Amazing Science

Researchers have developed a biosynthetic “clock” that keeps cells from reaching normal levels of deterioration related to aging. They engineered a gene oscillator that switches between the two normal paths of aging, slowing cell degeneration and setting a record for life extension.

A new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity -- while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story -- into a continuous stream of text. The system developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.

The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was led by Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at UT Austin. The work relies in part on a transformer model, similar to the ones that power Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

Unlike other language decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive. Participants also do not need to use only words from a prescribed list. Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining telling a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone.

"For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what's been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences," Huth said. "We're getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas."

The result is not a word-for-word transcript. Instead, researchers designed it to capture the gist of what is being said or thought, albeit imperfectly. About half the time, when the decoder has been trained to monitor a participant's brain activity, the machine produces text that closely (and sometimes precisely) matches the intended meanings of the original words. For example, in experiments, a participant listening to a speaker say, "I don't have my driver's license yet" had their thoughts translated as, "She has not even started to learn to drive yet." Listening to the words, "I didn't know whether to scream, cry or run away. Instead, I said, 'Leave me alone!'" was decoded as, "Started to scream and cry, and then she just said, 'I told you to leave me alone.'"

Beginning with an earlier version of the paper that appeared as a preprint online, the researchers addressed questions about potential misuse of the technology. The paper describes how decoding worked only with cooperative participants who had participated willingly in training the decoder. Results for individuals on whom the decoder had not been trained were unintelligible, and if participants on whom the decoder had been trained later put up resistance -- for example, by thinking other thoughts -- results were similarly unusable.

While conducting a study of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uncovered a previously unseen way in which the ice and ocean interact. The glaciologists said their findings could mean that the climate community has been vastly underestimating the magnitude of future sea level rise caused by polar ice deterioration.

Using satellite radar data from three European missions, the UCI/NASA team learned that Petermann Glacier's grounding line -- where ice detaches from the land bed and begins floating in the ocean -- shifts substantially during tidal cycles, allowing warm seawater to intrude and melt ice at an accelerated rate. The group's results are the subject of a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Petermann's grounding line could be more accurately described as a grounding zone, because it migrates between 2 and 6 kilometers as tides come in and out," said lead author Enrico Ciraci, UCI assistant specialist in Earth system science and NASA postdoctoral fellow. "This is an order of magnitude larger than expected for grounding lines on a rigid bed."

He said the traditional view of grounding lines beneath ocean-reaching glaciers was that they did not migrate during tidal cycles, nor did they experience ice melt. But the new study replaces that thinking with knowledge that warm ocean water intrudes beneath the ice through preexisting subglacial channels, with the highest melt rates occurring at the grounding zone.

The researchers found that as Petermann Glacier's grounding line retreated nearly 4 kilometers -- 2½ miles -- between 2016 and 2022, warm water carved a 670-foot-tall cavity in the underside of the glacier, and that abscess remained there for all of 2022. "These ice-ocean interactions make the glaciers more sensitive to ocean warming," said senior co-author Eric Rignot, UCI professor of Earth system science and NASA JPL research scientist.

"These dynamics are not included in models, and if we were to include them, it would increase projections of sea level rise by up to 200 percent -- not just for Petermann but for all glaciers ending in the ocean, which is most of northern Greenland and all of Antarctica."

The Greenland ice sheet has lost billions of tons of ice to the ocean in the past few decades, the PNAS paper stresses, with most of the loss caused by warming of subsurface ocean waters, a product of Earth's changing climate. Exposure to ocean water melts the ice vigorously at the glacier front and erodes resistance to the movement of glaciers over the ground, causing the ice to slide more quickly to the sea, according to Rignot.

Goldenhar syndrome is a rare congenital disease, affecting early foetal development. This syndrome includes malformations of varying severity, affecting different parts of the face. Its causes and modes of transmission are still poorly understood.

An international collaboration led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and Beihang University, in China, has discovered that pathogenic variants of the FOXI3 gene -- responsible for the development of the ear -- cause one form of this developmental disorder. The scientists were also able to identify the modes of transmission of the disease when this particular gene is involved. These results can be found in Nature Communications.

