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Radio telescopes confirm 3.3-million-light-year halo in unusually quiet galaxy cluster
Astronomers have employed the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) and the MeerKAT radio telescope to observe a galaxy cluster known as RXCJ0232–4420. Results of the new observations, published April 29 on the arXiv pre-print server, deliver important insights into the nature of this cluster.
Galaxy clusters contain up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. They generally form as a result of mergers and grow by accreting sub-clusters. Therefore, they could serve as excellent laboratories for studying galaxy evolution and cosmology.
A protein directs neuronal migration in the embryonic brain
During brain development, neurons can regulate their movement until they reach their final destination thanks to a “molecular switch” involving the protein Teneurin 4 (Ten4). This protein can guide neuronal migration through mutually exclusive molecular pathways and determine the direction of nerve cells.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature Communications, improves our understanding of the molecular mechanisms that control neuronal migration and offers new insights into how the brain develops at the molecular level.
The study combines advanced techniques — structural protein studies, gene editing in animal models and super-resolution microscopy — to broaden our understanding of the origins of neurodevelopmental disorders and psychiatric or neurological conditions —schizophrenia, epilepsy, autism, bipolar disorder, etc. — which may be linked to errors in neuronal migration.
The maternal-fetal interface as an immunological barrier: Structure, regulation, and breakdown
The maternal-fetal interface is a specialized immunological barrier that integrates tolerance, defense, and regulated inflammation throughout gestation. Distinct immune populations mediate implantation, immune homeostasis, and parturition, while dysregulation can result in chronic placental inflammation, a consequence of barrier failure, characterized by infiltration of maternal T cells into placental/fetal tissues.
Gaussian Splatting is my new favourite thing, so I hassled an ex-Epic artist to tell me everything he knows about the low-cost ‘photo-real’ rendering technique
Open source engine PlayCanvas is what Iakov Sumygin used to build that browser-based FPS. Resources like this strengthen Schindelar’s case, particularly as the engine just introduced SplatTransform 2.0, a tool that offers “fully automated, lightning-fast generation of high-quality collision for your splats.” Without a collision mesh, players could otherwise phase through the environment, so this is yet another option that streamlines the pipeline between scan and interactive assets.
“Gaussian Splatting training—meaning the reconstruction process after capture—can reproduce real-world appearance in ways that traditional scanning methods struggle with or cannot handle properly,” He tells me, “We can now capture and represent things like hair, semi-transparency, translucency, subsurface scattering, fine foliage, and other complex visual phenomena that are extremely difficult to reconstruct as clean geometry with traditional texture workflows.”
“This direct connection between captured real-world data and a production-ready, real-time representation is what makes Gaussian Splatting so interesting,” Schindelar says, “It is not just a rendering trick—it changes the entire capture-to-delivery pipeline.”
Optogenetic mediated contractility enables reversible control of microglial morphology and migration in vivo
Biermeier et al. use live imaging in zebrafish to show that microglia alternate between distinct morphological states that support brain surveillance and phagocytosis. By optogenetically controlling cytoskeletal contractility, they demonstrate programmable, reversible control of microglial behavior in the living brain.
“Can We Survive Technology?” by John von Neumann
This is an essay written by John von Neumann in 1955, which I think is fairly described as being about global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies. It discusses a bunch of specific technologies that seemed like a big deal in 1955 — which is interesting in itself as a list of predictions; nuclear power! increased automation! weather control? — but explicitly tries to draw a general lesson.
Von Neumann is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and was involved in the Manhattan project in addition to inventing zillions of other things.
I’m posting here because a) I think the essay is worth reading in its own right, and b) I find it interesting to see what the past’s intellectuals thought of issues related transformative technology, and how their perspective differs/is similar to ours. Notably, I disagree with several of the conclusions (e.g. von Neumann seems to think differential technological development is doomed).
Good vibrations for quantum communications: Engineers couple single phonon to single atomic spin
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated, for the first time, a single quantum of vibrational energy interacting with a single atomic spin, seeding a pathway to quantum technologies that use sound as an information carrier, instead of light or electricity. The results are published in Nature.
Led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, the researchers engineered a nanometer-scale mechanical resonator around a single color-center spin qubit in diamond. These color centers, atomic defects in the diamond’s crystal structure, act as quantum memory capable of storing quantum information. The researchers’ new system can host sufficiently strong spin-phonon interactions for quantum information storage—a key challenge thus far in the field.
“At the heart of the experiment is a phonon—the smallest possible unit of sound,” Lončar said. “When we listen to music, it takes countless phonons working together to move our eardrums and maybe even get us spinning on the dance floor. But qubits are far more sensitive: a single phonon can be enough to change their quantum state—to excite them, or, as in our experiment, to help them relax.”