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Summary: Study identifies a different set of individual neurons in the medial frontal cortex that is responsible for memory-based decision making. The findings have implications for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and other disorders associated with problems in cognitive flexibility.

Source: CalTech

Continue reading “‘Where are my keys?’ and other memory-based choices probed in the brain” »

Smart phone apps provide nearly instantaneous navigation on Earth; the Deep Space Atomic Clock could do the same for future robotic and human explorers.

As the time when NASA will begin sending humans back to the Moon draws closer, crewed trips to Mars are an enticing next step. But future space explorers will need new tools when traveling to such distant destinations. The Deep Space Atomic Clock mission is testing a new navigation technology that could be used by both human and robotic explorers making their way around the Red Planet and other deep space destinations.

In less than a year of operations, the mission has passed its primary goal to become one of the most stable clocks to ever fly in space; it is now at least 10 times more stable than atomic clocks flown on GPS satellites. In order to keep testing the system, NASA has extended the mission through August 2021. The team will use the additional mission time to continue to improve the clock’s stability, with a goal of becoming 50 times more stable than GPS atomic clocks.

It started with a blast.

On June 23, construction company Kiewit Alberici Joint Venture set off explosives 3,650 feet beneath the surface in Lead, South Dakota, to begin creating space for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab.

The blast is the start of underground excavation activity for the experiment, known as DUNE, and the infrastructure that powers and houses it, called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, or LBNF.

Modern physics knows a great deal about how the universe works, from the grand scale of galaxies down to the infinitesimally small size of quarks and gluons. Still, the answers to some major mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter and origin of gravity, have remained out of reach.

Caltech physicists and their colleagues using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in existence, and its Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment have made a new observation of very rare events that could help take physics beyond its current understanding of the world.

The new observation involves the simultaneous production of three W or Z bosons, subatomic “mediator particles” that carry the weak force—one of the four known fundamental forces —which is responsible for the phenomenon of radioactivity as well as an essential ingredient in the sun’s thermonuclear processes.

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology have developed MathDeck, an online search interface that allows anyone to easily create, edit and lookup sophisticated math formulas on the computer.

Created by an interdisciplinary team of more than a dozen faculty and students, MathDeck aims to make math notation interactive and easily shareable, rather than an obstacle to mathematical study and exploration. The math-aware search interface is free to the public and available to use at mathdeck.cs.rit.edu.

Researchers said the project stems from a growing public interest in being able to do web searches with math keywords and formulas. However, for many people, it can be difficult to accurately express sophisticated math without an understanding of the scientific markup language LaTeX.

Astronomers have discovered and validated two small exoplanets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star TOI-1266.

Elon Musk is hinting at Tesla Cybertruck being virtually amphibious, and it’s not clear if he’s actually kidding.

Sometimes, Musk makes comments about future Tesla products and features that can be hard to judge.

For example, it was hard to tell if he was kidding when he said that the next Tesla Roadster would be equipped with a cold air thruster, but that’s apparently happening.

AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine is probably the world’s leading candidate and most advanced in terms of development, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief scientist said on Friday.

A team of scientists, led by Natural History Museum postdoctoral researcher Dr. Anne-Claire Fabre, have conducted the first study on how metamorphosis has influenced the evolution of salamanders.

Using micro-CT scanning to study the skulls of this group of animals, the team were able to build a huge dataset of 148 species of salamanders and used cutting-edge methods to describe the shape of the skull with nearly 1000 reference points, known as landmarks.

Dr. Fabre said, “Most studies of this kind are limited to just a few dozen landmarks. Our study is the first large-scale investigation of this incredibly diverse group. We have captured the shape of the skull in such great detail that it has allowed us to learn more than ever before about how these creatures evolved.”