First described in 1952 at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) by the ophthalmologist Maurice Goldenhar (1924-2001), Goldenhar syndrome or oculo-auriculo-vertebral dysplasia is a rare congenital disorder with facial asymmetry, malformations of the auditory and ocular systems, and spinal column anomalies, sometimes associated with mental retardation. It varies greatly in expression and severity depending on the individual and is thought to affect approximately one in 3,500 to 5,600 births.

This syndrome is caused by mutations that appear during foetal development. Do these mutations occur spontaneously or is there an inherited form of the disease? The mode of transmission and the molecular mechanisms involved are still poorly understood. A recent international research effort, led by a joint team from the UNIGE and Beihang University, in China, is providing new elements for understanding the disease. The scientists have identified a gene -- FOXI3 -- whose pathogenic variants are involved in one form of the disease.

Thanks to data from a magnified, multiply imaged supernova, a team led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers has successfully used a first-of-its-kind technique to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. Their data provide insight into a longstanding debate in the field and could help scientists more accurately determine the Universe's age and better understand the cosmos. The work is divided into two papers, respectively published in Science, one of the world's top peer-reviewed academic journals, and The Astrophysical Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal of astrophysics and astronomy.

In astronomy, there are two precise measurements of the expansion of the Universe, also called the "Hubble constant." One is calculated from nearby observations of supernovae, and the second uses the "cosmic microwave background," or radiation that began to stream freely through the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. However, these two measurements differ by about 10 percent, which has caused widespread debate among physicists and astronomers. If both measurements are accurate, that means scientists' current theory about the make-up of the universe is incomplete.

"If new, independent measurements confirm this disagreement between the two measurements of the Hubble constant, it would become a chink in the armor of our understanding of the cosmos," said Patrick Kelly, lead author of both papers and an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. "The big question is if there is a possible issue with one or both of the measurements. Our research addresses that by using an independent, completely different way to measure the expansion rate of the Universe."

The University of Minnesota-led team was able to calculate this value using data from a supernova discovered by Kelly in 2014 -- the first ever example of a multiply imaged supernova, meaning that the telescope captured four different images of the same cosmic event. After the discovery, teams around the world predicted that the supernova would reappear at a new position in 2015, and the University of Minnesota team detected this additional image.

These multiple images appeared because the supernova was gravitationally lensed by a galaxy cluster, a phenomenon in which mass from the cluster bends and magnifies light. By using the time delays between the appearances of the 2014 and 2015 images, the researchers were able to measure the Hubble Constant using a theory developed in 1964 by Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal that had previously been impossible to put into practice.

The researchers' findings don't absolutely settle the debate, Kelly said, but they do provide more insight into the problem and bring physicists closer to obtaining the most accurate measurement of the Universe's age. "Our measurement favors the value from the cosmic microwave background, although it is not in strong disagreement with the supernova value," Kelly said. "If observations of future supernovae that are also gravitationally lensed by clusters yield a similar result, then it would identify an issue with the current supernova value, or with our understanding of galaxy-cluster dark matter."

Using the same data, the researchers found that some current models of galaxy-cluster dark matter were able to explain their observations of the supernovae. This allowed them to determine the most accurate models for the locations of dark matter in the galaxy cluster, a question that has long plagued astronomers.

Scientists have made groundbreaking progress in characterizing the fraction of human DNA that varies between individuals.

For more than 20 years, scientists have relied on the human reference genome, a consensus genetic sequence, as a standard against which to compare other genetic data. Used in countless studies, the reference genome has made it possible to identify genes implicated in specific diseases and trace the evolution of human traits, among other things. But it has always been a flawed tool. One of its biggest problems is that about 70 percent of its data came from a single man of predominantly African-European background whose DNA was sequenced during the Human Genome Project, the first effort to capture all of a person's DNA. As a result, it can tell us little about the 0.2 to one percent of genetic sequence that makes each of the seven billion people on this planet different from each other, creating an inherent bias in biomedical data believed to be responsible for some of the health disparities affecting patients today. Many genetic variants found in non-European populations, for instance, aren't represented in the reference genome at all.

For years, researchers have called for a resource more inclusive of human diversity with which to diagnose diseases and guide medical treatments. Now scientists with the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium have made groundbreaking progress in characterizing the fraction of human DNA that varies between individuals. As they recently published in Nature, they have assembled genomic sequences of 47 people from around the world into a so-called pangenome in which more than 99 percent of each sequence is rendered with high accuracy. Layered upon each other, these sequences revealed nearly 120 million DNA base pairs that were previously unseen. While it's still a work in progress, the pangenome is public and can be used by scientists around the world as a new standard human genome reference, says The Rockefeller University's Erich D. Jarvis, one of the primary investigators.

