Reflections from Brookhaven Lab physicists on culmination of 2020–22 U.S. high-energy physics community planning process.
Researchers have succeeded in making photosynthesis more efficient in soybean plants, in a major breakthrough that will mean less forest has to be cut down to make way for farms.
The 13 regions at the moon’s South Pole are a long way from where Neil Armstrong explored.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Argentina has found chromosomal evidence of people living in South America as far back as 18,000 years ago. The group has published a paper describing their work and findings on the open access site PLOS ONE.
Over the past several years, scientists have found evidence of people first traveling to North America from Siberia approximately 14,000 to 17,000 years ago, using what was then a land bridge to Alaska. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence suggesting that the timeline may have to be pushed back a bit.
Rather than looking for tools or bones left behind by the first people to travel to South America—which presumably was populated by people moving south down through North America and then through Central America—the researchers used a chromosomal approach.
A new generation of AI image tools can reproduce an artist’s signature style. Some creatives fear for their livelihoods.
Summary: Increasing neurogenesis by deleting the Bax gene in mouse models of Alzheimer’s improved the animals’ performance in tests measuring spatial recognition and contextual memory.
Source: Rockefeller University.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered that increasing the production of new neurons in mice with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) rescues the animals’ memory defects.
How to Build a GPT-3 for Science
Posted in robotics/AI, science
A GPT-3-like AI model for science would accelerate innovation and improve reproducibility. Creating it will require us to unlock research.
Summary: Researchers have developed a new sensor that allows scientists to image the brain without missing signals for an extended period of time and deeper in the brain than current technology allows.
Source: Baylor College of Medicine.
As you are reading these words, certain regions of your brain are displaying a flurry of millisecond-fast electrical activity. Visualizing and measuring this electrical activity is crucial to understand how the brain enables us to see, move, behave or read these words.
A novel method for measuring nanoparticle size could have applications in industry and basic materials science research.
Nanoparticles are present in everything from paints to pharmaceutical products. While nanoparticles have many important characteristics, such as molecular composition and shape, it is their size that determines many chemical and physical properties. A new technique relying on an optical vortex—a laser beam whose wave fronts twist around a dark central region—allows researchers to characterize nanoparticle size rapidly and continuously [1]. This light-based size probe might one day find applications in numerous industrial settings and aid fundamental materials science research.
It is difficult to precisely synthesize nanoparticles with the desired dimensions, so manufacturers must often validate that their nanoparticles have the right size to comply with regulations and to ensure product quality. There are many ways of determining nanoparticle size, but one popular approach, dynamic light scattering (DLS), is based on measurements of Brownian motion, the random particle movement caused by jostling from the surrounding liquid medium. In DLS, the Brownian motion is determined by measuring fluctuations in laser light scattering from the nanoparticles. In general, the faster the Brownian motion, the smaller the particles. But current techniques are generally not capable of characterizing the largest particles and measuring them continuously.