Science X Newsletter Week 24

Dear Reader ,

Here is your customized Science X Newsletter for week 24:

	New evidence that all stars are born in pairs Did our sun have a twin when it was born 4.5 billion years ago?
	Blue Brain team discovers a multi-dimensional universe in brain networks For most people, it is a stretch of the imagination to understand the world in four dimensions but a new study has discovered structures in the brain with up to eleven dimensions - ground-breaking work that is beginning to reveal the brain's deepest architectural secrets.
	Wireless charging of moving electric vehicles overcomes major hurdle If electric cars could recharge while driving down a highway, it would virtually eliminate concerns about their range and lower their cost, perhaps making electricity the standard fuel for vehicles.
	No Universe without Big Bang According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their "no-boundary proposal", and by Alexander Vilenkin with his "tunnelling proposal". Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able to use better mathematical methods to show that these ideas cannot work. The big bang, in its complicated glory, retains all its mystery.
	Romania to ban wild animals in circuses Tigers, lions, bears and other wild animals will be banned from circuses in Romania after the country's parliament passed a bill on Tuesday in a move welcomed by animal rights groups.
	Evidence that Jupiter is the oldest planet in the solar system An international group of scientists has found that Jupiter is the oldest planet in our solar system.
	Early stress confers lifelong vulnerability causing alterations in a specific brain region Early life stress encodes lifelong susceptibility to stress through long-lasting transcriptional programming in a brain reward region implicated in mood and depression, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published June 15 in the journal Science.
	Neural networks take on quantum entanglement Machine learning, the field that's driving a revolution in artificial intelligence, has cemented its role in modern technology. Its tools and techniques have led to rapid improvements in everything from self-driving cars and speech recognition to the digital mastery of an ancient board game.
	Doctors use magnetic stimulation to 'rewire' the brain for people with depression Americans spend billions of dollars each year on antidepressants, but the National Institutes of Health estimates that those medications work for only 60 percent to 70 percent of people who take them. In addition, the number of people with depression has increased 18 percent since 2005, according to the World Health Organization, which this year launched a global campaign encouraging people to seek treatment.
	A surprising new link between inflammation and mental illness Up to 75 percent of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus—an incurable autoimmune disease commonly known as lupus—experience neuropsychiatric symptoms. But so far, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying lupus' effects on the brain has remained murky. Now, new research from Boston Children's Hospital has shed light on the mystery and points to a potential new drug for protecting the brain from the neuropsychiatric effects of lupus and other central nervous system (CNS) diseases. The team has published its surprising findings in Nature.
	Are left-handed people more gifted than others? Our study suggests it may hold true for maths The belief that there is a link between talent and left-handedness has a long history. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed. So were Mark Twain, Mozart, Marie Curie, Nicola Tesla and Aristotle. It's no different today – former US president Barack Obama is a left-hander, as is business leader Bill Gates and footballer Lionel Messi.
	Learning with light: New system allows optical 'deep learning' "Deep Learning" computer systems, based on artificial neural networks that mimic the way the brain learns from an accumulation of examples, have become a hot topic in computer science. In addition to enabling technologies such as face- and voice-recognition software, these systems could scour vast amounts of medical data to find patterns that could be useful diagnostically, or scan chemical formulas for possible new pharmaceuticals.
	3-in-1 device offers alternative to Moore's law In the semiconductor industry, there is currently one main strategy for improving the speed and efficiency of devices: scale down the device dimensions in order to fit more transistors onto a computer chip, in accordance with Moore's law. However, the number of transistors on a computer chip cannot exponentially increase forever, and this is motivating researchers to look for other ways to improve semiconductor technologies.
	Promiscuous salamander found to use genes from three partners equally A promiscuous salamander has found a simple genetic formula for success: Mate with multiple males and use equal parts of each partner's genetic material in her offspring.
	Big scientific breakthrough at sub-atomic level holds promise for secure comms Chinese scientists have pulled off a major feat with one of the sub-atomic world's weirdest phenomena: photons that behave like twins and experience the same things simultaneously, even over great distances.
	Two new massive planets detected around the star HD 27894 Gas giant planet HD 27894 b appears to have at least two massive companions, according to a new study published June 1 in a paper on arXiv.org. One of the newly discovered alien worlds is a Saturn-mass planet, while the other one is a cold exoworld several times more massive than Jupiter.
	Physicists use quantum memory to demonstrate quantum secure direct communication For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol combined with quantum memory, which is essential for storing and controlling the transfer of information. Until now, QSDC protocols have used fiber delay lines as a substitute for quantum memory, but the use of quantum memory is necessary for future applications, such as long-distance communication over secure quantum networks.
	Magnets, all the way down! In many ways, magnets are still mysterious. They get their (often powerful) effects from the microscopic interactions of individual electrons, and from the interplay between their collective behavior at different scales. But if you can't move these electrons around to study how factors like symmetry impact the larger-scale magnetic effects, what can you do instead?
	Two-headed porpoise pulled from the ocean in the North Sea A newly born two-headed porpoise has been documented by a group of Dutch fishermen and studied by a team of researchers from several institutions in the Netherlands. In their paper published in Deinsea—Online Journal of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, the researchers report how the fishermen caught the porpoise, photographed it and then threw it back into the ocean.
	How the quantum Zeno effect impacts Schroedinger's cat You've probably heard about Schrödinger's cat, which famously is trapped in a box with a mechanism that is activated if a radioactive atom decays, releasing radiation. The act of looking in the box collapses the atom's wave function—the mathematical description of its state —from a "superposition" of states to a definite state, which either kills the cat or let's it live another day.

---

This email is a free service of Science X Network
You received this email because you subscribed to our list.
If you no longer want to receive this email use the link below to unsubscribe.
https://sciencex.com/profile/nwletter/
You are subscribed as jmabs1@gmail.com