Join NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at CES on January 6 at 6:30 p.m. PT for an exclusive look at groundbreaking innovations in AI, gaming, robotics, and beyond.

Google is establishing a team to build AI that can simulate the physical world, led by one of the former co-leads on OpenAI’s Sora model.

According to Elon Musk.

A Global 5G Community, fostering a community and ecosystem around the development of 5G applications.

Collaborative work by amateur and professional astronomers has helped to resolve a long-standing misunderstanding about the composition of Jupiter’s clouds. Instead of being formed of ammonia ice—the conventional view—it now appears they are likely to be composed of ammonium hydrosulfide mixed with smog.

The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

The new discovery was triggered by amateur astronomer, Dr. Steven Hill, based in Colorado. Recently, he demonstrated that the abundance of ammonia and cloud-top pressure in Jupiter’s atmosphere could be mapped using commercially-available telescopes and a few specially colored filters.

Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed a method for generating highly realistic computer-generated images of fluid dynamics in elements such as smoke.

This research, conducted by the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing, was presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 conference, where it received a Best Paper Honorable Mention for its contributions to computer graphics and physics-based simulation. The paper is published in ACM Transactions on Graphics.

To demonstrate the power of their approach, the team compared an iconic photograph from the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens volcano in Washington State to a computer-generated rendering of a volcanic smoke plume created using their new method. The resulting simulation captures the intricate, multi-scale billowing of the smoke plume, including its twisting, curling motion and delicate turbulence, which are hallmarks of realistic fluid behavior.

When we first meet another person, we typically form an initial impression of them based on their facial features and appearance. These first impressions of others could potentially influence our subsequent cognitive processes, such as what mental states we believe that the people we meet are experiencing at a given time.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), the California Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College carried out a study investigating the potential relationship between first impressions of faces and the inference of mental states. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that first impressions of faces influence the inference of other people’s mental states.

“Over the years there have been a lot of surprising findings showing how first impressions from faces can predict important outcomes, such as which candidates would win an election, which politicians would be convicted of corruption, and which offenders would be sentenced to death,” Chujun Lin, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

Per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) earn their “forever chemical” moniker by persisting in water, soil and even the human brain. This unique ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in brain tissue makes PFAS particularly concerning, but the underlying mechanism of their neurotoxicity must be studied further.

To that end, a new study by University at Buffalo researchers has identified 11 genes that may hold the key to understanding the brain’s response to these pervasive chemicals commonly found in everyday items. The paper is published in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.

These genes, some involved in processes vital for neuronal health, were found to be consistently affected by PFAS exposure, either expressing more or less, regardless of the type of PFAS compounds tested. For example, all compounds caused a gene key for neuronal cell survival to express less, and another gene linked to neuronal cell death to express more.

Common methods of communicating flood risk may create a false sense of security, leading to increased development in areas threatened by flooding.

This phenomenon, called the “safe development paradox,” is described in a new paper from North Carolina State University. Lead author Georgina Sanchez, a research scholar in NC State’s Center for Geospatial Analytics, said this may be an unintended byproduct of how the Federal Emergency Management Agency classifies areas based on their probability of dangerous flooding.

The findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Recent research led by UTHealth Houston scientists has uncovered two genes associated with variants linked to epilepsy, which showed specific traits that make them promising diagnostic biomarkers.

The study is published in Nature Communications.

Led by Dennis Lal, Ph.D., director of the Center for Neurogenetics and associate professor of neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, the research team analyzed data from 1,386 human brain tissues for somatic variants in the genes of individuals undergoing epilepsy surgery. Somatic variants are DNA changes that occur after conception and can only be identified in the brain tissue.