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Originally published by Stefanie Seltmann, Berlin Institute of Health in der Charité (BIH) , on June 1, 2023 Credit: BIH/Petra Ritter Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin , together with a colleague from Barcelona , made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally " jump to conclusions " when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem . Read more

Originally published by Karolinska Institutet on June 12, 2023 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have created a new method of studying the smallest bioparticles in the body. The study, which is published in Nature Biotechnology, has considerable scientific potential, such as in the development of more effective vaccines. Circulating around the body are nanoparticles that affect it in one way or another. For example, there are lipoproteins that maintain cell metabolism, pathogenic viruses that cause many diseases and lipid nanoparticles that are used to carry drugs, like recent mRNA vaccines . However, such particles are too small to be studied easily . To enable this, the researchers in this study have developed a new method that they call single-particle profiling (SPP) . Read more

A bacterium found in English oak buds can help separate out the rare earth elements used in technologies such as electric cars and wind turbines . Originally published by Jeremy Hsu, on 31 May 2023   Oak buds contain a useful bacterium for separating rare earth elements Getty Images/Anna Hedderly A bacterial protein found in English oak buds could be used to more efficiently process the rare earth elements needed for different technologies. Rare earth elements are used in products such as smartphone and TV screens, electric vehicle motors and wind turbines . Natural deposits of these elements can be found and mined in multiple countries. But the industrial separation facilities necessary for processing them use an energy-intensive method that typically requires hundreds of steps and uses many toxic chemicals – something that could be simplified through the natural shortcuts provided by a certain class of bacteria . Read more

A new electrically conductive material could lead to better self-healing soft robots Originally written by Sophie Bushwick on June 1, 2023.   Scientific American June 2023 Issue   Credit: College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University Sometimes science advances at a snail's pace, but in this case that's a good thing: researchers have created a squishy material that combines polymers with liquid metal, demonstrated in a snail-like robot. Developers say this electrically conductive gel could be used to make self-healing electronic circuits and biological monitors for measuring heart and muscle activity—and maybe even lead to robot nervous systems . Read more

Originally published by Ben Turner, on April 27, 2023 By surgically attaching electrodes to octopuses, researchers have been able to peer inside the cephalopods’ minds for the very first time.  A Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) hunting at night at a coral reef in Curaçao. (Image credit: Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Octopuses possess a brain wave that has n ever been seen before in animal s, along with others similar to those found in humans , first-of-their-kind brain recordings reveal. The groundbreaking study captured the first ever brain recordings of freely moving octopuses and was performed by implanting electrodes in the animals’ brains and connecting them to data loggers under their skin. The recordings have given scientists the very first inklings into the workings of cephalopod minds . The researchers published their findings March 27 in the journal Cell . Read more

Originally published by Thamarasee Jeewandar a, Phys.org, on April 27, 2023 Effect of monodisperse binary nanoparticle mixture (220nm-diameter melanin and 220nm-diameter silica; melanin, blue spheres; silica, yellow spheres) composition and mixing state on the supraball color reflectance. -- (A) Visualizations of the cross-section of binary mixture supraballs with varying levels of particle mixing in the increasing order from top to bottom and varying relative proportion of silica in the increasing order from left to right. (B) Corresponding structural colors, represented as RGB color panels, of the binary mixture supraballs. Credit: Science Advances, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adf2859 Materials scientists are often bioinspired, and in a new study, bird-inspired by structural colors exhibited by avian species to form non-iridescent nanoparticle assemblies. Such nanoparticle mixtures varying in particle chemistry and size can affect the color produced to identify struc...