A study of 2,217 kids found that those who played 21 hours of video games per week had greater cognitive abilities than kids who played none.
Twitter is working on a feature that would charge users for some video content, The Washington Post reported.
Referred to as “Paywalled Video,” the new feature would allow content creators to charge users a fee to view videos on the platform, according to an internal email obtained by the publication.
The Post reported that a Twitter employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it seemed like a feature that would probably be used at least partly for adult content.
When we encounter metals in our day-to-day lives, we perceive them as shiny. That’s because common metallic materials are reflective at visible light wavelengths and will bounce back any light that strikes them. While metals are well suited to conducting electricity and heat, they aren’t typically thought of as a means to conduct light.
But in the burgeoning field of quantum materials, researchers are increasingly finding examples that challenge expectations about how things should behave. In new research published in Science Advances, a team led by Dmitri Basov, Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University, describes a metal capable of conducting light. “These results defy our daily experiences and common conceptions,” said Basov.
The work was led by Yinming Shao, now a postdoc at Columbia who transferred as a Ph.D. student when Basov moved his lab from the University of California San Diego to New York in 2016. While working with the Basov group, Shao has been exploring the optical properties of a semimetal material known as ZrSiSe. In 2020 in Nature Physics, Shao and his colleagues showed that ZrSiSe shares electronic similarities with graphene, the first so-called Dirac material discovered in 2004. ZrSiSe, however, has enhanced electronic correlations that are rare for Dirac semimetals.
HOW did our universe begin? This is among the most profound questions of all, and you would be forgiven for thinking it is impossible to answer. But Laura Mersini-Houghton says she has cracked it. A cosmologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was born and raised under communist dictatorship in Albania, where her father was considered ideologically opposed to the regime and exiled. She later won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, forging a career in cosmology in which she has tackled the origins of the universe – and made an extraordinary proposal.
Mersini-Houghton’s big idea is that the universe in its earliest moments can be understood as a quantum wave function – a mathematical description of a haze of possibilities – that gave rise to many diverse universes as well as our own. She has also made predictions about how other universes would leave an imprint upon our own. Those ideas have been controversial, with some physicists arguing that her predictions are invalid. But Mersini-Houghton argues that they have been confirmed by observations of the radiation left over from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background.
Mount Sinai researchers have cataloged thousands of sites in the brain where RNA is modified throughout the human lifespan in a process known as adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) editing, offering important new avenues for understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of brain development and how they factor into both health and disease.
In a study published in Cell Reports, the team described how the rate of RNA editing in the brain increases as individuals age, with implications for dissecting the pathology of altered A-to-I editing across a range of neurodevelopmental and aging disorders.
“Our work provides more nuanced and accurate insights into the contribution of RNA modifications by A-to-I editing during human brain development,” says senior author Michael Breen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and a member of the Seaver Center for Autism Research and Treatment.
Reproduction permanently alters females’ bones in ways not previously known, a team of anthropologists has found. Its discovery, based on an analysis of primates, sheds new light on how giving birth can permanently change the body.
“Our findings provide additional evidence of the profound impact that reproduction has on the female organism, further demonstrating that the skeleton is not a static organ, but a dynamic one that changes with life events,” explains Paola Cerrito, who led the research as a doctoral student in NYU’s Department of Anthropology and College of Dentistry.
Specifically, the researchers found that calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus concentrations are lower in females who have experienced reproduction. These changes are linked to giving birth itself and to lactation.
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new method for determining which genes are relevant to the aging process. The work was done in an animal species widely used as a model for genetic and biological research, but the finding has broader applications for research into the genetics of aging.
“There are a lot of genes out there that we still don’t know what they do, particularly in regard to aging,” says Adriana San Miguel, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State.
That’s because this field faces a very specific technical challenge: by the time you know whether an organism is going to live for a long time, it’s old and no longer able to reproduce. But the techniques we use to study genes require us to work with animals that are capable of reproducing, so we can study the role of specific genes in subsequent generations.