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Rust-to-iron cycle may unlock long-term storage for renewable energy

In the future, iron might be used as a chemical energy storage material, making large quantities of renewable energy available in the long term. Iron powder is combusted in a cyclic process that is carbon neutral and then reconverted to its original state using energy input. Scientists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) were the first to conduct an extensive study to evaluate the potential of this technology for power generation. Their results show that iron, while not superseding hydrogen, may usefully complement it in a climate-neutral energy system. The findings have been published in Chem Circularity.

Be it for wind energy from coastal regions or for solar power from desert areas, iron could serve as a transportable energy carrier in the future to make these renewable energy sources usable worldwide. “This works in a cycle that emits no carbon dioxide or environmentally harmful substances,” said Julia Schuler from KIT’s Institute for Industrial Production (IIP). For power generation, iron powder is combusted, producing iron oxide, i.e. rust. Using hydrogen from renewable sources, it is reduced to iron again in a process that removes the oxygen it contains. The iron powder can then be reused.

“When burned, iron powder behaves very much like coal. We wanted to find out whether it was possible to repurpose existing coal power plants to iron-firing,” said Schuler. She believes that modifications are primarily necessary in the heat generator; other components, such as the steam cycle, turbines, generator and power grid connection, could continue to be used.

In a Flight of Starlings by Giorgio Parisi

From the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, an enlightening and personal journey into the practice of groundbreaking science.

“[Giorgio Parisi is] an extraordinary scientist.” —Carlo Rovelli

With In a Flight of Starlings, celebrated physicist Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work, starting with investigating the principles of physics by observing the flight of flocks of birds. Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds—collections of everything from atoms and planets to other animals, such as ourselves.

As Grand As Dune… Yet Few Have Seen It

Often compared to Frank Herbert’s Dune, this story follows advanced civilizations and their fates across a dark galaxy as they begin to discover the remnants of a far superior progenitor civilization, one that disappeared long before the galactic dating system even began.

This is a full version of Homeworld 1 lore series all put together into one long form video. Enjoy!

Chapters:
00:00 Progenitor Civilization & The Exiles.
05:56 Alien Super-Technology.
09:06 The Great Nebula.
17:49 The Galactic Core.
20:19 Alien Mega-Structures.
22:49 The Homeworld.

Characters and terminology mentioned in the video:
Kharak: The desert planet where Kushan have been exiled 4,000 years ago.
Bentusi: The oldest known alien civilization, and the only one to officially posses hyperspace far-jump technology. Unlike short-jump, it allows near-instantaneous travel to virtually any location in the galaxy.
Taiidan: A powerful empire controlling much of the inner galaxy, including Hiigara.
Kushan: A humanoid civilization exiled from Hiigara 4,000 years ago by the Taiidan. They settled on a desert planet called Kharak. After integrating forbidden hyperspace far-jump core into their Mothership, Kharak was destroyed by the Taiidan.
Kadeshi: The same species as the Kushan. During exile, they settled inside the Great Nebula, which they now call the Garden of Kadesh.
Karan S’jet: The living mind of the Kushan Mothership. Something like a navigator from Dune.
Turanic Raiders: Hostile alien civilization loyal to the Taiidan.
Hyperspace Inhibitors: Technology that shuts down hyperspace engines of any passing ship in a very large radius.
Hiigara: Ancient home of the Kushan, before their exile.
Captain Elson: The leader of Taiidan Rebelion.

You can get the remastered game at: https://store.steampowered.com/
Good Site for Homeworld lore: https://homeworld.fandom.com.

Footage:

Can Mushrooms Reduce LDL? 53-Test Analysis

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The cortical column as a tuned receiver: a network mechanism for temporal-interference stimulation

Temporal-interference (TI) stimulation promises what other non-invasive methods cannot: focal, steerable stimulation deep in the brain, produced where two high-frequency currents overlap and their amplitudes beat at a low difference frequency. Yet a puzzle sits at its core. An amplitude-modulated field carries no power at that beat frequency, so no passive, linear part of a neuron can follow it; recovering the beat requires a nonlinearity, usually sought in single-cell ion channels. Here we show that the recovery, and its tuning, are properties of the neural population rather than the single cell. In a neural mass—the $ $$104$-neuron unit that generates the EEG—the firing-rate nonlinearity acts as a square-law detector that demodulates the beat, while the recurrent synaptic network, poised near a Hopf bifurcation, resonantly amplifies the recovered rhythm at its own natural frequency. Detection is inherited from the single neuron; the sharp, frequency-selective amplification is emergent—set by how near the network sits to criticality, and tunable by its own connectivity. Demonstrated in a heuristic cortical column and in an exact next-generation mean field, the mechanism reproduces TI’s known behavior: it is independent of the carrier once the membrane polarization is matched, largest when the beat matches a region’s intrinsic rhythm, and—because the resonance amplifies oscillatory timing far more than mean rate—locks spike timing without changing firing rate, as observed in vivo. Because the gain depends on brain state, TI efficacy should be as much a property of the brain as of the device: the cortical column behaves as a tuned AM radio receiver.: temporal interference; transcranial stimulation; neural mass model; amplitude demodulation; Hopf bifurcation; cross-frequency coupling; Jansen–Rit; LaNMM.

Engineers develop AI tool to design peptides that turn signals on or off

To develop new and better peptides, the short amino acid strings behind medicines like GLP-1 drugs, researchers have used AI to generate candidates and to predict their properties.

However, merging these capabilities into a system that generates peptides likely to activate or block specific targets has proven difficult. In part, this is due to the vast number of possible peptides, but also because predicting how readily a peptide will bind to a target—like G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), a family of cell-surface proteins targeted by about one-third of approved drugs—is easier than simultaneously forecasting what effect that binding will have.

Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and The Chinese University of Hong Kong have created TD3B, an AI framework that guides peptide generation toward candidates predicted to have a desired effect. The results, which focus on GPCRs, are described in a paper presented as a Spotlight at the 2026 International Conference on Machine Learning.

The same sounds are mapped similarly in the human and mouse brain, study finds

While exploring the world around them, both humans and other animals continuously interpret information they pick up with their sight, hearing, touch and other senses. Neuroscience research suggests that the brain does not individually process every single sensory experience, but rather organizes information into mental models known as internal representations.

Internal representations can help recognize familiar patterns or relationships between different stimuli and experiences. While many past studies have explored the role of these perceptual “maps,” fewer have looked at how stimuli are represented in the brains of different species and how they influence learning and decision-making.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz recently carried out experiments aimed at better understanding how humans and mice perceive, mentally represent and distinguish the same sounds. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that sounds are organized similarly in the human and mouse brain, but also that auditory maps tend to remain surprisingly stable during learning and decision-making.

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