Salt, or more precisely the sodium it contains, is very much a “Goldilocks” nutrient. Low sodium levels cause a drop in blood volume, which can have serious, sometimes deadly, health consequences. Conversely, too much salt can lead to high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

In modern America, where most people consume a high-salt diet, almost no one is in danger of having too little salt. However, given the critical importance of sodium for body and brain functions, evolution has developed a powerful drive to consume salt in situations where there is a deficiency.

Understanding the brain circuitry that controls salt appetite has proved elusive, but now a new study by University of Iowa researchers has identified the first and, thus far, only neurons necessary for salt appetite.

Patients with late-stage cancer often have to endure multiple rounds of different types of treatment, which can cause unwanted side effects and may not always help.

In hopes of expanding the treatment options for those patients, MIT researchers have designed tiny particles that can be implanted at a tumor site, where they deliver two types of therapy: heat and chemotherapy.

This approach could avoid the side effects that often occur when chemotherapy is given intravenously, and the synergistic effect of the two therapies may extend the patient’s lifespan longer than giving one treatment at a time. In a study of mice, the researchers showed that this therapy completely eliminated tumors in most of the animals and significantly prolonged their survival.

To harness the power of the sun and make sugars for energy storage, plants use photosynthesis. But some plants are more efficient at it than others. For the first time, researchers have identified a key step in the transformation between old-fashioned C3 photosynthesis and new and improved C4 photosynthesis — which could lead to the development of more efficient, more resilient “super crops,” SciTechDaily reports.

Scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, collaborated with researchers at the University of Cambridge to make the breakthrough, charting the evolution of plants over millions of years.

While 95% of plants use C3 photosynthesis, SciTechDaily explained, a new group of plants evolved to use C4 photosynthesis around 30 million years ago.

The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So, chip manufacturers are looking to build up rather than out.

Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface, the industry is aiming to stack multiple surfaces of transistors and semiconducting elements—akin to turning a ranch house into a high-rise. Such multilayered chips could handle exponentially more data and carry out many more complex functions than today’s electronics.

A significant hurdle, however, is the platform on which chips are built. Today, bulky silicon wafers serve as the main scaffold on which high-quality, single-crystalline semiconducting elements are grown. Any stackable chip would have to include thick silicon “flooring” as part of each layer, slowing down any communication between functional semiconducting layers.

It’s getting harder to harder to ignore the potential disruptive power of AI in research. Scientists are already using AI tools but could the future lead to complete replacement of humans? How will our scientific institutions transform? These are difficult questions but ones we have to talk about in today’s episode.

Written, presented \& edited by Prof. David Kipping.

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REFERENCES
► Smith \& Geach 2024, \

OpenAI has run into problem after problem on its new artificial-intelligence project, code-named Orion.

Creativity has long been considered one of the most difficult aspect of human intelligence for AI to mimic. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, has raised questions about whether AI can match or even surpass human creativity.

Scientists have developed imaging-guided, biodegradable microrobots that can be propelled acoustically or magnetically through tissues for targeted drug delivery and enhanced ultrasound imaging contrast.

Thirty-five years ago, our Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, was launched! The satellite was a crucial stepping stone in understanding the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the earliest moments of our universe.

Launched from what’s now Vandenberg Space Force Base on Nov. 18, 1989, COBE carried three instruments to space to measure microwave and infrared light across the whole sky. COBE’s observations helped us learn how our universe started and evolved.

COBE discovered that the oldest light in the universe contained tiny temperature variations (red indicates hotter regions, blue colder). These were the seeds for the gravitational formation of structures of galaxies seen in the universe today.

S James Webb Space Telescope: + There are still many questions we want to answer about the early universe, and our missions continue to study it and refine our understanding.

Explore the universe’s baby picture: https://go.nasa.gov/3VPXWgF

The James Webb Space Telescope awed the world on July 12 with its first images and data. And it’s just getting started with its exploration of the cosmos. Dr. John Mather, the observatory’s senior project scientist, has been working toward this milestone for more than 25 years.

The concept of vectors can be traced back to the 17th century with the development of analytic geometry by René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. They used coordinates to represent points in a plane, which can be seen as a precursor to vectors. In the early 19th century, mathematicians like Bernard Bolzano and August Ferdinand Möbius began to formalize operations on points, lines, and planes, which further developed the idea of vectors.

Hermann Grassmann is considered one of the key figures in the development of vector spaces. In his 1844 work “Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre” (The Theory of Linear Extension), he introduced concepts that are central to vector spaces, such as linear independence, dimension, and scalar products. However, his work was not widely recognized at the time.

In 1888, Giuseppe Peano gave the first modern axiomatic definition of vector spaces. He called them “linear systems” and provided a set of axioms that precisely defined the properties of vector spaces and linear maps. Hilbert helped to further formalize and abstract the concept of vector spaces, placing it within a broader axiomatic framework for mathematics. He played a key role in the development of functional analysis, which studies infinite-dimensional vector spaces.