered using VR compared with 2D video images in reducing the experience of pain, finding VR almost twice as effective.
The paper is titled “Immersion in nature through virtual reality attenuates the development and spread of mechanical secondary hyperalgesia: a role for insulo-thalamic effective connectivity.”