A gel-coupled transducer, no incision and no drug, revved the drainage plumbing of a stroke-injured rodent brain, routing red-cell residue to neck lymph nodes and lifting survival to five in six from half.
A wave-powered robot heard dolphins whistle near shore and click more often where sound-producing fish were present. The pattern could help identify social and foraging habitat, but the recordings cannot show which dolphin species were involved or prove what either animal was hearing.
A rocket-propelled semitrailer carrying mock nuclear-weapon cargo has smashed into a barrier in New Mexico, completing Sandia National Laboratories’ full-scale crash-test series for a new secure transporter. The decisive evidence is now in the data, which have not been publicly released.
A pale, eyeless earthworm eel pumped from farmland borewells in Bihar is the first fish ever recorded from the aquifer beneath the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and a genus wholly new to science.
Tracking 56 barred owls in northwestern California, researchers found each bird claiming large territories in the tallest, oldest forest, with nearly two-thirds of an average home range overlapping spotted owl habitat. Removing resident owls reopened habitat, but only where control is sustained.
In mice lacking an autism-linked gene, inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus no longer remodeled themselves after social experience. Boosting a single plasticity gene in those cells, in adult animals, rebalanced the circuit, improved memory, sharpened brain rhythms, and cut seizures from ten of fourteen mice to three of twelve.
Gaia observations of 110 Milky Way star clusters challenge the assumption that stars everywhere are born in the same proportions. A telltale bend in their stellar mass distributions varies with cluster age, evidence that the stellar initial mass function depends on the conditions in which stars form.
An MIT plasma physicist and a financial economist have built a ten-parameter test, modeled on fusion’s famous Lawson criterion, that asks the question the industry tends to dodge: can a fusion power plant bring in more money than it consumes?
A brain-inspired memory network fed heavily skewed patterns can look like it is recalling something when it is only agreeing with the majority. Rewriting the learning rule so it tracks each neuron’s departure from its own average restored recall at every bias level the researchers tested.
A week of daily separations left adult mouse brain cells with their DNA packaging loosened, and of sixteen candidate enzymes only one had changed. Add that enzyme to unstressed pups and they grew up fragile. Take it away and stressed pups grew up steady.
Fuel cells run on platinum, and platinum is scarce and expensive. A new carbon material riddled with tiny channels stops the metal from clumping and wearing away, which could mean cheaper fuel cells that last long enough for trucks and data centers to rely on.
Clavina routes photons through reusable linear and nonlinear modules instead of rebuilding the hardware for each task. The result is not a fault-tolerant quantum computer yet, but it is a credible architecture for one.