"This complex genomic collection represents significantly more accurate human genetic diversity than has ever been captured before," he says. "With a greater breadth and depth of genetic data at their disposal, and greater quality of genome assemblies, researchers can refine their understanding of the link between genes and disease traits, and accelerate clinical research."

Sourcing diversity

Richard Feynman’s path integral is a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy. Physicists still struggle to figure out how to use it, and what it means.

The most powerful formula in physics starts with a slender S, the symbol for a sort of sum known as an integral. Further along comes a second S, representing a quantity known as action. Together, these twin S’s form the essence of an equation that is arguably the most effective diviner of the future yet devised.

“It’s how the world really is,” said Renate Loll, a theoretical physicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

But the equation, although it graces the pages of thousands of physics publications, is more of a philosophy than a rigorous recipe. It suggests that our reality is a sort of blending—a sum—of all imaginable possibilities. But it does not tell researchers exactly how to carry out the sum. So physicists have spent decades developing an arsenal of approximation schemes for constructing and computing the integral for different quantum systems. The approximations work well enough that intrepid physicists like Loll are now pursuing the ultimate path integral: one that blends all conceivable shapes of space and time and produces a universe shaped like ours as the net result. But in this quest to show that reality is indeed the sum of all possible realities, they face deep confusion about which possibilities should enter the sum.

Quantum mechanics really got off the ground in 1926 when Erwin Schrödinger devised an equation describing how the wavelike states of particles evolve from moment to moment. The next decade, Paul Dirac advanced an alternative vision of the quantum world. His was based on the venerable notion that things take the path of “least action” to get from A to B—the route that, loosely speaking, takes the least time and energy. Richard Feynman later stumbled upon Dirac’s work and fleshed out the idea, unveiling the path integral in 1948. The heart of the philosophy is on full display in the quintessential quantum mechanics demonstration: the double-slit experiment.

Physicists fire particles at a barrier with two slits in it and observe where the particles land on a wall behind the barrier. If particles were bullets, they’d form a cluster behind each slit. Instead, particles land along the back wall in repeating stripes. The experiment suggests that what moves through the slits is actually a wave representing the particle’s possible locations. The two emerging wavefronts interfere with each other, producing a series of peaks where the particle might end up being detected.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences.

Newly discovered electrical activity within cells could change the way researchers think about biological chemistry

The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body. These electrical signals are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical charges can exist between microdroplets of water and air.

Now, researchers at Duke University have discovered that these types of electric fields also exist within and around another type of cellular structure called biological condensates. Like oil droplets floating in water, these structures exist because of differences in density. They form compartments inside the cell without needing the physical boundary of a membrane. Inspired by previous research demonstrating that microdroplets of water interacting with air or solid surfaces create tiny electrical imbalances, the researchers decided to see if the same was true for small biological condensates. They also wanted to see if these imbalances sparked reactive oxygen,  “redox,” reactions like these other systems.

Appearing on April 28, 2023 in the journal Chem, their foundational discovery could change the way researchers think about biological chemistry. It could also provide a clue as to how the first life on Earth harnessed the energy needed to arise. “In a prebiotic environment without enzymes to catalyze reactions, where would the energy come from?” asked Yifan Dai, a Duke postdoctoral researcher working in the laboratory of Ashutosh Chilkoti, the Alan L. Kaganov Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Lingchong You, the James L. Meriam Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

“This discovery provides a plausible explanation of where the reaction energy could have come from, just as the potential energy that is imparted on a point charge placed in an electric field,” Dai said. When electric charges jump between one material and another, they can produce molecular fragments that can pair up and form hydroxyl radicals, which have the chemical formula OH. These can then pair again to form hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in tiny but detectable amounts. “But interfaces have seldom been studied in biological regimes other than the cellular membrane, which is one of the most essential part of biology,” said Dai. “So we were wondering what might be happening at the interface of biological condensates, that is, if it is an asymmetric system too. These findings suggest why condensates are so important in the functioning of cells.”

