Science

Science

Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock's famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock's work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it turns out that when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens and compares them to those of Pollock himself, the children's work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock's than those of the adults.

Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain-computer interface (BCI) translated her thoughts into keystrokes - and simple melodies, such as 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', rang out.

In their system, the engineers use ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material that can absorb moisture from the air. This said material is an ultrasonic actuator made of a flat ceramic ring, which receives the electricity during vibrations. In their research, the team learned that this vibration can break the weak connection between the water molecules and the sorbent, so when the waves hit the flat ceramic ring and the system, the water inside it loosens and falls out as droplets,

Researchers and scientific journals can add a new possibility to a growing list of artificial intelligence-generated horrors: letters to the editor. Two days after researchers published a paper on the efficacy of ivermectin as a treatment for malaria in the New England Journal of Medicine this summer, the journal received a letter to the editor from another researcher criticizing the paper's findings.

Time is running out for the venerable NASA observatory. In September, the agency reckoned there was a 50 percent chance of an uncontrolled reentry by mid-2026, increasing to 90 percent by the end of the year. Although the spacecraft was launched in 2004, it remains operational and could continue to capture data on gamma-ray bursts if boosted to a higher orbit.

A single multipurpose gene-editing tool can correct several genetic conditions by restoring proteins that have been truncated by disease-causing mutations. The method might one day overcome a key stumbling block faced by gene-editing therapies: the need to design a bespoke treatment for each disease. The new approach, called PERT, combines gene editing with engineered RNA molecules that allow protein synthesis to continue even when a mutation in the DNA tells it to stop prematurely.

Mysterious mental misfires are not random and, in many cases, predictable and avoidable. Once you understand the neuroscience behind these common tasks, the confusion evaporates, and you can avoid the self-doubt and humiliation that often come from what we sometimes conclude are examples of individual stupidity. What appears to be a personal flaw is actually just your ancient brain navigating a modern world.

A comet, dubbed C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), spectacularly broke apart into three huge chunks and anybody with an eight-inch telescope or bigger can catch the resulting fireworks show for the next several weeks, according to Sky & Telescope. The comet shouldn't be confused with interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. K1/ATLAS originated from within the furthest stretches of the solar system, and not interstellar space. Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope 2.0 Project, which allows public access to remotely-controlled telescopes,

In brief, circular (3-mm diameter) craniotomies were centred over ALM (2.5 mm anterior and 1.5 mm lateral from Bregma). We expressed the soma-targeted opsin ST-ChrimsonR in excitatory neurons by injecting a virus (10 12 titre; AAV2/2 camKII-KV2.1-ChrimsonR-FusionRed; Addgene, plasmid, catalogue no. 102771) into the craniotomy, 400 µm below the dura (five to ten sites, 20-30 nl each), centred in the craniotomy and spaced by approximately 500 μm between injection sites.

The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, reveal that, far from being a recent human cultural invention, kissing is an ancient trait deeply rooted in our biology. This is the first time anyone has taken a broad evolutionary lens to examine kissing. Our findings add to a growing body of work highlighting the remarkable diversity of sexual behaviors exhibited by our primate cousins, said Matilda Brindle, lead author of the study and an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Biology at Oxford, in a statement.

Brindle and her colleagues, Catherine Talbot of the Florida Institute of Technology and Stuart West of Oxford, wanted to evaluate kissing from an evolutionary perspective. So they searched through past studies for modern examples of primates smooching, defined rather unromantically as non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer. They found that just like humans, great apes kiss for a variety of reasons, from conveying sexual desire to indicating friendly, affectionate feelings.

Science@Cal is proud to present a series of free public science lectures on the third Saturday of every month. These talks are given by renowned UC Berkeley scientists and aimed at general audiences. Talks take place on the UC Berkeley campus at 11 am. Doors open thirty minutes before the talk and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Each talk is planned to last an hour, plus time for at least a few questions at the end.

"Shrimps is bugs" all over the city: Thank you for leading me to this rabbithole of scientific and taxonomic discovery.

Most of us have strong opinions about what those words mean, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that "smart" and "dumb" are slippery, subjective constructs. What seems smart to one person may strike another as naive, arrogant, or shortsighted. Worse still, our own perception of what's smart can shift over time. Yesterday's clever decision can look like today's regrettable blunder.

Generative artificial intelligence can now counterfeit reality at an industrial scale. Deepfakesphotographs, videos and audio tracks that use AI to create convincing but entirely fabricated representations of people or eventsaren't just an Internet content problem; they are a social-order problem. The power of AI to create words and images that seem real but aren't threatens society, critical thinking and civilizational stability.

Some say the reason most manhole covers are round is that a circle cannot fall through a smaller circular hole. Which of these other two-dimensional shapes cannot fall through a hole that is the same shape but slightly smaller? Shapes 1, 2 and 3 can all fall through their own holes. Shape 4 cannot. Challenge problem: Can you find another shape that cannot fall through a slightly smaller hole of the same shape?

Scientists have unveiled the most detailed map of the brain ever created. The fascinating chart represents almost 10 million neurons, 26 billion synapses and 86 interconnected brain regions. It was created with Fugaku, Japan's ultra-fast supercomputer, which is capable of quadrillions of calculations per second. Scientists will use their digital copy to answer questions about what happens in a disease, how brain waves shape mental focus and how seizures spread in the brain.

"They're coming off the line at one a month right now, and then we're ramping from there," he said of the second stages, known internally as GS-2. "It would be ambitious to get to the upper level, but we want to be hardware rich. So, you know, we want to try to keep building as fast as we can, and then with practice I think our launch cadence can go up."

Around 38 percent of websites that were on the Internet in 2013 are gone now. Half of Wikipedia pages reference dead links. Information seems to be disappearing all around us, and that's nothing new. Over geological time, information loss is the norm, not the exception. Yet according to physics, information is never destroyed. In principle, a burned book is just as readable as the originalif you analyze the ashes of the fire, the smoke and the flames to re-create the incinerated words.

It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.