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Procrastination in adulthood linked to brain development during adolescence

Procrastination, the tendency to unnecessarily delay or put off tasks even if this will have negative consequences, is a common behavior for many people. While occasionally delaying or putting off bothersome tasks is not necessarily problematic, severe and prolonged procrastination is closely tied to some neuropsychiatric disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety disorders.

Unveiling patterns in the brain’s structure and genetic factors linked to procrastination could help to reliably uncover this tendency to postpone tasks in affected individuals. This could in turn inform the development of preventative strategies or interventions that tackle procrastination early, before it exacerbates other underlying mental health disorders.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutes in China recently carried out a study aimed at shedding new light on the biological and genetic roots of procrastination. Their paper, published in Molecular Psychiatry, outlines specific patterns in the brain’s structure during adolescence that are linked to procrastination in adulthood.

An organ-conformal, kirigami-structured bioelectronic patch for precise intracellular delivery

Now online! Organ-level localized delivery is a long-standing challenge, especially for gene therapy. This study establishes a universal conformality theory that enables POCKET—a kirigami-structured bioelectronic patch—to integrate seamlessly with organs and realize precise intracellular electro-delivery of therapeutics without off-target effects.

Bitly: Among adults with treatment-refractory

HER2-positive BiliaryTractCancer, zanidatamab produced sustained, meaningful clinical responses and extended survival compared to prior standards.

In patients with immunohistochemistry (IHC) 3+ tumors, response rates and overall survival were notably higher than those with IHC 2+ tumors, substantiating the use of reflex IHC testing to identify candidates for HER2-targeted therapy.

Safety remained consistent over 33 months of follow-up, and the ongoing HERIZON-BTC-302 phase 3 trial is assessing zanidatamab alongside first-line standard care in this setting.

This is a 404 error, which means you’ve clicked on a bad link or entered an invalid URL. Maybe what you are looking for can be found at Bitly.com. P.S. Bitly links are case sensitive.

Measuring the quantum extent of a single molecule confined to a nanodroplet

There is no measurement that can directly observe the wave function of a quantum mechanical system, but the wave function is still enormously useful as its (complex) square represents the probability density of the system or elements of the system. But for a confined system, the wave function can be inferred.

Scientists from China have now shown that the wave function’s dependence in space can be determined for a single molecule embedded in a superfluid helium nanodroplet. Their research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

NVIDIA Offers “Vera” CPU as a Standalone Competitor to Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s EPYC Processors

NVIDIA’s integration of AI systems now extends beyond GPUs with generic Arm CPUs. The company is introducing its high-performance “Vera” CPUs as a standalone product, marking its first entry as a competitor to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server-grade CPUs. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed this new venture in an interview with Bloomberg, stating, “For the very first time, we’re going to be offering Vera CPUs. Vera is such an incredible CPU. We’re going to offer Vera CPUs as a standalone part of the infrastructure. You can now run your computing stack not only on NVIDIA GPUs but also on NVIDIA CPUs. Vera is completely revolutionary… Coreweave will have to act quickly if they want to be the first to implement Vera CPUs. We haven’t announced any of our CPU design wins yet, but there will be many.”

The “Vera” CPU is equipped with 88 custom Armv9.2 “Olympus” cores that utilize Spatial Multithreading technology, allowing it to handle 176 threads through physical resource partitioning. These custom cores support native FP8 processing, enabling some AI workloads to be executed directly on the CPU with 6x128-bit SVE2 implementation. The chip offers 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth and supports up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory, making it ideal for memory-intensive computing tasks. However, with the CPU now being offered as a standalone solution, it is unclear whether there will be any classic memory options like DDR5 RDIMMs, or if the CPU will rely solely on SOCAMM LPDDR5X. A second-generation Scalable Coherency Fabric provides 3.4 TB/s of bisection bandwidth, connecting the cores across a unified monolithic die and eliminating the latency issues common in chiplet architectures. Additionally, NVIDIA has integrated a second-generation NVLink Chip-to-Chip technology, delivering up to 1.

Prenatal exposure to air pollution associated with lower cognitive performance in early childhood

The prenatal period is a critical window for brain development, yet few studies have examined the impact of air pollution exposure during pregnancy on child cognition. A new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), in collaboration with the University of Barcelona (UB), shows that prenatal exposure to pollution is associated with lower cognitive performance in newborns.

These findings highlight the importance of reducing air pollution exposure, especially during pregnancy, to protect neurodevelopment.

The study, published in Environmental Pollution, included data from 168 mother-child pairs participating in the BiSC (Barcelona Life Study Cohort) project, conducted in Barcelona between 2018 and 2023.

Brain Scans Reveal an “Inflamed Brain Type” Across Major Psychiatric Disorders

Individuals with psychiatric disorders exhibiting seemingly similar symptoms often respond very differently to the same treatment, suggesting that distinct biological processes are at work beneath the surface of similar clinical presentations. Researchers have now identified a distinct immuno-inflammatory biomarker across major psychiatric disorders that can be detected using non-invasive brain imaging. Patients exhibiting this brain signature showed systemic inflammation and poorer response to standard treatments. The findings of the new study in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, lay the foundation for a biology-augmented diagnostic framework in psychiatry and detail the potential for biomarker-guided, anti-inflammatory precision therapies.

Neuroimaging links diverse biological mechanisms to clinical manifestations, providing compelling insights into the neural mechanisms underlying brain function implicated in psychiatric diseases. Through neuroimaging, shared neural correlates have been increasingly identified across major psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. While subtypes within and across psychiatric diagnoses have been identified, the biological underpinnings remain unclear. This study aimed to uncover these hidden “biotypes,” focusing particularly on brain inflammation—a mechanism thought to drive illness in a subset of patients, but which is difficult to measure directly in the living brain.

The research was conducted in two independent cohorts. In the first stage, brain connectivity scans were combined with blood-based molecular (DNA methylation) data to identify a brain network pattern linked to immune system dysfunction. In the second longitudinal stage, investigators validated that patients with this brain marker had higher blood inflammation indices—such as neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratios—and showed less improvement with conventional treatments during hospitalization.

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