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Category: futurism

Scientists Solve 100-Year-Old Schrödinger Mystery About Color Perception

New research into how humans perceive color differences is helping resolve questions tied to a theory first proposed nearly 100 years ago by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. A team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Roxana Bujack used geometry to mathematically describe how people experience hue, saturation and lightness. Their findings, presented at a visualization science conference, strengthen and formalize Schrödinger’s model by showing these color qualities are fundamental properties of the color system itself.

“What we conclude is that these color qualities don’t emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself,” Bujack said. “This metric geometrically encodes the perceived color distance — that is, how different two colors appear to an observer.”

By formally defining these perceptual characteristics, the researchers believe they have supplied a crucial missing piece in Schrödinger’s long-standing vision of a complete model capable of defining hue, saturation, and lightness entirely through geometric relationships between colors.

ABA signaling is involved in the regulation of BSK1 stability mediated by the UBP24-PUB25/26 module in Arabidopsis

Li et al. report that Arabidopsis BSK1 negatively regulates ABA signaling. The stability of BSK1 is dynamically controlled by PUB25 and PUB26, a process likely regulated by BAK1 phosphorylation, whereas UBP24 stabilizes BSK1 by removing ubiquitin chains. ABA shifts this balance toward degradation by inducing the accumulation of PUB25/26.

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.”

The emerging cancer treatment that’s exciting scientists: ‘We’ve just scratched the surface on what’s possible’

Late last month, Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill put the treatment in the spotlight, revealing his stage three cancer was in remission after undergoing CAR T-cell therapy as part of a clinical trial in Sydney. He stopped short of describing his remission as a miracle – the success, he said, was “science at its best”

The history of CAR (for “chimeric antigen receptor”) T-cell therapy is one of small discoveries accumulating over decades, leading to major advances in patient care. Pioneered in the 1990s, the therapy has exploded in the past decade. Four CAR T-cell therapies have been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for use in Australia since 2018. All are for blood cancers.

The success of those therapies is increasing enthusiasm among researchers and clinicians that CAR T-cell therapies will soon become a major weapon in the battle against cancer. It is now being tweaked to combat solid tumours, with promising early signs of success tempered by the difficulties in tailoring T-cells to find their target. The future may even see it become an injectable.

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