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New research from SAHMRI has found a link between the omega-3 fatty acid known as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and increased IQ among children born prematurely.

Preterm children are more likely to have lower IQ scores and cognitive impairments compared with term-born children.

Dr. Jacqueline Gould, who led the study now published in the New England Journal of Medicine, says infants born at the earliest gestations are deprived of the natural supply of DHA that normally builds up in the brain during the last trimester of pregnancy.

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Biomedical and electrical engineers at UNSW Sydney have developed a new way to measure neural activity using light—rather than electricity—which could lead to a complete reimagining of medical technologies like nerve-operated prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces.

Professor François Ladouceur, with UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, says the multi-disciplinary team has just demonstrated in the lab what it proved theoretically shortly before the pandemic: that sensors built using liquid crystal and integrated optics technologies—dubbed “optrodes”—can register nerve impulses in a living animal body.

Not only do these optrodes perform just as well as conventional electrodes—that use electricity to detect a nerve impulse—but they also address “very thorny issues that competing technologies cannot address,” says Prof. Ladouceur.

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For the first time, a group of researchers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, IBM, ETH Zurich, MIT and Harvard University have observed topological phases of matter of quantum states under the action of temperature or certain types of experimental imperfections. The experiment was conducted using quantum simulator at IBM.

Quantum simulators were first conjectured by the Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman in 1982. Ordinary classical computers are inefficient at simulating systems of interacting quantum particles These new simulators are genuinely quantum and can be controlled very precisely. They replicate other quantum systems that are harder to manipulate and whose physical properties remain very much unknown.

In an article published in the journal Quantum Information, the researchers describe using a with superconducting qubits at IBM to replicate materials known as topological insulators at finite temperature, and measure for the first time their topological quantum phases.

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Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious and unconscious experience is a major goal of fundamental and translational neuroscience. Here, we target the early visual cortex with a protocol of noninvasive, high-resolution alternating current stimulation while participants performed a delayed target–probe discrimination task and reveal dissociable mechanisms of mnemonic processing for conscious and unconscious perceptual contents. Entraining β-rhythms in bilateral visual areas preferentially enhanced short-term memory for seen information, whereas α-entrainment in the same region preferentially enhanced short-term memory for unseen information. The short-term memory improvements were frequency-specific and long-lasting. The results add a mechanistic foundation to existing theories of consciousness, call for revisions to these theories, and contribute to the development of nonpharmacological therapeutics for improving visual cortical processing.

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The volcano has been in a state of “heightened unrest” for more than a month, with the number of earthquakes rising from between 10 and 20 per day to 40 to 50 per day, likely due to an increase in magma inside the volcano, according to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

The strongest was a 5.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the Big Island two weeks ago, although local officials said it did not cause major damage or injuries.

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