According to the Free Energy Principle (FEP), developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston and colleagues, much of what the brain does can be understood as minimizing such mismatches—a technical form of 'surprise' defined as the improbability of sensory input given an internal model. The proposal brings perception, action, learning, and decision-making under a single framework.
The ISS project was set to end in 2030. In 2024, NASA awarded a contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX to build a tug to de-orbit the outpost by 2030, assuming it lasts that long. By then the complex's first module will have been in orbit for more than 30 years, and cracks have plagued the structure alongside hardware failures as the laboratory ages.
The remote military range near the town of Tonopah is not primarily used for nuclear detonations, but it has long been linked to US nuclear weapons programs. The site is used to test how nuclear weapons would be delivered, including experiments where aircraft drop non-nuclear versions of bombs to study their performance.
The Natrium reactor, developed jointly by Bill Gates-backed TerraPower and GE Hitachi, is being built as part of the Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. It represents something genuinely new: a reactor designed from the ground up to complement renewable energy rather than compete with it.
As global competition in space accelerates, New York is mobilizing its premier research institutions through NYCST to address workforce shortages, close capability gaps and mature the critical technologies our nation needs. For decades, our state has been a home to innovative aerospace companies. Through NYCST, we are now aligning that heritage with our top-tier research institutions to ensure that industry can develop and scale up breakthrough technologies right here in New York.
The Starship rocket system splits in two after takeoff. The upper spacecraft would head to Earth orbit to serve as that depot, ready to carry nothing but fuel. The towering Super Heavy rocket booster, meanwhile, would return to the launch site so it can be reused.
The facility suffered a still unexplained mishap last November during the launch of a Soyuz capsule carrying two Russians and one American to the orbiting station. Officials said a component called a maintenance or service cabin failed to move out from under the blast of exhaust from the ascending rocket.
For over 15 years, the EFRC program has provided a transformational research environment that has brought together the strengths of our National Laboratories and universities to accelerate discovery, develop innovative tools, and train the next generation of the American energy science workforce. The EFRCs will continue to play a vital role in bridging disciplines and institutions, advancing foundational science and strengthening America's leadership to push forward scientific frontiers critical for new energy technologies.
The rods are the central element of a novel seismic-responsive structural system that is designed to help the building snap back to its original shape in the event of a major earthquake. Their trick is an embedded cluster of taut cables made from a highly flexible compound called a shape-memory alloy that's capable of bending under tension-like the lateral shaking in a California earthquake-and then straightening out.
GEMINI leverages a computationally designed protein assembly as an intracellular memory device to record the history of individual cells. GEMINI grows predictably within live cells, capturing cellular events as tree-ring-like fluorescent patterns for imaging-based retrospective readout. Absolute chronological information of activity histories is attainable with hour-level accuracy.
If we told them to look at the face, they could usually manage it. But they were mostly looking at the hands. The Prakash children eventually learn to look at faces when spoken to - usually a few months after their surgeries. Their experiences reveal that seeing doesn't come naturally the moment a person is cured of blindness. Newly-sighted people must learn to see.
Researchers administered one of four doses of stem cells to 118 people between 70 and 85 years old, all of whom had frailty. In a timed walking test nine months after treatment, those who had received the highest dose could walk about 60 metres farther, on average, than they could before treatment.
According to Einstein's General Relativity, for every black hole that exists within the Universe, there are only three properties that go into it that matter in any way: the black hole's total mass, the black hole's net electric charge, and the black hole's intrinsic angular momentum, and that's it. It doesn't matter what type of matter went into the black hole in order to form it; all that matters is its mass, charge, and angular momentum.
It influenced my idea of what animals and natural history were, almost before I knew what real animals in the real world were like. For some researchers, themes in the Pokémon games mirror their everyday work. Spencer Monckton, a research scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who grew up playing the games and watching the TV series, says that collecting Pokémon is very much the same thing as what an entomologist does.
We found that life is more likely to survive an asteroid impact, so it's definitely still a real possibility that life on Earth could have come from Mars. Maybe we're Martians! The idea that life could have spread through the solar system or even the universe on rocks is known as the lithopanspermia hypothesis.
The article from the journal argues that the gut-autism axis is a house of cards built on lousy studies with inconsistent data. They assert that the studies are contradictory and that too much emphasis is placed on dubious mouse models. It is notoriously challenging to nail down microbial causes of disease—it is hard enough to simply identify a normal microbiome.
Both species are under threat. But while African savanna elephants are endangered, forest elephants are critically endangered. They're also highly elusive. Living in dense tropical rainforests in central Africa and parts of West Africa they're very hard to find and study.
The results showed that the squeaking sound is produced by wave-like patterns across the rubber surface, contacting and then releasing from the glass, allowing the sliding between the surfaces. The waves move across the interface between the two materials at a speed of nearly 300 kilometers per hour.
Although there are many amber stones containing a single creature, there are fewer that include two or more, as is the case with a pair of mosquitoes trapped in amber 130 million years ago which tell us that, back then, males also sucked blood. Even more extraordinary is when several organisms can be seen interacting, either eating the other, acting as a parasite, or cooperating.
Such sex 'distorters' have been discovered - and studied in great depth - in laboratory animals such as mice and flies, in which their effects can be detected through selective breeding. 'If you look, more often than not, you find them,' says Nitin Phadnis, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who co-led the study.
Mini 3D 'organoids' are slowly phasing out animal testing in some areas of research. These laboratory-grown tissue structures can model human biology more accurately than traditional animal models, reducing the need for animal experimentation while providing more relevant data for drug development and disease research.
