Presenting their work at this year’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Tenenbaum and one of his students, Jiajun Wu, are co-authors on four papers that examine the fundamental cognitive abilities that an intelligent agent requires to navigate the world: discerning distinct objects and inferring how they respond to physical forces. By building computer systems that begin to approximate these capacities, the researchers believe they can help answer questions about what information-processing resources human beings use at what stages of development....

Recently, a team at the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (I2CNER), within southern Japan’s Kyushu University, created a device to store energy in chemical form through continuous electrolysis. The researchers noted that glycolic acid (GC) has a much greater energy capacity than hydrogen, one of the more popular energy-storage chemicals. GC can be produced by four-electron reduction of oxalic acid (OX), a widely available carboxylic acid. As described in their publication in Scientific Reports, the team devised an electrolytic cell based on a novel membrane-electrode assembly....

Dinosaurs left behind more evidence than just giant skeletons. Tiny eggshell fragments can provide insights into Mesozoic ecosystems that fossils of bones and teeth do not. This is particularly valuable for understanding the smaller animals that were less likely to be preserved. Early Cretaceous eggshell fragments, the oldest found in Japan, offer a glimpse into the ecosystem of dinosaurs during this time period. A research team from the University of Tsukuba has recently published a study in Historical Biology, where they examined fossil eggshell fragments found in northern central Japan....

The TEDDY study’s international research team has identified the new gene regions in young people who have already developed type 1 diabetes or who have started making antibodies against their insulin-producing cells, often a precursor state to the full-blown disease that leads to a lifetime of insulin therapy. Their analysis of 5,806 individuals published in the Journal of Autoimmunity also confirmed three regions already associated with one of those related conditions....

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, utilized laser-altimeter data from spacecraft to uncover subtle patterns in the ice cap’s height. After that, they demonstrated how these patterns corresponded to computer model predictions of the effects that a body of water under the ice cap would have on the surface. Their findings are consistent with prior ice-penetrating radar readings, that were originally interpreted to indicate the possibility of a liquid water region under the ice....

A lower density likely means that at least part of Mars’ crust is relatively porous. At this point, however, the team cannot rule out the possibility of a different mineral composition or perhaps a thinner crust. “The crust is the end-result of everything that happened during a planet’s history, so a lower density could have important implications about Mars’ formation and evolution,” said Sander Goossens of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

“What makes this discovery surprising,” writes Alexander Hayes in a related Perspective, “is that the sediment can be mobilized despite Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere, whose surface pressure (1 Pa) is 100,000 times lower than Earth’s.” When the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto on 14 July 2015, it obtained the most detailed images yet of the dwarf planet. When analyzing the data, Matt Telfer and colleagues spotted a collection of 357 pale ridges, as well as six darker wind streaks, located on one of Pluto’s largest features, a vast plain called Sputnik Planitia....

Even in the most arid places on Earth, there is some moisture in the air, and a practical way to extract that moisture could be a key to survival in such bone-dry locations. Now, researchers at MIT have proved that such an extraction system can work. The new device, based on a concept the team first proposed last year, has now been field-tested in the very dry air of Tempe, Arizona, confirming the potential of the new method, though much work remains to scale up the process, the researchers say....

The first mystery, “radius valley”, refers to the unusual scarcity of exoplanets with a radius around 1.8 times that of Earth. According to observations made by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, planets of this size are about 2-3 times less common than super-Earths (with radii around 1.4 times that of Earth) and mini-Neptunes (with radii around 2.5 times Earth’s). The second mystery, known as “peas in a pod,” refers to the presence of neighboring planets of similar size in hundreds of planetary systems, including TRAPPIST-1 and Kepler-223, which also have orbits with near-musical harmony....

Many theorists believe a Mars-sized object slammed into the early Earth, and material dislodged from that collision formed the basis of the moon. When this idea was tested in computer simulations, it turned out that the moon would be made primarily from the impacting object. Yet the opposite is true; we know from analyzing rocks brought back from Apollo missions that the moon consists mainly of material from Earth. A new study published April 29 in Nature Geoscience, co-authored by Yale geophysicist Shun-ichiro Karato, offers an explanation....