Cells can build biological condensates to either separate or trap together certain proteins and molecules, either hindering or promoting their activity. Researchers are just beginning to understand how condensates work and what they could be used for. Because the Chilkoti laboratory specializes in creating synthetic versions of naturally occurring biological condensates, the researchers were easily able to create a test bed for their theory. After combining the right formula of building blocks to create minuscule condensates, with help from postdoctoral scholar Marco Messina in? Christopher J. Chang’s group at the University of California – Berkeley, they added a dye to the system that glows in the presence of reactive oxygen species.

Their hunch was right. When the environmental conditions were right, a solid glow started from the edges of the condensates, confirming that a previously unknown phenomenon was at work. Dai next talked with Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, whose group established the electric behavior of water droplets. Zare was excited to hear about the new behavior in biological systems, and started to work with the group on the underlying mechanism. “Inspired by previous work on water droplets, my graduate student, Christian Chamberlayne, and I thought that the same physical principles might apply and promote redox chemistry, such as the formation of hydrogen peroxide molecules,” Zare said. “These findings suggest why condensates are so important in the functioning of cells.”

A futuristic demonstration of emerging renewable energy material – printed solar cells, is being trialled in a public setting for the first time as it nears commercial readiness.

Creator of the organic printed solar material, Physicist Professor Paul Dastoor from the Faculty of Science said his team were excited to take their ‘science to the streets’ in what represented significant progress toward commercial availability of the material. “Globally, there’s been so few of these installations, we know very little about how they perform in a public setting. This installation is the next critical step in accelerating the development and commercialization of this technology. It presents a new scenario for us to test performance and durability against a range of new challenges,” said Professor Dastoor.

“Located within Lane Cove Council’s vibrant new urban space ‘The Canopy’, this demonstration plucks extraordinary science from behind sealed lab doors, and places it in an ordinary environment, where people will interact with it as they go about their grocery shopping, play with their children in the park, or enjoy food in one of the nearby restaurants. It’s an effortless and subtle way to spark conversation and showcase ‘what’s next’ in energy generation to thousands of people.” The renewable energy tech - which is ultra light-weight, ultra flexible, recyclable and cheap to manufacture, will power interactive public lighting in Sydney.

Professor Dastoor said he was hopeful the public installation would prompt further discussion on the subject of energy as the Federal Government considered submissions to its technology investment roadmap. "The government is seeking to bring down carbon emissions over the next 30 years and the community has been very engaged on this subject. Globally, there are many research groups like ours working on sustainable energy technologies and now, via the technology investment roadmap, is our opportunity to ensure we invest in and deliver clever solutions,” said Professor Dastoor.

Director of the University’s Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER), Professor Alan Broadfoot, said the University was committed to bringing the world closer to a sustainable future through its next generation resources engagement priority. “The printed solar project highlights the transformational research coming out of NIER through valued partnerships with government, industry, and the community in critical areas such as new energy technologies,” said Professor Broadfoot.

A new advanced manufacturing industry for Australia

This installation follows a successful commercial-scale public sector installation with CHEP in late 2018. Professor Dastoor said global interest in printed solar was the highest he had ever witnessed and that an advanced manufacturing facility for printed solar in NSW was the imminent goal for his team. “We have a world-class manufacturing facility at the University’s Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER), which has been generously supported by the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF). This print facility can manufacture hundreds of meters of material a day, however we’re now reaching the point where we need to significantly scale this level of production,” said Professor Dastoor.

This technology will really disrupt and revitalise the contracting print industry. Printed solar is manufactured on conventional printers – our lab-scale system previously manufactured wine labels.

Futurists have long speculated that upon the arrival of AGI, the first sperintelligence will quickly follow. From I. J. Good, writing in 1965,

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Nick Bostrom wrote in his book Superintelligence (2014),

Note that one could think that it will take quite a long time until machines reach the human baseline, or one might be agnostic about how long that will take, and yet have a strong view that once this happens, the further ascent into strong superintelligence will be very rapid.

and categorized takeoff durations into three types:

• "A slow takeoff is one that occurs over some long temporal interval, such as decades or centuries."

• "A fast takeoff occurs over some short temporal interval, such as minutes, hours, or days."

• "A moderate takeoff is one that occurs over some intermediary temporal interval, such as months or years."

