Now is the time to decipher what makes the brain both flexible and dependable—and to apply those lessons to AI—before an unaligned agentic system wreaks havoc.
For nearly two decades, scientists have been puzzled by the corrosion of negatively polarized platinum electrodes, a costly issue for water electrolyzers used in hydrogen production and electrochemical sensors.
Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Leiden University have identified the culprit, paving the way for cheaper hydrogen energy and more reliable sensors.
Huntington’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that is usually fatal about 15 to 20 years after a patient is diagnosed. It is known to be caused by an aberrant repetitive sequence (CAG) in the huntingtin gene. Unaffected people carry fewer than 35 of these CAG repeats, while Huntington’s patients have more than 40 CAG repeats, which get longer, or expand over their lifetime. Scientists have now revealed that a specific subset of genes related to the repair of mismatched DNA, may have a key role in Huntington’s disease. The neurons that are impaired in Huntington’s are particularly susceptible to this mismatch damage that is not fixed. The findings have been reported in Cell.
In this work, the researchers used a mouse model of Huntington’s disease to study the impact of several genes on the disorder, including six genes related to DNA mismatch repair. In mice that were engineered to lack the mismatch repair genes Msh3 and Pms1, many of the symptoms of Huntington’s that these mice mimic were rescued. Some of the molecular and cellular pathology of Huntingon’s disease (HD) was no longer observed in the brains of these animals, and there were improvements in gait and movement.
Hollywood star Brad Pitt recently opened SINTEF’s conference on digital security. Well, actually, no, he didn’t. “I cloned his voice in less than three minutes,” says Viggo Tellefsen Wivestad, researcher at SINTEF Digital.
Wivestad began his talk on deepfake with himself on video, but as Brad, with his characteristic sexy voice: “Deepfake. Scary stuff, right?” And that is precisely the researcher’s message.
Deepfake will become a growing threat to us as both private individuals and employees, and to society at large. The technology is still in its infancy. Artificial intelligence is opening up unimaginable opportunities and becoming harder and harder to detect.
A new Nature Physics study has shed light on the long-hypothesized liquid-liquid critical point where water simultaneously exists in two distinct liquid forms, opening new possibilities for experimental validation.
Water is known for its anomalous properties—unlike most substances, water is densest in its liquid state, not solid. This leads to unique behaviors such as ice floating on water.
One of several such unusual characteristics has prompted decades of research to understand water’s unique behavior, particularly in the supercooled regime.
Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have developed a method that makes objects on a magnetic field invisible within a particle stream. Until now, this so-called cloaking had only been studied for waves such as light or sound. They report their results in Nature Communications.
Making objects invisible is no longer a purely fictional idea from fantasy or sci-fi films. At least to some extent, cloaking also works in research: manipulating objects in such a way that they become invisible to certain waves such as light or sound.
The Bayreuth researchers are extending cloaking to particle motions. Cloaking for particle streams on miniaturized chemical laboratories, so-called lab-on-a-chip devices, can help to transport active ingredients in a targeted manner without exposing them to undesirable premature chemical reactions.
ETH Zurich researchers have investigated how tiny gas bubbles can deliver drugs into cells in a targeted manner using ultrasound. For the first time, they have visualized how tiny cyclic microjets liquid jets generated by microbubbles penetrate the cell membrane, enabling the drug uptake.
The targeted treatment of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or brain tumors is challenging because the brain is a particularly sensitive organ that is well protected. That’s why researchers are working on ways of delivering drugs to the brain precisely, via the bloodstream. The aim is to overcome the blood–brain barrier, which normally only allows certain nutrients and oxygen to pass through.
Microbubbles that react to ultrasound are a particularly promising method for this sort of therapy. These microbubbles are smaller than a red blood cell, are filled with gas and have a special coating of fat molecules to stabilize them. They are injected into the bloodstream together with the drug and then activated at the target site using ultrasound. The movement of the microbubbles creates tiny pores in the cell membrane of the blood vessel wall that the drug can then pass through.
Rain can freefall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. If the droplets land in a puddle or pond, they can form a crown-like splash that, with enough force, can dislodge any surface particles and launch them into the air.
Now MIT scientists have taken high-speed videos of droplets splashing into a deep pool, to track how the fluid evolves, above and below the water line, frame by millisecond frame. Their work could help to predict how spashing droplets, such as from rainstorms and irrigation systems, may impact watery surfaces and aerosolize surface particles, such as pollen on puddles or pesticides in agricultural runoff.
The team carried out experiments in which they dispensed water droplets of various sizes and from various heights into a pool of water. Using high-speed imaging, they measured how the liquid pool deformed as the impacting droplet hit the pool’s surface.
Optical atomic clocks can increase the precision of time and geographic position a thousandfold in our mobile phones, computers, and GPS systems. However, they are currently too large and complex to be widely used in society.
Now, a research team from Purdue University, U.S., and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has developed a technology that, with the help of on-chip microcombs, could make ultra-precise optical atomic clock systems significantly smaller and more accessible—with significant benefits for navigation, autonomous vehicles, and geo-data monitoring.
The research is published in the journal Nature Photonics.
The practice of purposely looping thread to create intricate knit garments and blankets has existed for millennia. Though its precise origins have been lost to history, artifacts like a pair of wool socks from ancient Egypt suggest it dates back as early as the third to fifth century CE. Yet, for all its long-standing ubiquity, the physics behind knitting remains surprisingly elusive.
“Knitting is one of those weird, seemingly simple but deceptively complex things we take for granted,” says theoretical physicist and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Lauren Niu, who recently took up the craft as a means to study how “geometry influences the mechanical properties and behavior of materials.”
Despite centuries of accumulated knowledge, predicting how a particular knit pattern will behave remains difficult—even with modern digital tools and automated knitting machines. “It’s been around for so long, but we don’t really know how it works,” Niu notes. “We rely on intuition and trial and error, but translating that into precise, predictive science is a challenge.”