An international team of evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have reconstructed the evolution of the avian brain using a massive dataset of brain volumes from dinosaurs, extinct birds like Archaeopteryx and the Great Auk, and modern birds. The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology, reveals that prior to the mass extinction at the...
The origin of machine and deep learning algorithms, which increasingly affect almost all aspects of our life, is the learning mechanism of synaptic (weight) strengths connecting neurons in our brain. Attempting to imitate these brain functions, researchers bridged between neuroscience and artificial intelligence over half a century ago. However, since then experimental neuroscience has not...
Biophysicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have visualized a nearly complete transport cycle of the mammalian glutamate transporter homologue from archaea. They confirmed that the transport mechanism resembles that of an elevator: A “door” opens, ions and substrate molecules come in, the door closes,...
When an earthquake or other natural disaster strikes, government relief agencies, insurers and other responders converge to take stock of fatalities and injuries, and to assess the extent and cost of damage to public infrastructure and personal property. But until now, such post-disaster assessment procedures have focused on the dollar value of damages to property...
Historic research based on group movements of humans and animals suggest three simple rules: move away from those that are too close. move toward those that are far away. match the direction of the movement of their neighbors. This research is especially used for air travel where there is an increased risk for contagious infection...
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are combining artificial intelligence/machine learning, bioinformatics and supercomputing to help discover candidates for new antibodies and pharmaceutical drugs to combat COVID-19. Backed by five high performance computing (HPC) clusters and years of expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, a COVID-19 response team of LLNL researchers from various...
Amidst the flurry of social media updates about the COVID-19 pandemic, a chart illustrating the importance of flattening the curve has gone viral. The idea is that taking measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 lowers the chances of overwhelming hospitals and increases the chances that all of those who become ill will have access...
It becomes annoyingly easy to knock over a shampoo bottle when it’s nearly empty. This is an easily observed and curiosity-provoking phenomenon that, according to Lehigh University physics professor Jerome Licini, yields insights into center-of-mass and impacts. “The physics of that is pretty interesting and easy to understand,” says Licini who, along with first-year physics major...
Have you ever followed a recipe to bake some bread? If you have, congratulations; you have executed an algorithm. The algorithms that follow us around the internet to suggest items we might like, and those that control what shows up in our Facebook feeds may seem mysterious and uncanny at times. Yet, an algorithm is...
When our sun belches out a hot stream of charged particles in Earth’s general direction, it doesn’t just mess up communications satellites. It might also be scrambling the navigational sense of California gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus), causing them to strand on land, according to a Duke University graduate student. Many animals can sense the Earth’s...
