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Label-free optical imaging enables automated measurement of human white matter microstructure
White matter pathways allow distant parts of the brain to communicate, supporting memory, emotion, and language. One such pathway, the uncinate fasciculus, connects the front of the temporal lobe with regions of the frontal cortex involved in decision-making and social behavior. Despite its importance, little is known about the microscopic structure of this tract in the human brain.
Traditional techniques such as electron microscopy can reveal fine details, but they often fail when applied to postmortem human tissue, which is frequently degraded.
In a study published in Biophotonics Discovery, researchers report a new way to examine white matter structure in postmortem human brains.
New study bridges the worlds of classical and quantum physics
When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that same ball down to the size of an atom or smaller, it would behave in ways beyond anything that classical physics can predict.
Or so we’ve thought.
MIT scientists have now shown that certain mathematical ideas from everyday classical physics can be used to describe the often weird and nonintuitive behavior that occurs at the quantum, subatomic scale.
Ion Clock Experiments Reveal Time Can Go Quantum
PRESS RELEASE — Few concepts in physics are as familiar, yet as enigmatic, as time. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is not absolute: its passage depends on motion and gravity. But when combined with quantum physics, this relativistic form of time becomes even more counterintuitive. According to quantum theory, the flow of time itself may exist in a genuine quantum superposition, ticking faster and slower at the same time. Now, a new paper titled Quantum signatures of proper time in optical ion clocks, published on April 20, 2026 in Physical Review Letters, the premier physics research journal, shows that this striking possibility may soon be tested in the laboratory.
In this work, a team led by Assistant Professor of theoretical physics Igor Pikovski at Stevens Institute of Technology, in collaboration with experimental groups of Christian Sanner at Colorado State University and Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), explores quantum aspects of the flow of time and how they can be accessed with atomic clocks. Their results suggest that the same quantum technologies being developed for next-generation clocks and quantum computers may soon probe something far more fundamental: When a clock’s motion obeys quantum mechanics, its movement can exist in superposition, and with it the recorded passage of time itself. This is analogous to Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, where the counterintuitive nature of quantum superposition is illustrated by a cat being both alive and dead; here it is the passage of time itself that is in superposition, like a cat that is both young and old at once.
“Time plays very different roles in quantum theory and in relativity,” says Pikovski. “What we show is that bringing these two concepts together can reveal hidden quantum signatures of time-flow that can no longer be described by classical physics.”
Research Into Naturally Occurring Hair Growth in Skin Nevi May Inform New Regenerative Therapies
An international team of researchers funded in part by NIAMS sought to understand why skin nevi grow long hair. Nevi, which are a type of skin lesion, have an abundance of pigment-producing cells, called melanocytes, that have become aged (or senescent). The team determined that senescent melanocytes within nevi produce large quantities of several signaling molecules. One such molecule, called osteopontin, causes dormant hair stem cells to wake up, which increases hair growth.
The study, which appeared in the journal Nature on June 21, 2023, provides answers as to why nevi are hairy and also uncovers the unexpected growth-promoting potential of senescent cells, which are typically thought to be associated with inhibited tissue growth.
AI Models Mirror Human Logic on Real-World Scenarios
“What we show is that the models actually capture that human uncertainty pretty well,” said Michael Lepori. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/technology/30475/ai-models…cenarios-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/technology/30475/ai-models…cenarios-2)
Can AI models distinguish fact from fiction? This is what a new study scheduled to be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations this weekend hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated how AI models could tell the difference between facts and “fake news”. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and the public better understand how AI models can evolve to meet human needs, which comes at a time when AI is becoming more integrated into our everyday lives.
For the study, the researchers analyzed how AI language models (LMs) were able to differentiate between different topics and information and judge what’s true and what’s fake. The motivation behind this study was to address a knowledge gap regarding whether large language models (LLMs) have a human-like understanding of the world or if they simply make decisions based on what’s given to them.
