How the brain's 'internal compass' works

New study reveals how the brain makes sense of changing environmental cues
Photo Credit: Albrecht Fietz

Scientists have gained new insights into the part of the brain that gives us a sense of direction, by tracking neural activity with the latest advances in brain imaging techniques. The findings shed light on how the brain orients itself in changing environments – and even the processes that can go wrong with degenerative diseases like dementia, that leave people feeling lost and confused.

“Neuroscience research has witnessed a technology revolution in the last decade allowing us to ask and answer questions that could only be dreamed of just years ago,” says Mark Brandon, an Associate Professor of psychiatry at McGill University and researcher at the Douglas Research Centre, who co-led the research with Zaki Ajabi, a former student at McGill University and now a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University.

Reading the brain's internal compass

To understand how visual information impacts the brain’s internal compass, the researchers exposed mice to a disorienting virtual world while recording the brain's neural activity. The team recorded the brain’s internal compass with unprecedented precision using the latest advances in neuronal recording technology.

Surprisingly simple explanation for alien comet ‘Oumuamua’s weird orbit

An artist’s depiction of the interstellar comet ‘Oumuamua, as it warmed up in its approach to the sun and outgassed hydrogen (white mist), which slightly altered its orbit. The comet, which is most likely pancake-shaped, is the first known object other than dust grains to visit our solar system from another star.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA and Joseph Olmsted and Frank Summers of STScI

In 2017, a mysterious comet dubbed ‘Oumuamua fired the imaginations of scientists and the public alike. It was the first known visitor from outside our solar system, it had no bright coma or dust tail, like most comets, and a peculiar shape — something between a cigar and a pancake — and its small size more befitted an asteroid than a comet.

But the fact that it was accelerating away from the sun in a way that astronomers could not explain perplexed scientists, leading some to suggest that it was an alien spaceship.

Now, a University of California, Berkeley, astrochemist and a Cornell University astronomer argue that the comet’s mysterious deviations from a hyperbolic path around the sun can be explained by a simple physical mechanism likely common among many icy comets: outgassing of hydrogen as the comet warmed up in the sunlight.

What made ‘Oumuamua different from every other well-studied comet in our solar system was its size: It was so small that its gravitational deflection around the sun was slightly altered by the tiny push created when hydrogen gas spurted out of the ice.

The oxygen-ion battery

Prof. Jürgen Fleig, Tobias Huber, Alexander Schmid (left to right)
Photo Credit: Courtesy of TU Wien

A new type of battery has been invented at TU Wien (Vienna): The oxygen-ion battery can be extremely durable, does not require rare elements and solves the problem of fire hazards.

Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous today - from electric cars to smartphones. But that does not mean that they are the best solution for all areas of application. TU Wien has now succeeded in developing an oxygen-ion battery that has some important advantages. Although it does not allow for quite as high energy densities as the lithium-ion battery, its storage capacity does not decrease irrevocably over time: it can be regenerated and thus may enable an extremely long service life.

In addition, oxygen-ion batteries can be produced without rare elements and are made of incombustible materials. A patent application for the new battery idea has already been filed together with cooperation partners from Spain. The oxygen-ion battery could be an excellent solution for large energy storage systems, for example to store electrical energy from renewable sources. 

Pregnant women diagnosed with cancer don’t get the emotional support they need due to research gap

Photo Credit: Lucas Mendes

Support for pregnant women diagnosed with cancer is limited because of insufficient research into the specific emotional consequences and needs associated with a diagnosis at this time, according to a new report from the University of Surrey.

Researchers have also found that pregnant women diagnosed with cancer often delay seeking medical help because they believe their symptoms are due to natural changes in their body.

In the most comprehensive study of its kind, researchers from Surrey, in collaboration with the charity Mummy’s Star, reviewed causes of psychosocial issues (distress, depression, and anxiety) affecting pregnant women diagnosed with cancer and what supportive care is available to them and their partners.

Hunting Venus 2.0: Scientists sharpen their sights

Composite view of Venus consisting of two images from Japan's Akatsuki mission, taken at two different distances.
Image Credit: JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic

With the first paper compiling all known information about planets like Venus beyond our solar system, scientists are the closest they’ve ever been to finding an analog of Earth’s “twin.” 

If they succeed in locating one, it could reveal valuable insights into Earth’s future, and our risk of developing a runaway greenhouse climate as Venus did. 

Scientists who wrote the paper began with more than 300 known terrestrial planets orbiting other stars, called exoplanets. They whittled the list down to the five most likely to resemble Venus in terms of their radii, masses, densities, the shapes of their orbits, and perhaps most significantly, distances from their stars. 

The paper, published in The Astronomical Journal, also ranked the most Venus-like planets in terms of the brightness of the stars they orbit, which increases the likelihood that the James Webb Space Telescope would get more informative signals regarding the composition of their atmospheres.

