Why does an ant, with a brain smaller than a grain of sand, find the shortest path better than a human engineer?
Richard Feynman didn’t learn about ants from a textbook. He learned by sitting on his bathroom floor with a sugar cube and a stopwatch. What he discovered wasn’t just biology—it was a biological supercomputer solving the \.
New multiplexed imaging technology using standard clinical MRI systems can simultaneously map more than 20 biomarkers in high resolution, providing a comprehensive view of the brain with a single scan.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrated the multiplexed MRI technology (MRx) by characterizing brain tumors and multiple sclerosis lesions—revealing different structural, physiological and molecular changes within the diseases. Led by Zhi-Pei Liang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I., the team has reported its findings in the journal Nature.
“MRx can be a powerful tool for noninvasive tissue characterization, helping to advance personalized, precision and predictive medicine,” Liang said. “By providing rich, multidimensional biomarkers to capture disease progression and treatment response, this capability could open new opportunities for more precise diagnosis, individualized treatment planning and improved patient outcomes.”
Autoimmune diseases, where the body’s own immune system mistakenly goes on the attack, are much more common in women – and a new study analyzing more than 1.25 million blood cells goes a long way to explaining why.
The analysis, led by a team from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, revealed over 1,000 genetic ‘switches’ in immune cells that work differently depending on sex.
In short, these variations in gene activity mean that inflammatory pathways that respond to threats are likely to be busier in women, leading to a greater risk of conditions like lupus and multiple sclerosis.
Since the goal is to find Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, the Sun is an ideal proxy, as it is the only one astronomers can fully resolve. Dedicated instruments with high-precision spectrographs have been developed to observe the “Sun-as-a-star,” such as the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher North (HARPS-N) solar telescope and the HARPS spectrograph (HELIOS). The main drawback is that only disc-integrated spectra are obtained, precluding a detailed analysis of individual stellar features.
According to the team, what is needed is a telescope that can offer three vital things: 1. Spatially resolved spectroscopy with very high wavelength stability 2. Very high spectral resolution to adequately resolve photospheric line asymmetries 3. Extended wavelength coverage, for the simultaneous observation of thousands of spectral lines probing different physical conditions.
This, they claim, can be achieved by linking the ESPRESSO spectrograph to a solar telescope — in this case, PoET. The solar telescope will observe the Sun at different spatial scales, corresponding to sunspots and solar granules, and send the light it gathers to ESPRESSO via optical fibers. The overall system involves three telescopes, starting with the main telescope (MT) developed by Officina Stellare. This telescope has a Gregorian configuration, standard for solar observations, and will observe small areas of the solar disc.
WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic will study use of orbital data centers being developed by SpaceX.
The two companies announced agreements May 6 giving Anthropic, developer of a line of AI products known as Claude, access to both terrestrial data centers as well as potential use of SpaceX’s orbital data center.
In the near term, Anthropic will purchase all the capacity of a SpaceX terrestrial data center, Colossus 1, with more than 300 megawatts of computing capacity. Anthropic said that capacity will allow it to raise limits on usage of Claude products for its customers.
The researchers confirmed this by designing experiments that removed angular momentum while preserving helicity. The sideways rotation still occurred, showing that helicity plays the key role.
This finding offers a deeper understanding of how light interacts with matter at extremely small scales. It also points to new ways of controlling nanoscale systems, with possible applications in light-driven nanomachines and advanced sensing technologies.
“This work represents a new measurement paradigm for nanoscale optomechanics,” says Tanaka. “Just as optical tweezers opened a new field in single-molecule biophysics, we hope this platform will unlock access to nanoscale mechanical phenomena that have so far remained beyond reach.”
Data centers need powerful chips, while smartphones need chips that are energy efficient. A supply chain scholar explains why chipmakers’ focus on the former comes at the expense of the latter.
“The key emphasis here is that disorder is a really important parameter. It’s this tunable thing when we’re playing with quantum phases.”
Modifying the structure of electron crystals is extremely exciting. In superconductors, materials that transport electricity without resistance, the superconducting state can coincide with changes to charge-density waves.
“When we’re doing basic science in these really exotic materials and exotic phases, dramatically new innovations happen,” Hovden told IFLScience. “Technological revolutions like the semiconductor, transistor, and computer happened because we did basic science on atomic structures, on atoms, on matter.”
Years before he conducted the research that would earn him a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Shinya Yamanaka, MD, Ph.D., was a postdoctoral scientist at Gladstone Institutes, studying genes. There, he helped discover a gene (now called eIF4G2) that’s essential for early embryonic development.
Then, the story pauses. Without the technology needed to develop an animal model to further investigate the gene, Yamanaka moved on to develop induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells—adult cells that have been reprogrammed into an embryonic state. That work earned him the Nobel Prize, but he never forgot his first gene.
Now, 30 years since his postdoc, Yamanaka has circled back to eIF4G2.