Toggle light / dark theme

Summary: Disruptions in how the body converts cholesterol into bile acids may play a key role in the development of dementia.

Source: PLOS

The blood-brain barrier is impermeable to cholesterol, yet high blood cholesterol is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia. However, the underlying mechanisms mediating this relationship are poorly understood.

Falling drops usually make a splash, but these drops do the twist. Researchers have created surfaces that can make droplets spin and whirl at more than 7300 revolutions per minute when they rebound.

To make the water droplets spin, researchers first had to make sure they didn’t wet the surface they fell on—otherwise, they’d just splash. The researchers did this by coating alumina plates with a fluorinated nonstick coating, similar to those found in nonstick cooking pans. Next, they masked some regions of the surface and shone ultraviolet (UV) light on the entire plate. The regions exposed to the UV became highly “wettable,” meaning water touching those regions spread out immediately rather than bouncing back up. The team created several designs of the wettable regions, including one with spiral arms radiating out from a center, much like a pinwheel.

As the droplet bounds up from the patterned surface, the portions encountering the wettable spirals stick to the surface, whereas the parts of the droplet in contact with the water-repelling surface rebound immediately. This creates a set of unbalanced forces, pulling on the droplet more in some parts than in others, twisting it, the team reports today in.

Scientists say the system could be used to find ‘hidden gems’ of research and guide research funding allocations.


An artificial intelligence system trained on almost 40 years of the scientific literature correctly identified 19 out of 20 research papers that have had the greatest scientific impact on biotechnology – and has selected 50 recent papers it predicts will be among the ‘top 5%’ of biotechnology papers in the future.1

Scientists say the system could be used to find ‘hidden gems’ of research overlooked by other methods, and even to guide decisions on funding allocations so that it will be most likely to target promising research.

But it’s sparked outrage among some members of the scientific community, who claim it will entrench existing biases.

Scientists have taken a step towards the creation of powerful devices that harness magnetic charge by creating the first ever three-dimensional replica of a material known as a spin-ice.

Spin ice materials are extremely unusual as they possess so-called defects which behave as the single pole of a magnet.

These single pole magnets, also known as magnetic monopoles, do not exist in nature; when every is cut into two it will always create a new magnet with a north and south pole.

Between the rolled eyes, shrugged shoulders, jazzed hands and warbling vocal inflection, it’s not hard to tell when someone’s being sarcastic as they’re giving you the business face to face. Online, however, you’re going to need that SpongeBob meme and a liberal application of the shift key to get your contradictory point across. Lucky for us netizens, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has collaborated with researchers from the University of Central Florida to develop a deep learning AI capable of understanding written sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy.

“With the high velocity and volume of social media data, companies rely on tools to analyze data and to provide customer service. These tools perform tasks such as content management, sentiment analysis, and extraction of relevant messages for the company’s customer service representatives to respond to,” UCF Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Ivan Garibay, told Engadget via email. “However, these tools lack the sophistication to decipher more nuanced forms of language such as sarcasm or humor, in which the meaning of a message is not always obvious and explicit. This imposes an extra burden on the social media team, which is already inundated with customer messages to identify these messages and respond appropriately.”

As they explain in a study published in the journal, Entropy, Garibay and UCF PhD student Ramya Akula have built “an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text.”

As part of preparing for an experiment aboard the International Space Station, researchers explored new ways to culture living heart cells for microgravity research. They found that cryopreservation, a process of storing cells at-80°C, makes it easier to transport these cells to the orbiting lab, providing more flexibility in launch and operations schedules. The process could benefit other biological research in space and on Earth.

The investigation, MVP Cell-03, cultured heart precursor on the station to study how microgravity affects the number of cells produced and how many of them survive. These precursor cells have potential for use in disease modeling, drug development, and , such as using cultured to replenish those damaged or lost due to cardiac disease.

Previous studies suggest that culturing such cells in simulated microgravity increases the efficiency of their production. But using live cell cultures in space presents some unique challenges. The MVP Cell-03 experiment, for example, must be conducted within a specific timeframe, when the cells are at just the right stage. Flight changes and crew availability could lead to delays that affect the research.