At the same time, he noted, there was still a 0.3% chance that their observation was a statistical fluke. “We need to be open and continue exploring other scenarios,” he added.

K2-18b is part of the “sub-Neptune” class of nearly 6,000 exoplanets that have been discovered beyond the solar system since the 1990s.

Finding evidence of life in the cosmos was the “holy grail” of exoplanet science, Madhusudhan said.

XPENG sees Iron as a personal assistant for admin and customer service in homes, offices, and retail—beyond just manufacturing.

The demonstrator raised his hands in the air to show how the message to the French president was sent with mental and physiological commands.

No brain surgery required.

Patients with ALS often lose their ability to speak making it harder to communicate with their family. This AI-powered device wants to change that.

Former urology instructor Seung-min Park won an Ig Nobel prize for his work on the Precision Health toilet, or “smart toilet.” Goals for the toilet include early disease detection and monitoring by analyzing excreta.

Once you get over the ick factor, new technologies are efficiently transforming human waste into agricultural solutions.

Year 2023 face_with_colon_three

Konishi, S., Ishibashi, S., Shimizu, S. et al. Sci Rep 13, 11,519 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-38522-x.

The precise nature of the engram, the physical substrate of memory, remains uncertain. Here, it is reported that RNA extracted from the central nervous system of Aplysia given long-term sensitization (LTS) training induced sensitization when injected into untrained animals; furthermore, the RNA-induced sensitization, like training-induced sensitization, required DNA methylation. In cellular experiments, treatment with RNA extracted from trained animals was found to increase excitability in sensory neurons, but not in motor neurons, dissociated from naïve animals. Thus, the behavioral, and a subset of the cellular, modifications characteristic of a form of nonassociative long-term memory (LTM) in Aplysia can be transferred by RNA. These results indicate that RNA is sufficient to generate an engram for LTS in Aplysia and are consistent with the hypothesis that RNA-induced epigenetic changes underlie memory storage in Aplysia.

Now this is the sort of application of AI that really intrigues me. Researchers have developed DolphinGemma, the first large language model (LLM) for understanding dolphin language. It could help us translate what these incredible creatures are saying, potentially much faster than we ever could with manual approaches used over several decades.

“The goal would be to one day speak Dolphin,” says Dr. Denise Herzing. Her research organization, The Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), exclusively studies a specific pod of free-ranging Atlantic spotted dolphins who reside off the coast of the Bahamas.

She’s been collecting and organizing dolphin sounds for the last 40 years, and has been working with Dr. Thad Starner, a research scientist from Google DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of the tech giant.