Menu

Blog

Page 4

Jun 14, 2024

Generation of ‘semi-guided’ cortical organoids with complex neural oscillations

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

This protocol details the generation of cortical organoids with complex neural oscillations through a ‘semi-guided’ protocol, and their functional characterization using microelectrode array measurements, calcium imaging and adeno-associated virus transduction.

Jun 14, 2024

Engineering brain assembloids to interrogate human neural circuits

Posted by in categories: engineering, genetics, neuroscience

A protocol is described for generating human brain assembloids and performing viral labeling and retrograde tracing, 3D live imaging of axon projection and optogenetics with calcium imaging and electrophysiological recordings to model neural circuits.

Jun 14, 2024

Dark matter turns out to be an echo of a parallel Universe

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics, quantum physics

The study is based on several intriguing coincidences. First, observations show that there is about the same amount of ordinary and dark matter, which exceeds baryonic by about five times. And secondly, neutrons and protons have almost the same mass, which allows them to form stable atoms — this is a random but stable property of the quantum world, because otherwise our universe would not be home to any of the atoms that make up stars, planets and ourselves.

In fact, the theory suggests that there may be a parallel universe like ours in which neutrons and protons do not have such convenient symmetry in mass. In this world, there is a “soup” of subatomic particles that interact little, which explains why dark matter does not seem to clump together.

It is important to note that this is just one more of many hypotheses that try to explain the mystery of dark matter – an annoying and lingering unknown in our understanding of the universe.

Jun 14, 2024

Counterfeit Titanium Found In Some Boeing And Airbus Jets

Posted by in categories: materials, transportation

So what else is faked material and what is structural integrity in the world of fakes?


“The planes that included components made with the material were built between 2019 and 2023, among them some Boeing 737 Max…”

Jun 14, 2024

Conservative Black Hole Scattering at Fifth Post-Minkowskian and First Self-Force Order

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

Quantum field theory techniques are employed to compute the conservative scattering dynamics of a pair of black holes to the fifth order in Newton’s constant.

Jun 14, 2024

Why many lung cancer patients who have never smoked have worse outcomes

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

The reason targeted treatment for non-small cell lung cancer fails to work for some patients, particularly those who have never smoked, has been discovered by researchers from UCL, the Francis Crick Institute and AstraZeneca.

The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that lung cancer cells with two particular genetic mutations are more likely to double their genome, which helps them to withstand treatment and develop resistance to it.

In the UK, lung cancer is the third most common type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer death. Around 85% of patients with lung cancer have (NSCLC), and this is the most common type found in patients who have never smoked. Considered separately, “never smoked” lung cancer is the fifth-most common cause of cancer death in the world.

Jun 14, 2024

New Transformer architecture could enable powerful LLMs without GPUs

Posted by in category: computing

The researchers compared two variants of their MatMul-free LM against the advanced Transformer++ architecture, used in Llama-2, on multiple model sizes.

Interestingly, their scaling projections show that the MatMul-free LM is more efficient in leveraging additional compute resources to improve performance in comparison to the Transformer++ architecture.

The researchers also evaluated the quality of the models on several language tasks. The 2.7B MatMul-free LM outperformed its Transformer++ counterpart on two advanced benchmarks, ARC-Challenge and OpenbookQA, while maintaining comparable performance on the other tasks.

Jun 14, 2024

Study Offers New Detail on how COVID-19 Affects the Lungs

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

New research shows that ferroptosis, a form of cell death, occurs in severe COVID-19 patient lungs. Stopping it improves outcomes. In some severe cases of COVID-19, the lungs undergo extreme damage, resulting in a range of life-threatening conditions like pneumonia, inflammation, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The root cause of those wide-ranging reactions in the lungs has until now remained unclear.

A new study by researchers at Columbia and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center sheds light on this mystery.

The study found that ferroptosis, a form of cell death first named and identified at Columbia in 2012, is the major cell death mechanism that underlies COVID-19 lung disease.

Jun 14, 2024

The Habitable Worlds Observatory could See Lunar and Solar ‘Exo-Eclipses’

Posted by in categories: physics, space

A future space observatory could use exo-eclipses to tease out exomoon populations.

If you’re like us, you’re still coming down from the celestial euphoria that was last month’s total solar eclipse. The spectacle of the moon blocking out the sun has also provided astronomers with unique scientific opportunities in the past, from the discovery of helium to proof for general relativity. Now, eclipses in remote exoplanetary systems could aid in the hunt for elusive exomoons.

A recent study out of the University of Michigan in partnership with Johns Hopkins APL and the Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entitled “Exomoons & Exorings with the Habitable Worlds Observatory I: On the Detection of Earth-Moon Analog Shadows & Eclipses,” posted to the arXiv preprint server, looks to use a future mission to hunt for eclipses, transits and occultations in distant systems.

Jun 14, 2024

Dark Matter Decoded: How Neutron Stars May Solve the Universe’s Biggest Mystery

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Scientists may be one step closer to unraveling one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Their recent calculations suggest that neutron stars could play a crucial role in shedding light on the mysterious dark matter.

In a paper published in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, physicists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, led by the University of Melbourne, calculated that energy transferred when dark matter particles collide and annihilate inside cold dead neutron stars can heat the stars up very quickly.

It was previously thought that this energy transfer could take a very long time, in some cases, longer than the age of the universe itself, rendering this heating irrelevant.

Page 4 of 11,31012345678Last