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Summary: Using advances in machine learning, researchers have created a new model that predicts the ease with which individuals produce and comprehend complex sentences.

Source: MIT

Cognitive scientists have long sought to understand what makes some sentences more difficult to comprehend than others. Any account of language comprehension, researchers believe, would benefit from understanding difficulties in comprehension.

Equipmake says it’s got the lightest and most power-dense electric motor on the market, and if there’s one place where weight is critical, it’s on a launch pad. The company has developed an ultra-lightweight motor for Australia’s first rocket launch.

Queensland-based Gilmour Space Technologies is on the home stretch making preparations for the launch of its three-stage Eris orbital launch vehicle next April. It’ll be the first orbital launch attempt of an Australian designed and built rocket, and the company hopes it’ll represent the beginning of a new space launch industry Down Under.

Rather than acting as a supplier to other rocket companies overseas, Gilmour has built its own machine from the ground up. Standing 25 m (82 ft) high, it has a first-stage diameter of 2 m (6.6 ft), and a second-stage diameter of 1.5 m (4.9 ft), and it’s designed to take a payload mass up to 305 kg (672 lb) up as high as 500 km (311 miles) for delivery to sun-synchronous or equatorial orbits.

Electronic wearable patches have been devised to monitor various health conditions by noninvasively detecting biomolecules on the skin surface.

A new Nature Communications study discusses the development of novel skin patches capable of deep detection of biomolecules, which correlate better and more rapidly with physiological states. For example, the photoacoustic patch described by the researchers, who are engineers at the University of California San Diego, can produce a three-dimensional (3D) map of deep tissue hemoglobin.

T cells aren’t the first immune forces on the scene, they arrive after being alerted by other immune system warriors that a microbe has invaded or a cancer has silently seeded.

Exactly how T cells obtain the energy they need to build a massive army in the face of infiltrators has been the subject of speculation, theory and decades-long laboratory inquiries.

Now, scientists are taking a deeper dive into the question, and their investigations are shedding new light on an array of dynamic biological activities that help bolster T cell populations. Their research demystifies how T cells can power their growth and proliferation when disease emerges and T cell strength is in greatest need.

Human microproteins encoded by small ORFs have been found to be functional. By comparing the corresponding sequences across vertebrate genomes, Vakirlis et al. show that a number of these originated “from scratch” from noncoding sequences, including two very recent cases unique to humans. These cases demonstrate the rapid evolution of genetic novelty.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now you see them, now you don’t.

Some frogs found in South and Central America have the rare ability to turn on and off their nearly transparent appearance, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science.

During the day, these nocturnal frogs sleep by hanging underneath tree leaves. Their delicate, greenish transparent forms don’t cast shadows, rendering them almost invisible to birds and other predators passing overhead or underneath.