Post Scientist

What did the fat say to the brain? For years, it was assumed that hormones passively floating through the blood were the way that a person's fat—called adipose tissue—could send information related to stress and metabolism to the brain. Now, Scripps Research scientists report in Nature that newly identified sensory neurons carry a stream of messages from adipose tissue to the brain. "The discovery of these neurons suggests for the first time that your brain is actively surveying your fat, rather than just passively receiving messages about it," says co-senior author Li Ye, Ph.D., the Abide-Vividion Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology and an associate professor of neuroscience at Scripps Research. "The implications of this finding are profound." "This is yet ...

Many of our bodily functions, such as walking, breathing, and chewing, are controlled by brain circuits called central oscillators, which generate rhythmic firing patterns that regulate these behaviors. MIT neuroscientists have now discovered the neuronal identity and mechanism underlying one of these circuits: an oscillator that controls the rhythmic back-and-forth sweeping of tactile whiskers, or whisking, in mice. This is the first time that any such oscillator has been fully characterized in mammals. The MIT team found that the whisking oscillator consists of a population of inhibitory neurons in the brainstem that fires rhythmic bursts during whisking. As each neuron fires, it also inhibits some of the other neurons in the network, allowing the overall population to generate a synchrono...

Psychologists at UNSW Sydney and University of Wollongong have challenged the prevailing view that people with exceptional face recognition abilities rely on processing faces holistically. Instead, they argue, people who are great at learning and remembering new faces—also known as super recognizers—can divide new faces into parts, before storing them in the brain as composite images. "It's been a long-held belief that to remember a face well you need to have a global impression of the face, basically by looking at the center and seeing the face as a whole," said lead researcher, Dr. James Dunn. "But our research shows that super-recognizers are still able to recognize faces better than others even when they can only see smaller regions at a time. This suggests that they...

For decades now, archaeologists wielded the tools of their trade to unearth clues about past peoples, while ecologists have sought to understand current ecosystems. But these well-established scientific disciplines tend to neglect the important question of how humans and nature interacted and shaped each other across different places and through time. An emerging field called archaeoecology can fill that knowledge gap and offer insights into how to solve today's sustainability challenges, but first, it must be clearly defined. A new paper by SFI Complexity Fellow Stefani Crabtree and Jennifer Dunne, SFI's Vice President for Science, lays out the first comprehensive definition of archaeoecology and calls for more research in this nascent but important field. ...

A method to convert a commonly thrown-away plastic to a resin used in 3D-printing could allow for making better use of plastic waste. A team of Washington State University researchers developed a simple and efficient way to convert polylactic acid (PLA), a bio-based plastic used in products such as filament, plastic silverware and food packaging to a high-quality resin. "We found a way to immediately turn this into something that's stronger and better, and we hope that will provide people the incentive to upcycle this stuff instead of just toss it away," said Yu-Chung Chang, a postdoctoral researcher in the WSU School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a co-corresponding author on the work. "W...

Over the past few decades, computer scientists have developed increasingly advanced technologies and tools to store large amounts of music and audio files in electronic devices. A particular milestone for music storage was the development of MP3 (i.e., MPEG-1 layer 3) technology, a technique to compress sound sequences or songs into very small files that can be easily stored and transferred between devices. The encoding, editing and compression of media files, including PKZIP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, MP3, AAC, Cinepak and MPEG-2 files, is achieved using a set of technologies known as codecs. Codecs are compression technologies with two key components: an encoder that compresses files and a decoder that decompresses them. There are two types of codecs, the so-called lossless and lossy codecs. During decompression, ...

Molecular motors are complex devices composed of many different parts that consume energy to perform various cellular activities. In short, molecular machines transform energy into useful work. Understanding the mechanistical aspects underlying these motors begins with generating a detailed description of their overall architecture and atomic organization. However, to uncover the core mechanisms energizing these motors it is essential to decode all of the molecular dynamics in atomic detail. Now, the research team of Thomas C. Marlovits from the Center for Structural Systems Biology CSSB at DESY and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg reveals the architecture, complete functional cycle and the mechanism of such a molecular motor. T...