The goal of the study was to ascertain if the LMs could determine whether an event is real or fake, along with ascertaining when the LM makes this determination during its thought process. For example, the researchers would give the LM simple scenarios like “clean a car”, clean a road”, and “clean a cloud”, and ask the LM to figure out which was real or fake. In the end, the researchers found that large LMs were capable of differentiating between real and fake events or data.
Identification and characterization of BRAF⇔TP53 interactions in melanoma
O’Toole et al. identify novel interactors of both normal BRAF and BRAFV600E and discover TP53 as a BRAFV600E-enhanced interactor in melanoma cells. While TP53 mutations do not frequently occur in melanoma, the authors demonstrate TP53 inactivation and a sequestration of cytoplasmic TP53 after oncogenic BRAF activation.
Why faster AI isn’t always better
In the race to make AI models not just reason better but respond faster, latency—the delay before an answer appears—is often treated as a purely technical constraint, something to minimize and move past. But how is this relentless push for speed actually impacting the people using these systems every day?
There is a rich body of work in human–computer interaction linking faster response times to better usability. But AI models are fundamentally different from the deterministic systems that previous research was built on. When you wait for a file to download or a page to load, the outcome is fixed and predictable.
AI models are probabilistic—you cannot anticipate the precise response. Their conversational interface means users naturally read human social cues into the interaction. A pause might be read as the AI “thinking,” for instance. Users are increasingly asked to choose between faster models and slower, deeper-reasoning ones, without guidance on what that choice actually means for their experience.
Recent Scientific Evidence that Supports Nichols’s Lost Primal Eye Theory of Mind I. Core Premise: The Evolutionary Shift
The Phantom Organ and The “Hard Problem” — I apply MVT to solve David Chalmers’s “Hard Problem” of consciousness-the question of why physical brain processes are accompanied by subjective feelings (qualia).
Nichols’s theory posits that self-referential consciousness and abstract thought in many modern animals are the evolutionary result of the loss of a physical sensory organ: the parietal/pineal eye (the “primal eye”). Nichols maps this transition across three brain states in vertebrate evolution: The E2 State (Finite-State): Early fish, amphibians, and ancestral reptiles (as well as modern “living fossils” like the Tuatara) possessed a functional, light-sensitive median eye on top of their skulls, connected to the pineal gland. This organ directly controlled thermoregulation, circadian rhythms, and basic predator detection in coldblooded (ectothermic) animals. Their brains were “hard-wired,” responding directly to environmental stimuli. The E1 State (Infinite-State): As mammals and birds evolved warmbloodedness (endothermy), external temperature sensing became redundant, and advanced lateral eyes took over visual duties. The primal eye atrophied, leaving behind only the internal pineal gland. Freed from the direct “lock-step” control of the sun, the brain became plastic and self-organising (infinite-state). The E0 State: Some lineages, like certain dinosaurs and modern crocodilians, lost both the median eye and the pineal gland entirely. II. The Phantom Organ and The “Hard Problem” Nichols applies MVT to solve David Chalmers’s “Hard Problem” of consciousness-the question of why physical brain processes are accompanied by subjective feelings (qualia). The Virtual Sensor: Just as an amputee can experience a “phantom limb” because the neural matrix still expects the arm, the E1 mammalian brain experiences a “phantom eye”. The brain was built over millions of years to process a central stream of generic sensory data from the primal eye. Centrally Evoked Mentation: When the physical eye retreated, it left an internal sensory void. The brain compensated by simulating the presence of this lost hub to unscramble data from the other senses. This virtual simulation is the seat of the subjective “I”. III. The Origins of REM Sleep and Dreaming Nichols heavily critiques philosophers like Owen Flanagan, who argue that dreams are useless evolutionary “spandrels” (biological noise). Baseline Architecture: In MVT, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is the baseline functional state of the new E1 architecture. Because the physical tether to sunlight was severed, the brain uses this “phantom” space to generate internal models.