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Research in animal models has demonstrated that stem-cell derived heart tissues have promising potential for therapeutic applications to treat cardiac disease. But before such therapies are viable and safe for use in humans, scientists must first precisely understand on the cellular and molecular levels which factors are necessary for implanted stem-cell derived heart cells to properly grow and integrate in three dimensions within surrounding tissue.

New findings from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) make it possible for the first time to monitor the functional development and maturation of cardiomyocytes—the responsible for regulating the heartbeat through synchronized —on the single-cell level using -embedded . The devices—which are flexible, stretchable, and can seamlessly integrate with living cells to create “cyborgs”—are reported in a Science Advances paper.

“These mesh-like nanoelectronics, designed to stretch and move with growing tissue, can continuously capture long-term activity within individual stem-cell derived cardiomyocytes of interest,” says Jia Liu, co-senior author on the paper, who is an assistant professor of bioengineering at SEAS, where he leads a lab dedicated to bioelectronics.

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Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air.

The research team, led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ph.D. student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analyzed a -consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium.

Recent work by the team has shown that many bacteria use hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source in nutrient-poor environments. “We’ve known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean” Professor Greening said. “But we didn’t know how they did this, until now.”

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Scientists studying a nearby protostar have detected the presence of water in its circumstellar disk. The new observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) mark the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest that the water in our solar system formed billions of years before the sun. The new observations are published today in Nature.

V883 Orionis is a located roughly 1,305 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion. The new observations of this protostar have helped scientists to find a probable link between the water in the interstellar medium and the water in our solar system by confirming they have similar composition.

“We can think of the path of water through the universe as a trail. We know what the endpoints look like, which are water on planets and in comets, but we wanted to trace that trail back to the origins of water,” said John Tobin, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the lead author on the new paper.

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Their popularity makes celebrities easy to spot. Strangers, however, can also get mistaken for celebrities, resulting in cases of false “celebrity sightings.” In attempting to explain the contradiction, a University of California, Riverside, study reports that celebrity faces are remembered more precisely but less accurately.

Precision, in this context, refers to how memories for a particular face resemble each other over repeated retrievals, which can be likened to the clustering of arrows on a target in archery. Accuracy measures how remembered faces resemble newly encountered faces—or the deviation from the target in archery.

“What our findings say is that people might accept errors by misidentifying someone as a in the interest of securing a ‘celebrity sighting,’” said Weiwei Zhang, an associate professor of psychology, who led the study that appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. “Our study explains why people are good and bad at spotting celebrities and highlights the importance of assessing both memory imprecision and bias in memory performance.”

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FallenKingdomReads’ list of 7 Hard Science Fiction Books That Will Make You Smarter.

Hard science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that prioritizes scientific accuracy and explores scientific concepts in depth. These books often require a solid understanding of scientific principles and can be a great way to learn about complex scientific concepts in an engaging and accessible way.

Here are seven hard science fiction books that will make you smarter.

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Scientists have discovered a new material that could be set to change the entire world. Researchers say they have created a superconducting material that works at both a temperature and a pressure low enough to actually use it in practical situations. It reaches a breakthrough that scientists have been chasing for more than a century, in making a material that is able to transmit electricity without resistance, and pass magnetic fields around the material.

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Microsoft revealed an AI-powered Bing chatbot in February, dubbing it “the new Bing.” But what can you actually do with the new Bing, and where does it fall short?

The new Bing is impressive for an automated tool, as it can not only answer questions in full sentences (or longer paragraphs), but it can also draw information from recent web results. The web features give it an edge over ChatGPT, which has limited knowledge of current events and facts, but it still has problems providing factual answers or helpful responses. That significantly affects its usefulness as a tool, though Bing’s ability to cite sources can help you double-check its responses.

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