The one thing we all ‘know’ about black holes is that nothing escapes their ineluctable grasp.
That is mostly true – but since the 1970s, physicists have predicted that black holes could slowly lose energy in the form of thermal radiation.
This is Hawking radiation, and while it has been recreated in laboratory analogs, the mechanism whereby it siphons energy from a black hole, known as backreaction, has remained elusive.
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers have created a detailed map of the pulvinar, a deep brain region that could help doctors more precisely target brain stimulation therapies for people with drug-resistant epilepsy. The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, reveal that brain regions separated by only a few millimeters connect to entirely different
Engineers at Queen Mary University of London have built a new color-changing tactile sensor, which allows robots to “see” and touch in real-time. The novel idea was invented by Giacomo Sasso, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Engineering and Materials Science at Queen Mary University of London, and it works by transforming invisible forces into dynamic color patterns. This enables high-resolution maps of contact, strain and pressure to emerge instantly.
The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
When pressure is applied to a soft sensing surface, the material produces spatially varying structural colors that can be captured immediately using a standard camera, removing the need for complex reconstruction algorithms.
“A lot of [the research subjects] are engineers, scientists—like very rational people,” Lifshitz says. “And it just shows me that the imagination is so powerful, that there’s so much we don’t even know yet about, if you invest energy into your imagination, it can actually come to life.”
He believes that through experiences like nature exposure, psychedelic therapy, or practices like creating a Tulpa, people can train themselves to be more absorptive. And that, from his perspective, would create a better world.
“I’m personally really interested in the idea that you can actually train yourself to have life feel more magical,” Lifshitz says. “You can make life enchanted through the power of your mind.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, a quarter of cancer deaths can be attributed to one source: cachexia. Cachexia is a syndrome that accompanies underlying chronic illness and causes unwanted muscle and fat loss, reducing quality of life and sometimes even limiting treatment options.
A new study led by Thales Papagiannakopoulos, Ph.D., an incoming Salk professor, published in Science, points to a potential new target for preventing cachexia.
The researchers found that a common genetic subset of lung cancer is more prone to cachexia and that tumors from this subtype talk to the brain through sensory neurons in the lung. Silencing these sensory nerves to disrupt the tumor-to-brain connection reduced cachexia, as did blocking the production of the lipid signaling molecule prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) through dietary changes.
Why do people make the choices they do? Researchers from the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and the University of Basel present their new approach to finding answers to that question. The approach combines observed choices with participants’ own descriptions of their decision processes, allowing researchers to study human behavior in greater detail than is possible with behavioral data alone.
The team merged behavioral experiments and free-text explanations to uncover the reasons underlying human decisions with the help of large language models (LLM). Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