While it seems that most prominent thinkers are convinced that rapid technological and economic progress will follow the development of AGI (See Paul Christiano, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ben Goertzel), most AI researchers surveyed are not convinced. In 2016, AI Impacts asked AI researchers,

Assume that HLMI will exist at some point. How likely do you then think it is that the rate of global technological improvement will dramatically increase (e.g. by a factor of ten) as a result of machine intelligence:

Within two years of that point? ___% chance

Within thirty years of that point? ___% chance

The median answer was 20% for the two year estimate and 80% for the thirty year estimate.

Stanford University researchers have developed a generative AI model that can choreograph human dance animation to match any piece of music. It’s called Editable Dance GEneration (EDGE).

“EDGE shows that AI-enabled characters can bring a level of musicality and artistry to dance animation that was not possible before,” says Karen Liu, a professor of computer science who led a team that included two student collaborators, Jonathan Tseng and Rodrigo Castellon, in her lab. The researchers believe that the tool will help choreographers design sequences and communicate their ideas to live dancers by visualizing 3D dance sequences. Key to the program’s advanced capabilities is editability. Liu imagines that EDGE could be used to create computer-animated dance sequences by allowing animators to intuitively edit any parts of dance motion.

For example, the animator can design specific leg movements of the character, and EDGE will “auto-complete” the entire body from that positioning in a way that is realistic, seamless, and physically plausible as well — a human could complete the moves. Above all, the moves are consistent with the animator’s choice of music. Like other generative models for images and text — ChatGPT and DALL-E, for instance — EDGE represents a new tool for choreographic idea generation and movement planning.

The editability means that dance artists and choreographers can iteratively refine their sequences move by move, position by position, adding specific poses at precise moments. EDGE then incorporates the additional details into the sequence automatically. In the near future, EDGE will allow users to input their own music and even demonstrate the moves themselves in front of a camera. “We think it’s a really a fun and engaging way for everyone, not just dancers, to express themselves through movement and tap into their own creativity,” Liu says.

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) have designed a system that makes an off-the-shelf quadruped robot nimble enough to walk a narrow balance beam — a feat that is likely the first of its kind. "This experiment was huge," said Zachary Manchester, an assistant professor in the RI and head of the Robotic Exploration Lab. "I don't think anyone has ever successfully done balance beam walking with a robot before."

By leveraging hardware often used to control satellites in space, Manchester and his team offset existing constraints in the quadruped's design to improve its balancing capabilities. The standard elements of most modern quadruped robots include a torso and four legs that each end in a rounded foot, allowing the robot to traverse basic, flat surfaces and even climb stairs. Their design resembles a four-legged animal, but unlike cheetahs who can use their tails to control sharp turns or falling cats that adjust their orientation in mid-air with the help of their flexible spines, quadruped robots do not have such instinctive agility. As long as three of the robot's feet remain in contact with the ground, it can avoid tipping over. But if only one or two feet are on the ground, the robot can't easily correct for disturbances and has a much higher risk of falling. This lack of balance makes walking over rough terrain particularly difficult.

"With current control methods, a quadruped robot's body and legs are decoupled and don't speak to one another to coordinate their movements," Manchester said. "So how can we improve their balance?" The team's solution employs a reaction wheel actuator (RWA) system that mounts to the back of a quadruped robot. With the help of a novel control technique, the RWA allows the robot to balance independent of the positions of its feet. RWAs are widely used in the aerospace industry to perform attitude control on satellites by manipulating the angular momentum of the spacecraft.

"You basically have a big flywheel with a motor attached," said Manchester, who worked on the project with RI graduate student Chi-Yen Lee and mechanical engineering graduate students Shuo Yang and Benjamin Boksor. "If you spin the heavy flywheel one way, it makes the satellite spin the other way. Now take that and put it on the body of a quadruped robot."

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun to shed light on formative years in the history of the universe that have thus far been beyond reach: the formation and assembly of galaxies. For the first time, a protocluster of seven galaxies has been confirmed at a distance that astronomers refer to as redshift 7.9, or a mere 650 million years after the big bang. Based on the data collected, astronomers calculated the nascent cluster’s future development, finding that it will likely grow in size and mass to resemble the Coma Cluster, a monster of the modern universe.

“This is a very special, unique site of accelerated galaxy evolution, and Webb gave us the unprecedented ability to measure the velocities of these seven galaxies and confidently confirm that they are bound together in a protocluster,” said Takahiro Morishita of IPAC-California Institute of Technology, the lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The precise measurements captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) were key to confirming the galaxies’ collective distance and the high velocities at which they are moving within a halo of dark matter – more than two million miles per hour (about one thousand kilometers per second).

