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Blog – Page 4912

Brain cells with the same “birthdate” are more likely to wire together into cooperative signaling circuits that carry out many functions, including the storage of memories, a new study finds.

Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the new study on the brains of mice developing in the womb found that () with the same birthdate showed distinct connectivity and activity throughout the animals’ , whether they were asleep or awake.

Published online August 22 in Nature Neuroscience, the findings suggest that evolution took advantage of the orderly birth of neurons—by gestational day—to form localized microcircuits in the hippocampus, the region that forms memories. Rather than attempting to create each new from scratch, the researchers suggest, the brain may exploit the stepwise formation of neuronal layers to establish neural templates, like “Lego pieces,” that match each new experience to an existing template as it is remembered.

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People have been dreaming of robot butlers for decades, but one of the biggest barriers has been getting machines to understand our instructions. Google has started to close the gap by marrying the latest language AI with state-of-the-art robots.

Human language is often ambiguous. How we talk about things is highly context-dependent, and it typically requires an innate understanding of how the world works to decipher what we’re talking about. So while robots can be trained to carry out actions on our behalf, conveying our intentions to them can be tricky.

If they have any ability to understand language at all, robots are typically designed to respond to short, specific instructions. More opaque directions like “I need something to wash these chips down” are likely to go over their heads, as are complicated multi-step requests like “Can you put this apple back in the fridge and fetch the chocolate?”

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In today’s society, being happy and having an optimistic attitude are social expectations that weigh heavily on how we live and the choices we make.

Some psychologists have pointed out how has evolved into an industry. In turn, this has created what I call a happiness imperative, the social expectation that we should all aspire to happiness.

But this can be an obstacle to happiness. This is why, as a researcher in philosophical , I argue that if we actually want to live better lives, pessimism is the philosophical system that can help us achieve it.

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NASA has dropped a remix of what a black hole sounds like — and it’s exactly what you’d expect. The hole in question sits 200 million light-years away in the Perseus galaxy cluster — an 11 million-light-year-wide set of galaxies packed with hot gas. In the clip, you can hear rumbling and groaning which feels fit for an episode of Stranger Things, but it’s actually pressure waves rippling through the hot gas.

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“We took skin biopsies from patients living with Huntington’s disease and reprogrammed the skin biopsies into neurons. We then compared these neurons with reprogrammed neurons from healthy people. The results are very interesting. We have found several defects that explain some of the disease mechanisms in neurons from patients with Huntington’s disease. Among other things, we observed that neurons from patients with Huntington’s disease show problems in breaking down and recycling a particular kind of protein – which can lead to a lack of energy in these cells”, says Johan Jakobsson, professor of neuroscience at Lund University.

The researchers have also measured the biological age of the cells and observed that the reprogrammed neurons retain their biological age, which is significant if they are to be used for research in the new model system.

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The James Webb Space Telescope team is still flexing its ability to capture detailed images close to home. Webb has snapped a pair of near-infrared photos showing Jupiter’s polar auroras. You can also see the planet’s extremely faint rings and two of its smaller moons, Amalthea (the bright spot to the far left) and Adrastea (the dot at the left edge of the central ring).

The pictures were taken using NIRCam’s widefield view on July 27th. As for the trippy visuals? Astronomers created composites using several images produced with filters mapped to multiple colors (particularly visible in the image below). The Great Red Spot and other cloud formations are white as they reflect large amounts of sunlight.

The James Webb crew didn’t just create these images for the sake of bragging rights. The observations should provide more insights into Jupiter’s “inner life,” according to the European Space Agency. That, in turn, could help scientists understand the behavior of gas giants beyond the Solar System. In other words, Webb’s data could soon prove useful on multiple levels.

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