Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers recently made a groundbreaking discovery on the nanoscale: a new type of quasiparticle found in all magnetic materials, no matter their strength or temperature. These new properties shake up what researchers previously knew about magnetism, showing it’s not as static as once believed.

“Emergent topological quasiparticle kinetics in constricted nanomagnets,” was published in Physical Review Research. The researchers include Deepak Singh and Carsten Ullrich from the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, along with their teams of students and postdoctoral fellows.

“We’ve all seen the bubbles that form in sparkling water or other carbonated drink products,” said Ullrich, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy. “The quasiparticles are like those bubbles, and we found they can freely move around at remarkably fast speeds.”

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies’ sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a trillion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once?

The research was conducted in the laboratory of Markus Meister, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences, and it was led by graduate student Jieyu Zheng. A paper describing the study appears in the journal Neuron.

A bit is a basic unit of information in computing. A typical Wi-Fi connection, for example, can process 50 million bits per second. In the new study, Zheng applied techniques from the field of information theory to a vast amount of scientific literature on human behaviors such as reading and writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik’s Cubes, to calculate that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second.

Pain is meant to be a defense mechanism. It creates a strong sensation to get us to respond to a stimulus and prevent ourselves from further harm. But, sometimes injuries, nerve damage, or infections can cause long-lasting, severe bouts of pain that can make daily life unbearable.

What if there was a way to simply turn off pain receptors? UNC School of Medicine researchers Bryan L. Roth, MD, Ph.D., the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, and Grégory Scherrer, PharmD, Ph.D., associate professor of cell biology and physiology and the UNC Neuroscience Center, have just proven that it is possible.

Using a tool designed by Roth in the early 2000s, the labs have created a new system that reduces acute and tissue-injury-induced inflammatory pain in mouse models. Hye Jin Kang, Ph.D., an alumnus of the Roth Lab and now associate professor at Yonsei University in Korea, was first author on the research paper. The results were published in Cell.

Could complex beliefs like paranoia have roots in something as basic as vision? A new Yale study finds evidence that they might.

When completing a visual perception task, in which participants had to identify whether one moving dot was chasing another moving dot, those with greater tendencies toward paranoid thinking (believing others intend them harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing excessive meaning and purpose to events) performed worse than their counterparts, the study found. Those individuals more often—and confidently—claimed one dot was chasing the other when it wasn’t.

The findings, published in the journal Communications Psychology, suggest that in the future, testing for illnesses like schizophrenia could be done with a simple eye test.

Leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum computers can perform calculations at lightning-fast speeds, enabling them to solve complex problems faster than conventional computers. In quantum technology applications such as quantum computing, light plays a central role in encoding and transmitting information.

NTU researchers have recently made breakthroughs in manipulating light that could potentially usher in the era of quantum computing. Details of this research have been published in Nature Photonics, Physical Review Letters, and Nature Communications.

The o1 model in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, a multimodal model, enhances your AI applications and supports both text and vision inputs. Learn more.

The protective proteins in our bodies aren’t just great for fending off infection—they could also fight the effects of getting older.

Very interesting discussion (with interactive animations) of how diffusion and criticality can model real-world processes and give us insight into why things happen.

Learn how things spread with playable simulations.

Child mortality in conflict settings was 8 percent, compared with 1.1 percent in peaceful countries.

It also said that 83.2 percent of the world’s poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The index, compiled jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), used indicators such as a lack of adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, nutrition and school attendance to assess levels of “multidimensional poverty”