The spectral data allowed astronomers to model and map the future development of the gathering group, all the way to our time in the modern universe. The prediction that the protocluster will eventually resemble the Coma Cluster means that it could eventually be among the densest known galaxy collections, with thousands of members. “We can see these distant galaxies like small drops of water in different rivers, and we can see that eventually they will all become part of one big, mighty river,” said Benedetta Vulcani of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, another member of the research team.

Galaxy clusters are the greatest concentrations of mass in the known universe, which can dramatically warp the fabric of spacetime itself. This warping, called gravitational lensing, can have a magnifying effect for objects beyond the cluster, allowing astronomers to look through the cluster like a giant magnifying glass. The research team was able to utilize this effect, looking through Pandora’s Cluster to view the protocluster; even Webb’s powerful instruments need an assist from nature to see so far.

Exploring how large clusters like Pandora and Coma first came together has been difficult, due to the expansion of the universe stretching light beyond visible wavelengths into the infrared, where astronomers lacked high-resolution data before Webb. Webb’s infrared instruments were developed specifically to fill in these gaps at the beginning of the universe’s story.

The seven galaxies confirmed by Webb were first established as candidates for observation using data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Frontier Fields program. The program dedicated Hubble time to observations using gravitational lensing, to observe very distant galaxies in detail. However, because Hubble cannot detect light beyond near-infrared, there is only so much detail it can see. Webb picked up the investigation, focusing on the galaxies scouted by Hubble and gathering detailed spectroscopic data in addition to imagery.

The research team anticipates that future collaboration between Webb and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a high-resolution, wide-field survey mission, will yield even more results on early galaxy clusters. With 200 times Hubble's infrared field of view in a single shot, Roman will be able to identify more protocluster galaxy candidates, which Webb can follow up to confirm with its spectroscopic instruments. The Roman mission is currently targeted for launch by May 2027.

Text-to-image AI is mainstream now, but just waiting in the wings is photorealistic text-to-video. The pitch for this technology is that you’ll be able to type a description and generate a corresponding video in any style you like. Current capabilities lag behind this dream, but for those tracking the tech’s progress, a recent announcement by AI startup Runway of a new AI video generation model is noteworthy nonetheless.

Runway offers a web-based video editor that specializes in AI tools like background removal and pose detection. The company helped develop open-source text-to-image model Stable Diffusion and announced its first AI video editing model, Gen-1, in February 2023.

Gen-1 focused on transforming existing video footage, letting users input a rough 3D animation or shaky smartphone clip and apply an AI-generated overlay. In one of the clips, for example, footage of cardboard packaging is paired with an image of an industrial factory to produce a clip that could be used for storyboarding or pitching a more polished feature.

Gen-2, by comparison, seems to be more focussed on generating videos from scratch, though there are lots of caveats to note. First, the demo clips shared by Runway are short, unstable, and certainly not photorealistic yet, and second, access is limited. Bloomberg News reports that users will have to sign up to join a waitlist for Gen-2 via Runway’s Discord, and a spokesperson for the company, Kelsey Rondenet, told The Verge that Runway will be “providing broad access in the coming weeks.”

In other words, all we have to judge Gen-2 right now is a demo reel and a handful of clips (most of which were already being advertized as part of Gen-1). AI video generated using Gen-2 with the prompt “A close-up of an eye.” Still, the results are fascinating, and the prospect of text-to-video AI is certainly intoxicating — promising both new creative opportunities and new threats for misinformation, etc. It’s also worth comparing Runway’s work with text-to-video research shared by behemoths like Meta and Google. The work by these companies is more advanced (their AI-generated clips are longer and more cohesive) but not in a way that necessarily reflects these firms’ massive resources. (Runway, by comparison, is only a 45-person team.)

In other words: startups continue to do exciting work in generative AI, including the still-unexplored territory of text-to-video. Watch for more soon, AI-generated or not.

Quantum dots in semiconductors such as silicon or gallium arsenide have long been considered hot candidates for hosting quantum bits in future quantum processors. Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University have now shown that bilayer graphene has even more to offer here than other materials. The double quantum dots they have created are characterized by a nearly perfect electron-hole-symmetry that allows a robust read-out mechanism -- one of the necessary criteria for quantum computing. The results were published in the journal Nature.

