The effects of exercise would not be nearly as powerful without the input of the brain, according to new research.
A study on mice has found a critical signal in the central nervous system that helps build physical endurance in the wider body after repeated exercise.
Traditionally, scientists thought that our body’s extensive response to frequent exercise occurred mainly in the periphery, such as the bones and muscles, and the heart.
Humanoid robots with full-body autonomy are rapidly advancing and are expected to create a $50 trillion market, transforming industries, economy, and daily life ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.
Neural Network Architecture & Control.
🤖 Q: How does Figure 3’s neural network control differ from traditional robotics? A: Figure 3 uses end-to-end neural networks for full-body control, manipulation, and room-scale planning, replacing the previous C++-based control stack entirely, with System Zero being a fully learned reinforcement learning controller running with no code on the robot.
🎯 Q: What enables Figure 3’s high-frequency motor control for complex tasks? A: Palm cameras and onboard inference enable high-frequency torque control of 40+ motors for complex bimanual tasks, replanning, and error recovery in dynamic environments, representing a significant improvement over previous models.
🔄 Q: How does Figure’s data-driven approach create competitive advantage? A: Data accumulation and neural net retraining provides competitive advantage over traditional C++ code, allowing rapid iteration and improvement, with positive transfer observed as diverse knowledge enables emergent generalization with larger pre-training datasets.
🧠 Q: Where is the robot’s compute located and why? A: The brain-like compute unit is in the head for sensors and heat dissipation, while the torso contains the majority of onboard computation, with potential for latex or silicone face for human-like interaction.
Scientific notation is a system developed to represent extremely large and extremely small numbers in a way that is easy to read, write, and understand. In chemistry and physics, many values such as the mass of an electron are too large or too small to be written conveniently in standard notation.
In this video, you will learn:
What scientific notation is and why it is used.
How to write numbers in the form a × 10ⁿ, where a is between 1 and 10
How to convert large numbers into scientific notation.
How to convert small numbers into scientific notation.
The LARS rule:
Left → Add to the exponent.
Right → Subtract from the exponent.
We also discuss how the direction of decimal movement affects the exponent and why the same rules apply to both very large and very small numbers.
📌 At the end of the video, you’ll find practice multiple-choice questions (MCQs) to test your understanding, including a real-life chemistry example involving the mass of an electron.
What are the genetic origins of early-onset obesity?
Studying a cohort of young adults in China, researchers in Science TranslationalMedicine performed deep sequencing and identified a loss-of-function variant in the gene TUB that impairs sensitivity to leptin.
Rare human TUB variants impair leptin sensitivity through disruption of STAT3 activation, leading to hyperphagic obesity.
There are documentaries about history, and then there are documentaries about the people who were quietly in the room when history happened.
STARMAN, the new film from Academy Award–nominated director Robert Stone, belongs firmly in the latter category. It chronicles the life of Gentry Lee—NASA scientist, mission architect, science communicator, and one of those rare figures whose career seems to map directly onto the modern Space Age.
If the Space Age began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, then Gentry Lee—born in 1942—has lived his entire adult life shaped by humanity’s reach beyond Earth. More than a witness to that history, Lee has been in the room for many of its defining moments.
As a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lee served as Director of Science Analysis and Mission Planning for the Viking mission to Mars and the Galileo probe to Jupiter, missions that transformed our understanding of the solar system. Alongside this work, he collaborated with Carl Sagan on PBS’s landmark series COSMOS, narrated Discovery Channel’s ARE WE ALONE?, and co-authored four novels with legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.
A Zelig-like figure at the crossroads of interplanetary science and science fiction, Gentry Lee has been everywhere—and worked with everyone—who helped define how we imagine space.
Now the subject of STARMAN, Lee guides us through a lifetime of curiosity, wonder, and exploration. The film is both entertaining and illuminating—and our conversation with him reflects that same spirit.
The research of artificial intelligence is undergoing a paradigm shift from prioritizing model innovations over benchmark scores towards emphasizing problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation. As the field enters the “second half,” the central challenge becomes real utility in long-horizon, dynamic, and user-dependent environments, where agents face context explosion and must continuously accumulate, manage, and selectively reuse large volumes of information across extended interactions. Memory, with hundreds of papers released this year, therefore emerges as the critical solution to fill the utility gap. In this survey, we provide a unified view of foundation agent memory along three dimensions: memory substrate (internal and external), cognitive mechanism (episodic, semantic, sensory, working, and procedural), and memory subject (agent- and user-centric). We then analyze how memory is instantiated and operated under different agent topologies and highlight learning policies over memory operations. Finally, we review evaluation benchmarks and metrics for assessing memory utility, and outline various open challenges and future directions.
New in the RedJournal: replanned TROG 12.01 unilateral cases to define guidelines for unilateral RT planning with maximal midline and contralateral sparing. @TROGfightcancer RadOnc HNcsm.
Unilateral radiotherapy (URT) is an effective treatment strategy in selected patients with lateralized tonsil cancer. However, there is a lack of established planning guidelines for URT treatment leading to suboptimal optimization of contralateral and midline organs at risk (OARs). This study aimed to re-optimize URT plans to maximize sparing of midline and contralateral OAR’s while maintaining target coverage, providing dosimetric guidelines for URT planning.