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Brain’s Nerves Found to Line Up Like a Grid

By Helen Shen of Nature magazine The nerves in a human brain form a three-dimensional grid of criss-crossing fibers, say researchers who have mapped them. The regular pattern creates a scaffold to guide brain development and support more complex and variable brain structures, says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

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A Rosie Future: Jetsons -Like Gadgets with "Ambient Intelligence" Are Key to Smart Homes and Cities

Fifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually surpass this futuristic vision. By 2062, the year the animated show was set, advances in artificial intelligence , sensor networks and robotics promise to make the Jetsons's home in Skypad Apartments, and indeed in all of Orbit City, seem quaint by comparison (although flying cars may remain out of reach--especially ones that beat parking problems by folding into a suitcase).

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How quantum physics could make ‘The Matrix’ more efficient

Researchers have discovered a new way in which computers based on quantum physics could beat the performance of classical computers. The work, by researchers based in Singapore and the UK, implies that a Matrix-like simulation of reality would require less memory on a quantum computer than on a classical computer. It also hints at a way to investigate whether a deeper theory lies beneath quantum theory.

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Climate Change Poses Disaster Risk for Most of the Planet

Climate change is bringing more droughts, heat waves and powerful rainstorms, shifts that will require governments to change how they cope with natural disasters to protect human lives and the world economy, a new U.N. report says.

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Supercomputing the difference between matter and antimatter

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is the same subatomic particle decay explored in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment performed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), which revealed the first experimental evidence of charge-parity (CP) violation — a lack of symmetry between particles and their corresponding antiparticles that may hold the answer to the question "Why are we made of matter and not antimatter?"

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New understanding of how materials change when rapidly heated

Collaboration between the University of Southampton and the University of Cambridge has made ground-breaking advances in our understanding of the changes that materials undergo when rapidly heated.

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Food, Not War, Is the Biggest Threat to World Security, Argues Lester Brown

Even as Iran s nuclear program raises the likelihood of yet another conflict in the Middle East, the bigger threat is a potential food crisis in the making, says Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute. When I ask myself, what are the threats for out security today, foreign aggression doesn t make top five, Brown told attendees of the Affordable World Security Conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Grain: some countries are hitting a ceiling on agricultural productivity [More]

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Ancient Human Had Feet Like an Ape [Video]

A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans' prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought.

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Dynamic Mitochondrial Networks in Cancer

Mitochondrial network of an endothelial cell is shown in green Research projects evolve in a fortuitous manner, often guided by a convergence of novel observations, intuition, helpful colleagues and unique personal circumstances. It is precisely this constellation that prompted two cardiologists to study the mitochondrial networks in lung cancer cells.

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The tick-tock of the optical clock

(PhysOrg.com) -- UK's National Physical Laboratory time scientists have made an accurate measurement of the highly forbidden octupole transition frequency in an ytterbium ion, which could be used as the basis for the next generation of optical atomic clocks.

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A unique ‘micro-loop mirror’ design may enhance the performance of integrated laser on silicon

Active optical fibers with silicon photonic chips can carry a lot more information for data interconnect than copper cables. Silicon photonics can also be the material of choice for wiring 'lab-on-a-chip' devices — however, the construction of such devices is not without its challenges.

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2 Trees Twice Thought to Be Extinct Rediscovered in Tanzania

How’s this for luck? Two tree species that scientists believed were extinct twice have been rediscovered in a remote area of Tanzania. According to a paper published in the Journal of East African Natural History , the two species were rediscovered in the remote, highly fragmented and rarely explored Namatimbili Ngarama Forest, 35 kilometers inland from the Indian Ocean.

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Einstein’s archive now available online

(PhysOrg.com) -- If you ever wanted to glimpse into Albert Einstein's thoughts, now you can. Last week, the complete catalog of about 80,000 documents written by or addressed to Einstein—letters, postcards, notebooks, and other papers—was made available online by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Einstein Papers Project (EPP) at Caltech.

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