One project will explore how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms,” changes brain activity at a cellular level. How do neurons react to magic mushrooms? What happens in the brain when we see motion, or when we recognize grain patterns in a piece of wood? How do our brains track the subtle changes in our friends’ appearances over time? The Allen Institute has launched four projects to investigate these questions through OpenScope, a shared neuroscience observatory. Just as astronomers use a…
Start-up Kinexon enables more precise refereeing decisions. Kinexon, a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has equipped the European Championship soccer balls with high-precision sensors. The technology helps referees make difficult decisions. Kinexon specializes in the analysis and control of moving objects – whether in sport or in production. The technology is also used to analyze and automate the processes of entire factories. When the final of the European Football Championship will be played on Sunday, the referee…
A research team from the University Alliance Ruhr, Germany, has found a catalyst that can be used to convert ammonia into the energy carrier hydrogen and the fertilizer precursor nitrite. The production of hydrogen and the production of fertilizer have so far been separate chemical processes. With the new approach, the team from Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Duisburg-Essen is demonstrating that the two can be combined on a laboratory scale. The Bochum-based group led by Ieva Cechanaviciute…
Current study involving GEOMAR calls for aquatic oxygen loss to be recognised as another Planetary Boundary. Oxygen concentrations in our planet’s waters is decreasing rapidly and dramatically – from ponds to the ocean. The progressive loss of oxygen threatens not only ecosystems, but also the livelihoods of large sectors of society and the entire planet, according to the authors of an international study involving GEOMAR published today in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. They call for the loss…
International team of evolutionary biologists investigate genomic underpinnings for the adaptive potential of spoonworts. Plant cold specialists like the spoonworts have adapted well to the cold climates of the Ice Ages. As cold and warm periods alternated, they developed a number of species that also resulted in a proliferation of the genome. Evolutionary biologists from the universities of Heidelberg, Nottingham, and Prague studied the influence this genome duplication has on the adaptive potential of plants. The results show that polyploids…
Scientists propose a new way of implementing a neural network with an optical system which could make machine learning more sustainable in the future. The researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have published their new method in Nature Physics, demonstrating a method much simpler than previous approaches. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly widespread with applications ranging from computer vision to text generation, as demonstrated by ChatGPT. However, these complex tasks require increasingly…
Researchers grew crystals containing actinium and illuminated them with X-rays to learn how the radioactive metal binds with other elements. That information could help design better cancer treatments. The element actinium was first discovered at the turn of the 20th century, but even now, nearly 125 years later, researchers still don’t have a good grasp on the metal’s chemistry. That’s because actinium is only available in extremely small amounts and working with the radioactive material requires special facilities. But to…
A method to analytically express the performance of wireless communication systems when using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) was successfully developed by researchers at Tohoku University, the University of Surrey, and the University of Nottingham. Numerical results on parametric studies of channel capacity (Full-wave: Results obtained by conventional numerical simulation. The results completely match those of the exact expressions derived in this work. Proposed: Numerical results obtained by the approximate expressions derived in this work. The parametric studies were performed with…
A method to screen a wide variety of drug candidates without laborious purification steps could advance the fight against drug-resistant bacteria. Efforts to combat the increasing threat of drug-resistant bacteria are being assisted by a new approach for streamlining the search for antimicrobial drug candidates, pioneered by researchers at Hokkaido University, led by Assistant Professor Kazuki Yamamoto and Professor Satoshi Ichikawa of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Their methods, developed together with researchers elsewhere in Japan and in the USA,…
Scientists investigating Alzheimer’s disease have determined the structure of molecules within a human brain for the very first time. Published today in Nature, the study describes how scientists used cryo-electron tomography, guided by fluorescence microscopy, to explore deep inside an Alzheimer’s disease donor brain. This gave 3-dimensional maps in which they could observe proteins, the molecular building blocks of life a million-times smaller than a grain of rice, within the brain. The study zoomed in on two proteins that cause…
Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have found that inflammation in an immune cell may be responsible in part for some severe symptoms in a group of rare genetic conditions called lysosomal storage diseases (LSDs). LSDs affect about one in 7,700 live births worldwide. Children with the condition typically present at a young age with progressive neurodegeneration. Many children with LSDs die prematurely, and current treatments focus on symptom management. Until now, the role of macrophages in the…
The team’s novel approach involves a pre-treatment process that significantly enhances the performance of existing GAC systems. In a groundbreaking effort to tackle the pervasive issue of PFAS contamination in drinking water, a research team at New Jersey Institute of Technology has received funding from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Desalination and Water Purification Research program. This highly competitive grant, awarded to only eight projects out of over eighty applicants, supports their innovative project titled “Enhanced Coagulation for the Removal of…
A reef island adapts to changing environmental influences. Although it is surrounded by stressed coral reefs, an island in the Indonesian Spermonde Archipelago has not shrunk but continued to grow. Reef islands hence react dynamically to environmental changes that disturb their reef systems according to a new study by researchers from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, Germany. Scientists examined the composition of the inhabited reef island Langkai off Makassar and reconstructed the course of the…
Sounds paradoxical: varicella zoster virus spreads better in the body by enhancing an immune defence mechanism. Varicella zoster virus (VZV) can cause chickenpox, as well as shingles and severe complications. When one comes into contact with VZV for the first time, the virus enters the body through the airways, reaching the mucous membranes in the nasopharynx and adjacent lymphatic tissues, from where VZV infects T lymphocytes. In these immune cells, VZV spreads throughout the body, reaching skin cells – resulting…
A new study reveals a four-fold increase in cycle life for electric aircraft batteries thanks to a novel electrolyte solution discovered using a bioscience technique. When it comes to figuring out why electric aircraft batteries lose power over time, one typically wouldn’t think to turn to a decades-old approach biologists use to study the structure and function of components in living organisms. However, it turns out that omics, a field that helped scientists unravel the secrets of the human genome,…
Environmentally friendly luminescent material made mainly from plant-derived material. 1. A research team at NIMS has successfully developed an environmentally friendly, microspherical fluorescent material primarily made from citric acid. These microbeads emit various colors of light depending on the illuminating light and the size of the beads, which suggests a wide range of applications. Furthermore, the use of plant-derived materials allows for low-cost and energy-efficient synthesis. 2. Conventional luminescent devices commonly utilized thin films of compound semiconductors containing metals or…
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