Seasonal frost commonly forms at middle and high latitudes on Mars, much like winter snow on Earth. However, on Mars most frost is carbon dioxide (dry ice) rather than water ice. This frost appears to cause surface activity, including flows in gullies. This image, acquired on April 11, 2015, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows frost in gully alcoves in a crater on the Northern plains....

The research also found that excess weight in childhood is predictive of adult obesity, even among young children, and that healthy-weight children are the only ones with less than a 50 percent chance of adult obesity. The findings were based on a rigorous simulation model that provides the most accurate predictions to date of obesity prevalence at various ages. The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine....

III-V compound semiconductors are one of the highest in mobility and photon-electron conversion efficiency in existence. Among them, GaAs is a representative III-V compound semiconductor, which is utilized for high-speed transistors, as well as high-efficiency near-infrared light-emitting diodes, lasers, and solar cells. Optical devices based on III-V GaAs suffer from intrinsic losses related to heat generation. To circumvent this, the use of dilute bismide GaAsBi alloy with a nontoxic Bi element has recently gained attention because the introduction of Bi suppresses heat generation while increasing electron-light conversion efficiency....

Now, groundbreaking research from the Australian Centre for Precision Health at the University of South Australia has discovered a connection between metabolism and dementia-related brain measures, offering important new information about the disease. Researchers examined data from 26,239 individuals in the UK Biobank and discovered that those with obesity-related liver stress, inflammation, or kidney stress had the greatest adverse effects in their brains. In order to identify early risk factors for dementia, the research examined relationships between six different metabolic profiles and 39 cardiometabolic markers with measurements of brain volume, brain lesions, and iron accumulation from MRI brain scans....

“We’ve found that a certain superconducting material contains special properties that could be the building blocks for the technology of the future,” says Yufan Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University and the paper’s first author. The findings were published today, October 11, 2019, in Science. Today’s computers use bits, represented by an electrical voltage or current pulse, to store information....

Jan Vondrák of the Department of Taxonomy, Institute of Botany, and the first author of the study says “Years ago, during field trips, we were repeatedly puzzled to find a layer of green algae where some of the fungal coatings on wood or bark (so-called corticioid fungi) are disturbed. We discovered that this is a close symbiosis of fungi and algae, not a lichen, though, because the fungus does not depend on its alga for nourishment....

What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles. Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic rays—particles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth’s atmosphere from space. “It’s taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point,” said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory....

MIT researchers have now developed a new way to fortify staple foods with these micronutrients by encapsulating them in a biocompatible polymer that prevents the nutrients from being degraded during storage or cooking. In a small clinical trial, they showed that women who ate bread fortified with encapsulated iron were able to absorb iron from the food. “We are really excited that our team has been able to develop this unique nutrient-delivery system that has the potential to help billions of people in the developing world, and taken it all the way from inception to human clinical trials,” says Robert Langer, the David H....

Findings suggest that national estimates of opioid overdose burden may be grossly underestimated. A 7-year comprehensive study of deaths attributed to out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in San Francisco found that more than one in six of those deaths were actually from occult overdose. These findings suggest that published national overdose mortality estimates may be substantially underestimated. A brief research report is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco conducted a case-series analysis of the POST SCD (POstmortem SysTematic Investigation of Sudden Cardiac Death) Study, to compare the characteristics of occult overdose OHCA deaths with all other causes of OHCA deaths and to classify primary intoxicants and whether intoxicants were prescribed for each death investigated....

With a milliseconds-long flash of blue light, Yale University researchers regulated a critical type of signaling molecule within cell membranes, another illustration of the power of light-based techniques to manipulate cell functions and thus to study mechanisms of disease. One of the most innovative new research approaches of recent years is called optogenetics or the use of genetically encoded probes to make cell functions sensitive to light. The new study, published the week of July 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the first to use light to regulate metabolic activity in the membranes of cells....