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Summary: A new theory suggests glial cells, specifically astrocytes, play a key role in cognitive processing.

Source: University Health Network.

A team of scientists from the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the University Health Network in Toronto, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has developed the first computer model predicting the role of cortical glial cells in cognition.

Pictures of the sky can show us cosmic wonders; movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are revealing motion and change across the sky.

Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.

Continue reading “NASA telescope takes 12-year time-lapse movie of entire sky” »

Thanks in large part to delays suffered by Arianespace’s next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, a small fleet of European satellites are simultaneously converging on the United States to hitch rides into orbit with SpaceX.

SpaceX launching European payloads is nothing new. The company has occasionally launched spacecraft built in Europe for European space agencies or companies, but the combination is exceedingly rare. For several reasons, however, what was once alien is beginning to become commonplace, and that fact is about to be made even clearer over the remainder of 2022.

SpaceX kicked off a string of six or seven launches of spacecraft built by or for Europe on October 15th. Over the weekend, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket – 70 meters (230 ft) tall, 3.7 meters (12 ft) wide, and capable of producing up to 770 tons (1.7M lbf) of thrust at liftoff – successfully launched the Hotbird 13F communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for the French satcom company Eutelsat.

But the true nature of the pillars was famously revealed in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, an image that wowed the public and was soon one of the most recognized and widely published photos ever captured by the venerable observatory.

But Hubble is primarily a visible-light telescope with only a limited ability to detect cloud-piercing infrared emissions from the interior of the pillars and from stars shining in and behind a translucent, obscuring layer of gas making up the interstellar medium that is most apparent looking into the plane of the galaxy.

Continue reading “Webb space telescope reveals ‘Pillars of Creation’ in stunning new detail” »

Have you ever suffered from jet lag or struggled after turning the clock forward or back an hour for daylight saving time? These are examples of you feeling the effects of what researchers call your biological clock, or circadian rhythm – the “master pacemaker” that synchronizes how your body responds to the passing of one day to the next.

This “clock” is made up of about 20,000 neurons in the hypothalamus. This area near the center of the brain coordinates your body’s unconscious functions, such as breathing and blood pressure. Humans aren’t the only lifeforms that have an internal clock system: All vertebrates – or mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish – have biological clocks, as do plants, fungi, and bacteria. Biological clocks are why cats are most active at dawn and dusk, and why flowers bloom at certain times of the day.

Continue reading “Your Body Has an Internal Clock That Dictates When You Eat, Sleep and Might Have a Heart Attack” »

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have developed a new, machine learning-based technique to accurately classify the state of macrophages, which are key immune cells. Classifying macrophages is important because they can modify their behaviour and act as pro-or anti-inflammatory agents in the immune response. As a result, the work has a suite of implications for research and has the potential to one day make major societal impact.

For example, this new approach could be of use to drug designers looking to create therapies targeting diseases and auto-immune conditions such as diabetes, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis – all of which are impacted by cellular metabolism and macrophage function.

Because classifying macrophages allows scientists to directly distinguish between macrophage states – based only on their metabolic response under certain conditions – this new information could be used as a diagnosis tool, or to highlight the role of a particular cell type in a disease environment.

The boundary layer between the upper and lower mantles of the Earth is known as the transition zone (TZ). It is located between 410 and 660 kilometers (between 255 and 410 miles) under the surface. The olive-green mineral olivine, commonly known as peridot, which makes up around 70% of the Earth’s upper mantle, changes its crystalline structure at the extreme pressure of up to 23,000 bar in the TZ. At a depth of around 410 kilometers (255 miles), at the upper edge of the transition zone, it changes into denser wadsleyite, and at a depth of 520 kilometers (323 miles), it transforms into even denser ringwoodite.

“These mineral transformations greatly hinder the movements of rock in the mantle,” explains Professor Frank Brenker from the Institute for Geosciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt. For example, mantle plumes – rising columns of hot rock from the deep mantle – sometimes stop directly below the transition zone. The movement of mass in the opposite direction also comes to standstill. Brenker says, “Subducting plates often have difficulty in breaking through the entire transition zone. So there is a whole graveyard of such plates in this zone underneath Europe.”

The project is aided by a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to the Living and Working With Robots program at UT Austin, under the umbrella of Good Systems, a broad research initiative at the university focused on leveraging the human benefits of AI.

MySA has reached out to UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering for more information on the autonomous robots program.

This GB Live News is in partnership with VB Lab funded by Xsolla.

Video games have always been resilient, even in an increasingly volatile geopolitical climate. Long-time game players are fiercely loyal, and enthusiastic new gamers keep pouring into the market, says Chris Hewish, president of Xsolla. In the first half of 2022 alone, more than 651 deals were announced or closed, for a value of $107 billion. But in a fiercely competitive market, clouded by less economic certainy, studios and indie developers are exploring an increasing number of ways to reach the audiences.

“Game companies do need to look at how their business models can function in a macroeconomic climate, heading into a recession,” he added. “Capital is going to become tighter. If you have a business model based upon growth over profitability, it’s going to be harder to find fuel for that growth. Readjusting to focus on profitability is probably one of the biggest things game companies can do right now, if they haven’t already, to weather the storm in a macro sense. But the opportunity with players and the number of people playing and spending, that’s still looking good.”