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Syracuse University and the University of Pennsylvania, has developed a means for showing how a certain piece of material wrinkles after it has been flattened. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics , the group describes experiments they conducted with tiny pieces of plastic. Prior research has shown that it is difficult to understand the rules of wrinkling for almost any material—there are just too many variables involved to get a handle on it. In this new effort, the researchers sought to understand how wrinkling works in a single material as it wrinkles in a controllable setting. The work followed up on work done by Ian Tabasco, a math...

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, in cooperation with Sandia National Laboratories, have successfully created photon pairs at several different frequencies using resonant metasurfaces. A photon is the quantum (the minimum amount involved in an interaction) of any form of electromagnetic radiation, such as light. Photons are essential to a number of current research fields and technologies, like quantum state engineering, which in turn represents the cornerstone of all quantum photonic technologies. With the help of quantum photonics, scientists and engineers are working to create new technologies such as new forms of encryption ...

As any driver knows, accidents can happen in the blink of an eye—so when it comes to the camera system in autonomous vehicles, processing time is critical. The time that it takes for the system to snap an image and deliver the data to the microprocessor for image processing could mean the difference between avoiding an obstacle or getting into a major accident. In-sensor image processing, in which important features are extracted from raw data by the image sensor itself instead of the separate microprocessor, can speed up the visual processing. To date, demonstrations of in-sensor processing have been limited to emerging research materials which are, at least for now, difficult to incorporate into commercial systems. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences...

Researchers are exploring a potential new therapeutic approach for triple negative breast cancer treatment. Amir Abdo Alsharabasy, a CÚRAM doctoral candidate working in the laboratory of Professor Abhay Pandit, is working on the design of nitric oxide scavengers to form a new treatment approach for this aggressive form of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer is invasive breast cancer that does not respond to hormonal therapy medicines or the current medicines that target the HER2 protein. Triple-negative breast cancer is usually more aggressive, harder to treat, and more likely to recur than cancers that are hormone receptor-positive or HER2-positive. "Nitric oxide is one of the prominent free radicals pr...

When asked to write the numbers from one to ten in a sequence, how do you order them? Horizontally? Vertically? Left to right? Top to bottom? Would you place them randomly? It has been often been assumed, and taught in schools in Western countries, that the "correct" ordering of numbers is from left to right (1, 2, 3, 4…) rather than right to left (10, 9, 8, 7…). The ordering of numbers along a horizontal dimension is known as a "mental number line" and describes an important way we represent number and quantity in space. Studies show humans prefer to position larger numbers to the right and smaller numbers to the left. People are usually faster and more accurate at comparing numbers when larger ones are to the right and smaller ones are to the left, and people with brain...

The immune system has evolved to safeguard the body from a wildly diverse range of potential threats. Among these are bacterial diseases, including plague, cholera, diphtheria and Lyme disease, and viral contagions such as influenza, Ebola virus and SARS CoV-2. Despite the impressive power of the immune system's complex defense network, one type of threat is especially challenging to combat. This arises when the body's own native cells turn rogue, leading to the phenomenon of cancer. Although the immune system often engages to try to rid the body of malignant cells, its efforts are frequently thwarted as the disease progresses unchecked.The illustration shows a cancer cell (center) surrounded by immune T-cells augmented with an oncolytic (cancer-fighting) virus. A new study describ...

Closure of the Neo-Tethys Ocean and the subsequent formation of the Tibetan Plateau is one of the most significant tectonic events on Earth. How the Indian subcontinent drifted northward anomalously fast and collided with Asia is an essential question in describing global changes in tectonics, climate and ecosystems. Double subduction of the Neo-Tethys Ocean is a leading model in interpreting this anomalous convergence speed. But no compelling evidence from the entire Himalaya and adjacent regions has been reported before. Recently, Yang Shun, a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), under the supervision of Profs. He Yumei and Jiang Mingming, along wit...