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The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning (warm temperatures, strong winds and low humidity) for Southern California that spans from Tuesday to Wednesday in the Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and Ventura counties, and from Tuesday to Thursday in the San Bernadino, Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties.

Sporadic power outages have materialized in the San Fernando Valley, a highly populated area north of the Hollywood Hills, with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reporting a few thousand customers without power as of 5 p.m. PST.

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Green tech innovations to combat climate change.

As the world faces the accelerating impacts of climate change, there is an urgent need for solutions that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote sustainability, and protect the environment. Green technology, or “green tech,” is playing a critical role in the fight against climate change. This innovative field focuses on creating products, services, and systems that minimize the environmental impact of human activities while promoting sustainability. In this article, we explore the latest green tech innovations and how they are transforming industries, driving sustainability, and contributing to a greener planet.

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NeuroXess, a Chinese startup, has made two major breakthroughs in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, coming to the aid of a brain-damaged patient. The first was its ability to decode thoughts to speech in real time, and the other was remotely controlling a robot arm using thoughts alone.

Testing of the startup’s new BCI also enabled the user to talk to an artificial intelligence (AI) model and operate a digital avatar. These tests are result of an experiment undertaken in August 2024 at Huashan Hospital, where neurosurgeons implanted a 256-channel, high-throughput flexible BCI device into the patient’s brain.

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A computational account of how schemas are learned through experience is lacking. In this Perspective, Bein and Niv synthesize schema theory and reinforcement learning research to derive computational principles that might govern schema learning and then propose their mediation via dimensionality reduction in the medial prefrontal cortex.

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Summary: While humans share over 95% of their genome with chimpanzees, our brains are far more complex due to differences in gene expression. Research shows that human brain cells, particularly glial cells, exhibit higher levels of upregulated genes, enhancing neural plasticity and development.

Oligodendrocytes, a glial cell type, play a key role by insulating neurons for faster and more efficient signaling. This study underscores that the evolution of human intelligence likely involved coordinated changes across all brain cell types, not just neurons.

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A recent study found that human brains process emotional expressions from humans and dogs similarly, with empathy enhancing attention to emotional cues. Aggressive faces elicited stronger neural responses, highlighting our sensitivity to emotionally significant stimuli across species.

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An ancient brain circuit, which enables the eyes to reflexively rotate up as the body tilts down, tunes itself early in life as an animal develops, a new study finds.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study revolves around how vertebrates, which include humans and animals spanning evolution from primitive fish to mammals, stabilize their gaze as they move. To do so, they use a that turns any shifts in orientation sensed by the balance (vestibular) system in their ears into an instant counter-movement by their eyes.

The research is published in the journal Science.

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As computer chips continue to get smaller and more complex, the ultrathin metallic wires that carry electrical signals within these chips have become a weak link. Standard metal wires get worse at conducting electricity as they get thinner, ultimately limiting the size, efficiency, and performance of nanoscale electronics.

In a paper published in Science, Stanford researchers show that niobium phosphide can conduct electricity better than copper in films that are only a few atoms thick. Moreover, these films can be created and deposited at sufficiently low temperatures to be compatible with modern computer chip fabrication. Their work could help make future electronics more powerful and more energy efficient.

“We are breaking a fundamental bottleneck of traditional materials like copper,” said Asir Intisar Khan, who received his doctorate from Stanford and is now a visiting postdoctoral scholar and first author on the paper.

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