Science Trends

  After Albert Einstein graduated from college in 1900, he struggled to find work as a teacher and took a job at the patent office. (Even Einstein had to start somewhere.) He used that job, in time-honored, dues-paying tradition, to cover the bills while he published four groundbreaking scientific papers and earned his PhD in 1906. By 1912, he was widely known -- at least within the scientific community -- as an accomplished theoretical physicist. Big fish? Sure, but in a really small pond. So he took a step back and assessed his career. Generally speaking, he was, um, a generalist. What if he focused on one thing? What if he applied non-Euclidian math to his own work on general relativity so it accounted for the effect of gravity? For the next three years, that's what he did. That's all he did. (He later claimed his hair turned white from the stress.) In 1915, he published his t...

  Perception and memory use some of the same areas of the brain. Small but significant differences in the neural representations of memories and perceptions may enable us to distinguish which one we are experiencing at any moment.   Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all,” said Sam Ling , an associate professor of neuroscience and director of the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Boston University. Could our memory of a beautiful forest glade, for example, be just a re-creation of the neural activity that previously enabled us to see it? “The argument has...

This map of the galaxy Messier 81, constructed from data taken with the Very Large Array, maps out this spiral-armed, star-forming galaxy in 21 centimeter emissions. The spin-flip transition of hydrogen, which emits light at precisely 21 centimeters in wavelength, is in many ways the most important length for radiation in the entire Universe.   Key Takeaways Across the observable Universe, there are some 10^80 atoms, and most of them are simple hydrogen: made of just one proton and one electron each. Every time a hydrogen atom forms, there's a 50/50 shot that the proton and electron will have their spins aligned, which is a slightly higher-energy state than if they're not aligned. The quantum transition from the aligned state to the anti-aligned state is one of the most extreme transitions of all, and it produces light of precisely 21 cm in wavelength: arguably the most important length in the Universe. In our Universe, quantum transitions are the gove...

  Long before she became a neurogeneticist at Cardiff University, Dr Rebecca Sims was acutely aware of the pain Alzheimer’s disease can wreak on families. “My grandfather had Alzheimer’s, so I’ve seen the devastation of somebody living with the disease,” she says. “I’ve got friends as well whose family members have had other dementias.” Sims herself has completed the largest ever genetic study of Alzheimer’s , an international collaboration which reported in April 2022. The Cardiff research mined the genomes of more than 100,000 people around the globe – who either have the disease or had a parent who suffered from it – for tell-tale clues which point to why they were susceptible. All of which makes Sims perfectly placed to answer a particularly thought-provoking question – if there was a test which could tell you whether you were going to develop...