Emory researchers shine light on how stress impacts women's hearts

Stress has significant impact on women's heart health, research has found
Photo Credit: Engin Akyurt

Right in the middle of women’s history month, it’s staggering to think back on how recently women and their hearts began to be taken seriously by the scientific community. As legendary Emory cardiologist Nanette Wenger, MD, wrote in a 2016 American College of Cardiology article: “Although heart disease is the number one killer of women, cardiovascular disease was really thought of as a man’s disease until the last few decades.” 

In the not-so-distant past, Wenger added, “Women who came into the emergency room with chest pains were told they had a stomach problem or that they were imagining the pain and had emotional problems, so they were sent home.” 

Thankfully, following down the path first carved out by pioneers like Wenger, there are researchers and physicians like Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, who have continued to build a data-backed case for the fact that women are very much not just making things up. 

Vaccarino, the Wilton Looney Professor of Cardiovascular Research at Rollins’ Department of Epidemiology and faculty member in the Division of Cardiology, is the principal investigator of a prospective study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) looking at sex differences in bodily responses to mental stress and subsequent cardiovascular events among young and middle-aged patients who survived a heart attack at Emory University.  

Shining a light into the ‘‘black box’’ of AI

With no insight into how Al algorithms work or what influences their results, the “black box” nature of AI technology raises important questions over trustworthiness.
Illustration Credit: Gerd Altmann

An international team led by UNIGE, HUG and NUS has developed an innovative method for evaluating AI interpretability methods, with the aim of deciphering the basis of AI reasoning and possible biases.

 Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG), and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a novel method for evaluating the interpretability of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, opening the door to greater transparency and trust in AI-driven diagnostic and predictive tools. The innovative approach sheds light on the opaque workings of so-called "black box" AI algorithms, helping users understand what influences the results produced by AI and whether the results can be trusted. This is especially important in situations that have significant impacts on the health and lives of people, such as using AI in medical applications. The research carries particular relevance in the context of the forthcoming European Union Artificial Intelligence Act which aims to regulate the development and use of AI within the EU. The findings have recently been published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Researchers develop a universal oral COVID-19 vaccine that prevents severe illness in hamsters

Illustration Credit: PIRO

A UCLA-led team has developed an inexpensive, universal oral COVID-19 vaccine that prevented severe respiratory illness and weight loss when tested in hamsters, which are naturally susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. It proved as effective as vaccines administered by injection or intranasally in the research.

If ultimately approved for human use, it could be a weapon against all COVID-19 variants and boost uptake, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and among those with an aversion to needles.

The study is published in the peer-reviewed journal Microbiology Spectrum.

The oral vaccine is based primarily on the nucleocapsid protein, which is the most abundantly expressed of the virus’s four major structural proteins and evolves at a much slower rate than the frequently mutating spike protein. The vaccine utilizes a highly weakened bacterium to produce the nucleocapsid protein in infected cells as well as the membrane protein, which is another highly abundant viral structural protein.

Recovery of endangered sunflower sea stars may play key role in restoring devastated submarine forests

Sunflower sea stars, such as the one that appears in the foreground, could help keep purple sea urchins in check, according to new research from Florida State University Assistant Professor Daniel Okamoto and colleagues published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Photo Credit: Lynn Lee

Scientists working to understand the decimation of kelp forests on the Pacific Coast have found that the endangered sunflower sea star plays a vital role in maintaining the region’s ecological balance and that sea star recovery efforts could potentially help restore kelp forests as well.

The multi-institution team, which includes Florida State University Assistant Professor of Biological Science Daniel Okamoto, has published a new study showing that a healthy sea star population could keep purple sea urchins — which have contributed to the destruction of kelp forests — in check.

Their work is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“Our work is focused on understanding what factors maintain healthy kelp forests as well as healthy urchin populations,” Okamoto said. “That is, what scenarios lead to collapse versus coexistence of these important species.”

‘Neutron camera’ method captures atomic-scale activity in a flash

Artist’s conceptual drawing illustrates the novel energy filtering technique using neutrons that enabled researchers at ORNL to freeze moving germanium telluride atoms in an unblurred image. The images offered key insights into how the material produces its outstanding thermoelectric performance.
Illustration Credit: Jill Hemman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists have long sought to better understand the “local structure” of materials, meaning the arrangement and activities of the neighboring particles around each atom. In crystals, which are used in electronics and many other applications, most of the atoms form highly ordered lattice patterns that repeat. But not all atoms conform to the pattern.

When some atoms take up local arrangements that are different than that implied by the overall structure of the crystal, studying the local structure gets more difficult — especially when the atoms are moving. In fact, the inability to clearly see these local effects means researchers are often not aware they can happen.

Now researchers using the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method of studying the local structure of materials in detail and in real time.

The team developed a variable-shutter pair distribution function, or vsPDF, technique in which neutrons function like a camera but at timescales that are a trillion times faster.