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The time has come to create a new kind of computer, say researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, who recently led development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learned to play Pong. In an article published on February 27 in the journal Frontiers in Science, the team outlines how biological computers could surpass today’s electronic computers for certain applications while using a small fraction of the electricity required by today’s computers and server farms....

In an opinion piece published in the journal Matter, members of the [email protected]MIT research group recently laid out a detailed vision for how the rapidly growing field of advanced fibers and fabrics could transform many aspects of our lives. For example, “smart clothing” might continuously monitor temperature, heart rate, and other vital signs, then analyze the data and give warnings of potential health conditions. Headed by Professor Yoel Fink, the group is developing fibers and fabrics with advanced computational properties....

COVID-19 has brought calculus, statistics and probability theory into our daily lives. Some of us might have been happy to leave mathematics behind in high school or college, but as the COVID-19 pandemic has spread, math has had a daily effect on all of our lives – even if we don’t have to crunch the numbers ourselves. Mathematical models — built on a foundation of calculus, statistics and probability theory — have been one of the driving forces behind policies, at least in Ohio, around the COVID-19 pandemic....

An international team of more than 1,000 scientists participated in a new study showing an integrated map of genetic variation from 1,092 human genomes. A newly published compendium of the genetic alphabets of more than 1000 individuals from around the world illustrates how similar humans are – but also how crucial genetic variations can be. The publication on November 1 in the journal Nature of the 1000 Genomes Project provides the most comprehensive catalog of human variations to date and will be indispensable to the practice of personalized medicine....

Older people who undergo emergency surgeries on their operating surgeon’s birthday may be more likely to die within a month than patients who go through similar procedures on other days, a new UCLA-led study suggests. The study, published this month in the peer-reviewed medical journal BMJ, shows that 30-day mortality rates are approximately 23% higher for patients 65 and older who are treated on a surgeon’s birthday. While the authors suspect that surgeons may be more distracted on their birthdays than other days, they said more research is needed to explain why this may happen....

If bodies of water were perfectly smooth, a sequence of nearly perfect reflections of the Sun would appear in a line along the track of the satellite’s orbit. In reality, water surfaces are irregular and often in motion due to waves and currents, so the sunlight gets scattered in many directions and leaves blurry streaks of light in the swaths of satellite data. For instance, notice the strips of sunglint in the mosaic below....

A high-salt diet is not only bad for one’s blood pressure, but also for the immune system. This is the conclusion of a current study under the leadership of the University Hospital Bonn. Mice fed a high-salt diet were found to suffer from much more severe bacterial infections. Human volunteers who consumed an additional six grams of salt per day also showed pronounced immune deficiencies. This amount corresponds to the salt content of two fast food meals....

At least two new minerals that have never before been seen on Earth have been discovered by a team of researchers in a 33,000-pound (15,000-kg) meteorite found in Somalia in 2020. This giant meteorite is the ninth largest ever found. “Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what’s been found before,” says Chris Herd, a professor in the Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences and curator of the University of Alberta’s Meteorite Collection....

Accelerating a free electron with a laser has been a longtime goal of solid-state physicists. David Cline, a distinguished professor in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Xiaoping Ding, an assistant researcher at UCLA, have conducted research at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and have established that an electron beam can be accelerated by a laser in free space. This has never been done before at high energies and represents a significant breakthrough, Cline said, adding that it also may have implications for fusion as a new energy source....

BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune, neurodegenerative disease, characterized by distinct disabilities affecting walking, vision, and cognition, to name a few. MS patients differ markedly from each other regarding which disability affects them the most. Inflammation strips the myelin coating from nerve cell extensions, called axons, and connections at the ends of nerves, called synapses, are lost, together disrupting signaling and eventually causing permanent disability depending on where this occurs. UCLA researchers proposed that molecular mechanisms behind each disability may differ, and that neuroprotective treatments tailored for each disability may be more effective than nonspecific treatments aiming to reduce a composite of different disabilities....

NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft has discovered “layers” and “rifts” in the electrically charged part of the upper atmosphere (the ionosphere) of Mars. The phenomenon is very common at Earth and causes unpredictable disruptions to radio communications. However, we do not fully understand them because they form at altitudes that are very difficult to explore at Earth. The unexpected discovery by MAVEN shows that Mars is a unique laboratory to explore and better understand this highly disruptive phenomenon....

The specialized protein named brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) promotes neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to form new connections and pathways) and the survival of neurons. Animal studies have shown that increasing the availability of BDNF encourages the formation and storage of memories, enhances learning, and overall boosts cognitive performance. These key roles and its apparent neuroprotective qualities have led to the interest in BDNF for aging research. Lead author Travis Gibbons from University of Otago, New Zealand said, “BDNF has shown great promise in animal models, but pharmaceutical interventions have thus far failed to safely harness the protective power of BDNF in humans....

Recently, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) published a study in Science, where they unveiled a new discovery of a cellular uptake pathway that is crucial for larger molecules. These large, complex molecules bind in unique ways to their targets, are efficiently taken up by cells, and have the potential to be used in creating new drugs for the treatment of cancer and other diseases....

A new survey from MIT is the first to systematically investigate the efforts of cities around the globe to adapt to climate change, showing that 95 percent of major cities in Latin America are planning for climate change, compared to only 59 percent of such cities in the United States. Quito, Ecuador, is not considered a global leader by most measures. But there is one way in which Quito is at the forefront of metropolises worldwide: in planning for climate change....

In this case, the phenomenon of “handedness,” known as chirality, occurs not in the structure of the molecules themselves, but in a kind of patterning in the density of electrons within the material. The researchers found that this asymmetric patterning can be induced by shining a circularly polarized mid-infrared light at an unusual material, a form of transition-metal dichalcogenide semimetal called TiSe2, or titanium diselenide. The new findings, which could open up new areas of research in the optical control of quantum materials, are described today in the journal Nature in a paper by MIT postdocs Suyang Xu and Qiong Ma, professors Nuh Gedik and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, and 15 colleagues at MIT and other universities in the U....

NASA does have a huge part in the studies of hurricanes and it starts mainly with the development of all these different instruments that we put on satellites and we put in orbit. As scientists, we are always looking at the reasons why there’s this possibility that more and more tropical cyclones are becoming category three or more in every hurricane season. There is a large influence from climate change....

With results indicating that nearly 50% of patients were able to discontinue all diabetes-related treatment, bariatric surgery is proving to be an effective treatment option for individuals with both type 2 diabetes and morbid obesity. As part of the Queensland Health Bariatric Surgery Initiative, a study published in PLOS ONE monitored 212 patients who underwent either gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy surgery in Queensland. Director of Griffith University’s Menzies Health Institute Queensland Professor Paul Scuffham said the patients were monitored for a period of 12 months after their surgery and looked at a range of factors including clinical and patient-reported outcomes....

New study and a review of decades of data pushes the memory clock back over a year, but the study confirms everyone is different. On average the earliest memories that people can recall point back to when they were just two-and-a-half years old, a new study suggests. The findings, published in peer-reviewed journal Memory, pushes back the previous conclusions of the average age of earliest memories by a whole year....

In the study, the analysis found a range of organic matter which reveals that the meteorite was once from part of an asteroid where liquid water occurred, and if it that asteroid had been given access to the water, a chemical reaction could have occurred leading to more molecules turning into amino acids and protein — the building blocks of life. The Winchcombe meteorite is a rare carbon-rich chondritic meteorite (approximately four percent of all recovered meteorites, containing up to 3....

In the last 12 months, over half of males and one in five women, transgender people, and gender non-conforming participants engaged in a “bulk and cut” cycle, according to recent research that was recently published in the journal Eating and Weight Disorders – Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia, and Obesity. In order to maximize the development of lean muscle mass and minimize body fat, an increasing number of people are practicing “bulking and cutting,” a dietary method that involves alternating between times of consuming excess calories (bulking) and reducing calorie intake (cutting), a practice that is in line with contemporary body ideals....