The development of robust semiconductor spin qubits could help the realization of large-scale quantum computers in the future. However, current quantum dot based qubit systems are still in their infancy. In 2022, researchers at QuTech in the Netherlands were able to create 6 silicon-based spin qubits for the first time. With graphene, there is still a long way to go. The material, which was first isolated in 2004, is highly attractive to many scientists. But the realization of the first quantum bit has yet to come.

"Bilayer graphene is a unique semiconductor," explains Prof. Christoph Stampfer of Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University. "It shares several properties with single-layer graphene and also has some other special features. This makes it very interesting for quantum technologies."

One of these features is that it has a bandgap that can be tuned by an external electric field from zero to about 120 milli-electronvolt. The band gap can be used to confine charge carriers in individual areas, so-called quantum dots. Depending on the applied voltage, these can trap a single electron or its counterpart, a hole -- basically a missing electron in the solid-state structure. The possibility of using the same gate structure to trap both electrons and holes is a feature that has no counter part in conventional semiconductors.

"Bilayer graphene is still a fairly new material. So far, mainly experiments that have already been realized with other semiconductors have been carried out with it. Our current experiment now goes really beyond this for the first time," Christoph Stampfer says. He and his colleagues have created a so-called double quantum dot: two opposing quantum dots, each housing an electron and a hole whose spin properties mirror each other almost perfectly.

Humans inherited genetic material from Neanderthals that affects the shape of our noses, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

A recent study has highlighted under-prepared regions across the world most at risk of the devastating effects of scorching temperatures.

The University of Bristol-led research, published in Nature Communications, shows that unprecedented heat extremes combined with socioeconomic vulnerability puts certain regions, such as Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, and Central America,most in peril.

Countries yet to experience the most intense heatwaves are often especially susceptible, as adaptation measures are often only introduced after the event. A high chance of record-breaking temperatures, growing populations, and limited healthcare and energy provision, increase the risks.

Beijing and Central Europe are also on the list of hotspots, as if record-breaking heatwaves occurred in these densely populated regions millions of people would be adversely affected. In light of the findings, the researchers are calling for policy makers in hotspot regions to consider relevant action plans to reduce the risk of deaths and associated harms from climate extremes.

New research led by Sascha Kempf of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder finds that Saturn's rings are no more than 400 million years old. That's much younger than Saturn itself, which formed around 4.5 billion years ago.

A "beautiful effect" predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar -- a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to a Cornell astrophysicist. The extremely dense and hot remnant of a massive star, boasting a magnetic field 100 trillion times stronger than Earth's, was expected to generate highly polarized X-rays, meaning that the radiation's electromagnetic field did not vibrate randomly but had a preferred direction.

But scientists were surprised when NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite last year detected that lower- and higher-energy X-rays were polarized differently, with electromagnetic fields oriented at right angles to each other.

Extra parts, from a thumb to an arm, could be designed to help boost our capabilities

Whether it is managing childcare, operating on a patient or cooking a Sunday dinner, there are many occasions when an extra pair of arms would come in, well, handy. Now researchers say such human augmentation could be on the horizon, suggesting additional robotic body parts could be designed to boost our capabilities.

Tamar Makin, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the MRC cognition and brain unit at Cambridge University, said the approach could increase productivity. “If you want an extra arm while you’re cooking in the kitchen so you can stir the soup while chopping the vegetables, you might have the option to wear and independently control an extra robotic arm,” she said.

The approach has precedence: Dani Clode, a designer and colleague of Makin’s at Cambridge University, has already created a 3D-printed thumb that can be added to any hand. Clode will be discussing the device as part of panel on “Homo cyberneticus: motor augmentation for the future body” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC on Friday.

Makin said the extra thumb could be helpful for waiters holding plates, or for electrical engineers when soldering, for example, and other robotic body parts could be designed for particular workplace needs. For example, extra arm could help a builder hammer a nail while holding a joist in place.

“We spoke with a surgeon [who] was really interested in holding his camera whilst he’s doing shoulder surgery, rather than his assistant holding his camera,” said Clode. “He wanted to be in full control of the tools that he’s using with the two hands whilst also holding that camera and being able to manipulate that as well.”

