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Blog – Page 7

The brains of humans and other primates are known to execute various sophisticated functions, one of which is the representation of the space immediately surrounding the body. This area, also sometimes referred to as “peripersonal space,” is where most interactions between people and their surrounding environment typically take place.

Researchers at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and other institutes recently investigated the neural processes through which the brain represents the area around the body, using brain-inspired computational models. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that receptive fields surrounding different parts of the body contribute to building a modular model of the space immediately surrounding a person or (AI) agent.

“Our journey into this field began truly serendipitously, during unfunded experiments done purely out of curiosity,” Giandomenico Iannetti, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “We discovered that the hand-blink reflex, which is evoked by electrically shocking the hand, was strongly modulated by the position of the hand with respect to the eye.

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Viruses are entirely dependent on their hosts to reproduce. They ransack living cells for parts and energy and hijack the host’s cellular machinery to make new copies of themselves. Herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1), it turns out, also redecorates, according to a study in Nature Communications.

Researchers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have discovered the cold sore reshapes the human genome’s architecture, rearranging its shape in three-dimensional space so that HSV-1 can access host genes most useful for its ability to reproduce.

“HSV-1 is an opportunistic interior designer, reshaping the human genome with great precision and choosing which bits it comes into contact with. It’s a novel mechanism of manipulation we didn’t know the virus had to exploit host resources,” says Dr. Esther González Almela, first author of the study.

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Astronomers have discovered a huge filament of hot gas bridging four galaxy clusters. At 10 times as massive as our galaxy, the thread could contain some of the universe’s ‘missing’ matter, addressing a decades-long mystery.

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A new cement-based paint can cool down the building by sweating off the heat. The cooling paint, named CCP-30, was designed by an international team of researchers and features a nanoparticle-modified porous structure composed of a calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) gel network.

This design enabled it to achieve superior cooling by combining both radiative, evaporative and reflective cooling mechanisms, which allowed it to reflect 88–92% of sunlight, emit 95% of the heat as , and hold about 30% of its weight in water, making it a paint ideal for keeping spaces cool throughout the day and across seasons.

As per the findings published in Science, the paint provides 10 times the cooling power of commercial cooling paints in tropical climates, resulting in electricity savings of 30 to 40%.

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Clearing your cookies is not enough to protect your privacy online. New research led by Texas A&M University has found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting—a method to uniquely identify a web browser—to track people across browser sessions and sites.

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A research team including members from the University of Michigan have unveiled a new observational technique that’s sensitive to the dynamics of the intrinsic quantum jiggles of materials, or phonons.

This work will help scientists and engineers better design metamaterials—substances that possess exotic properties that rarely exist in nature—that are reconfigurable and made from solutions containing nanoparticles that self-assemble into larger structures, the researchers said. These materials have wide-ranging applications, from shock absorption to devices that guide acoustic and optical energy in high-powered computer applications.

“This opens a new research area where nanoscale building blocks—along with their intrinsic optical, electromagnetic and —can be incorporated into mechanical metamaterials, enabling emerging technologies in multiple fields from robotics and mechanical engineering to information technology,” said Xiaoming Mao, U-M professor of physics and co-author of the new study.

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One of the great biological mysteries of the human body is how hundreds of complex, origami-like proteins, many of which are crucial for normal body function, come to assume their final, correct shape.

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Electricity can be easily converted into heat—every electric cooker does it. But is the opposite also possible? Can heat be converted into electricity—directly, without a steam turbine or similar detours?

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Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have pushed forward the development of computer vision with new, silicon-based hardware that can both capture and process visual data in the analog domain. Their work, described in the journal Nature Communications, could ultimately add to large-scale, data-intensive and latency-sensitive computer vision tasks.

“This is very powerful retinomorphic hardware,” says Guangyu Xu, associate professor of electrical and engineering and adjunct associate professor of biomedical engineering at UMass Amherst. “The idea of fusing the sensing unit and the processing unit at the device level, instead of physically separating them apart, is very similar to the way that process the visual world.”

Existing computer vision systems often involve exchanging redundant data between physically separated sensing and computing units.

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As the number of particles in a physical system increases, its properties can change and different phase transitions (i.e., shifts into different phases of matter) can take place. Microscopic systems (i.e., containing only a few particles) and macroscopic ones (i.e., containing many particles) are thus typically very different, even if the types of particles they are made up of are the same.

Mesoscopic systems lie somewhere between microscopic and macroscopic systems, as they are small enough for individual particle fluctuations to impact their dynamics and yet large enough to support collective particle dynamics. Studying these middle-sized physical systems can yield interesting insight into how the fluctuations of individual particles can give rise to the collective particle behavior observed as a system grows.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley and Columbia University recently introduced a new approach to precisely realize physical systems that are ideal for studying mesoscopic physics and the underpinnings of phase transitions. Their approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, relies on the use of atom tweezer arrays to control the number of atoms in a system and how they interact with light.

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