The myth that humans only use 10 per cent of their brains is exactly that — a myth.
It’s a mistruth that’s been misattributed to the likes of Albert Einstein over the years. In reality, humans actually use a lot of their brain pretty much all the time, but our understanding of exactly how they actually work is changing all the time.
Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see.
We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the universe as we see it would make no sense.
But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding.
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Scientists have made an unprecedented discovery about dark matter by examining anomalies in…
Organoids aren’t nearly as complex as their full-sized counterparts, but they’re useful for research — scientists can study organ development, monitor disease progression, and even test new treatments on them.
What’s new: When human embryos are about five weeks old, they develop structures called “optic cups” that will eventually become retinas.
Researchers have grown optic cups in the lab before, and they’ve also grown mini brains. Now, researchers at University Hospital Düsseldorf have grown brain organoids with optic cups.
Humans rapidly extract diverse and complex information from ongoing social interactions, but the perceptual and neural organization of the different aspects of social perception remains unresolved. We showed short movie clips with rich social content to 97 healthy participants while their haemodynamic brain activity was measured with fMRI. The clips were annotated moment-to-moment for a large set of social features and 45 of the features were evaluated reliably between annotators. Cluster analysis of the social features revealed that 13 dimensions were sufficient for describing the social perceptual space. Three different analysis methods were used to map the social perceptual processes in the human brain. Regression analysis mapped regional neural response profiles for different social dimensions. Multivariate pattern analysis then established the spatial specificity of the responses and intersubject correlation analysis connected social perceptual processing with neural synchronization. The results revealed a gradient in the processing of social information in the brain. Posterior temporal and occipital regions were broadly tuned to most social dimensions and the classifier revealed that these responses showed spatial specificity for social dimensions; in contrast Heschl gyri and parietal areas were also broadly associated with different social signals, yet the spatial patterns of responses did not differentiate social dimensions. Frontal and subcortical regions responded only to a limited number of social dimensions and the spatial response patterns did not differentiate social dimension. Altogether these results highlight the distributed nature of social processing in the brain.
After amazing us with its incredible strength, flexibility and thermal conductivity, graphene has now chalked up another remarkable property with its magnetoresistance. Researchers in Singapore and the UK have shown that, in near-pristine monolayer graphene, the room-temperature magnetoresistance can be orders of magnitude higher than in any other material. It could therefore provide both a platform for exploring exotic physics and potentially a tool for improving electronic devices.
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Magnetoresistance is a change in electrical resistance on exposure to a magnetic field. In the classical regime, magnetoresistance arises because the magnetic field curves the trajectories of flowing charges by the Lorentz force. In traditional metals, in which conduction occurs almost solely through electron motion, magnetoresistance quickly saturates as the field increases because the deflection of the electrons creates a net potential difference across the material, which counteracts the Lorentz potential. The situation is different in semimetals such as bismuth and graphite, in which current is carried equally by electrons and positive holes. Opposite charges flowing in opposite directions end up being deflected the same way by the magnetic field, so no net potential difference is generated and the magnetoresistance can theoretically grow indefinitely.
Quantum teleportation is a technique allowing the transfer of quantum information between two distant quantum objects, a sender and a receiver, using a phenomenon called quantum entanglement as a resource.
The unique feature of this process is that the actual information is not transferred by sending quantum bits (qubits) through a communication channel connecting the two parties; instead, the information is destroyed at one location and appears at the other one without physically traveling between the two. This surprising property is enabled by quantum entanglement, accompanied by the transmission of classical bits.
There is a deep interest in quantum teleportation nowadays within the field of quantum communications and quantum networks because it would allow the transfer of quantum bits between network nodes over very long distances, using previously shared entanglement.
In a paper published in March, artificial intelligence (AI) scientists at Stanford University and Canada’s MILA institute for AI proposed a technology that could be far more efficient than GPT-4 — or anything like it — at gobbling vast amounts of data and transforming it into an answer.
Also: What is GPT-4? Here’s everything you need to know
Known as Hyena, the technology is able to achieve equivalent accuracy on benchmark tests, such as question answering, while using a fraction of the computing power. In some instances, the Hyena code is able to handle amounts of text that make GPT-style technology simply run out of memory and fail.
In this episode, my guest is Oded Rechavi, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at Tel Aviv University and expert in how genes are inherited, how experiences shape genes and remarkably, how some memories of experiences can be passed via genes to offspring. We discuss his research challenging long-held tenets of genetic inheritance and the relevance of those findings to understanding key biological and psychological processes including metabolism, stress and trauma. He describes the history of the scientific exploration of the “heritability of acquired traits” and how epigenetics and RNA biology can account for some of the passage of certain experience-based memories. He discusses the importance of model organisms in scientific research and describes his work on how stressors and memories can be passed through small RNA molecules to multiple generations of offspring in ways that meaningfully affect their behavior. Nature vs. nurture is a commonly debated theme; Dr. Rechavi’s work represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of that debate, as well as genetic inheritance, brain function and evolution.
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