The team say robotic body parts could allow far more control than a simple mounted device, with their operation inspired by our natural mechanisms of agency. “We want something that we’d be able to control [very] precisely without us having to articulate what it is exactly that we want,” said Makin. She said the team’s approach was rooted in the idea that the additional appendages could be used to build on the existing capabilities of a person’s body.

“If you’re missing a limb, instead of trying to replace that limb, why don’t we augment your intact hand to allow you to do more with it?” she said. But the team envisage such devices also being used by people who are not living with disabilities. Clode said an important feature of human augmentation devices is that they do not take away from the wearer’s original capabilities. “[It’s] a layer on the body that can be used with the least amount of impact as possible for the most amount of gain,” she said. A key aspect of that, Clode added, is that – unlike a spade being used to increase our abilities to dig a hole – such robotic body parts must not be hand-operated.

Astronomers sorted through 200,000 Hubble images and made tens of thousands of measurements on them to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF.

Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. But how dark is dark? To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF. This would be any leftover light after subtracting the glow from planets, stars, galaxies, and from dust in the plane of our solar system (called zodiacal light).

When researchers completed this inventory, they found an exceedingly tiny excess of light, equivalent to the steady glow of 10 fireflies spread across the entire sky. That's like turning out all the lights in a shuttered room and still finding an eerie glow coming from the walls, ceiling, and floor.

The researchers say that one possible explanation for this residual glow is that our inner solar system contains a tenuous sphere of dust from comets that are falling into the solar system from all directions, and that the glow is sunlight reflecting off this dust. If real, this dust shell could be a new addition to the known architecture of the solar system.

This idea is bolstered by the fact that in 2021 another team of astronomers used data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to also measure the sky background. New Horizons flew by Pluto in 2015, and a small Kuiper belt object in 2018, and is now heading into interstellar space. The New Horizons measurements were done at a distance of 4 billion to 5 billion miles from the Sun. This is well outside the realm of the planets and asteroids where there is no contamination from interplanetary dust.

New Horizons detected something a bit fainter that is apparently from a more distant source than Hubble detected. The source of the background light seen by New Horizons also remains unexplained. There are numerous theories ranging from the decay of dark matter to a huge unseen population of remote galaxies.

"If our analysis is correct there's another dust component between us and the distance where New Horizons made measurements. That means this is some kind of extra light coming from inside our solar system," said Tim Carleton, of Arizona State University (ASU).

"Because our measurement of residual light is higher than New Horizons we think it is a local phenomenon that is not from far outside the solar system. It may be a new element to the contents of the solar system that has been hypothesized but not quantitatively measured until now," said Carleton.

A new Griffith University study has found that humpback whales will use sandy, shallow bay areas to ‘roll’ around in sandy substrates to remove dead skin cells on their return journeys south to cooler waters. Marine ecologist Dr Olaf Meynecke, from the Griffith-led Whales and Climate Research Program and Coastal and Marine Research Centre, used suction cup tags to track southward migrating whales between August 2021 and October 2022. 

The CATS tags are fitted with integrated high-definition video, magnesium release system, a VHF transmitter for retrieval, magnetometers, a hydrophone and light, pressure, temperature and GPS sensors.  Using data and footage collected from the tags, whales were observed performing full and side rolls in up to 49m water depth on the sea floor that was lined with fine sand or rubble.   “On all occasions of sand rolling, the whales were observed on video to be slowly moving forward with their head first into the sand followed by rolling to one side or a full roll,” Dr Meynecke said. 

“During the different deployments, the sand rolling was observed in the context of socializing. The behavior was either following courtship, competition or other forms of socializing. So we believe that the whales exfoliate using the sand to assist with moulting and removal of ectoparasites such as barnacle and specifically select areas suitable for this behavior.” 

In tropical and subtropical waters, barnacles attach to the whales in their early life stages, and whales need to remove barnacles frequently to avoid excessive growth that leads to drag and energy loss. “Humpback whales host diverse communities of skin bacteria that can pose a threat for open wounds if bacteria grow in large numbers,” Dr Meynecke said. “Removing excess skin is likely a necessity to maintain a healthy bacterial skin community. Humpback whales can remove some barnacles and skin through surface activity such as breaches but not all.” 

Skin from the whales was observed to be falling off during the process of all identified rolls, and fish such as juvenile silver trevally were seen to be actively feeding from the whales’ skin during this behaviour similar to cleaning stations are coral reefs.