To study superconducting materials in their “normal,” non-superconducting state, scientists usually switch off superconductivity by exposing the material to a magnetic field, left. SLAC scientists discovered that turning off superconductivity with a flash of light, right produces a normal state with very similar fundamental physics that is also unstable and can host brief flashes...
Credit: Unsplash Mammals that live in teams might typically live longer than members of solitary species, recommends a Nature Communications paper. The findings are based upon an analysis of nearly 1,000 mammals-- including the gold snub-nosed monkey, naked mole-rat, bowhead whale, and horseshoe bat-- and might improve our understanding of the development of social organization...
Medically accurate model of a tardigrade or water bear. The tardigrade, also called as the moss piglet or water bear is a strange, microscopic creature that appears like something out of a Disney nightmare scene: strange but not especially threatening. The pudgy, eight-legged, water-borne animal seems perpetually puckering. It's the farthest thing from what you...
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A group of scientists at the College of St Andrews, in the United Kingdom, collaborating with a colleague from the College of Portsmouth, also in the United Kingdom, has performed tests in young kids and chimpanzees to learn more regarding when attention changing develops in human beings. In their paper released...
Iniopera reconstruction. Credit: Richard Dearden / University of BIrmingham A rare three-dimensional fossil of an ancient chimera has revealed new hints of the diversity of these creatures in the Carboniferous time, some 300 million years ago. Ancient chimera A research study led by the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) and the University of Birmingham revealed an ancient...
The hottest startup in Silicon Valley today is OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed developer of ChatGPT, a much-hyped chatbot that could write a poem, university essay, and even a line of software code. Tesla tycoon Elon Musk was an early investor in OpenAI. Microsoft, reportedly, provided approximately a first investment of $1 billion to $10 billion in...
Credit: Annelisa Leinbach An increase in genetic regulatory aspects explains how modern humans evolved bigger brains than other hominins. The surface area of the human being's cerebral cortex is more than 3 times the dimension of that of the chimpanzee. Neuroscientists have found that particular gene variants are linked to increases in brain surface area. The...
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain What makes people brain distinct from that of all other animals-- including also our closest primate relatives? In an analysis of cell kinds in the prefrontal cortex of 4 primate species, Yale researchers identified species-specific-- particularly human-specific-- features, they report on Aug. 25th in the journal Science. And they discovered that what...
Several science students may imagine a ball rolling down a hill or a car skidding due to friction as prototypical examples of the systems physicists care about. However, much of modern physics consists of looking for objects and essentially invisible sensations: the small electrons of quantum physics and the particles concealed within odd steels...
Much of the electrical activity in the brain looks like noise and is not associated with reactions to any particular stimuli. The scientists found that there was structure in the noise that could reveal the state of attentiveness in the brain. In this model of brain activity in the monkey visual cortex, the overall...
