In a series of recently published studies using animals and people, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have further characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains of people with schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they figured out how to tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli sprouts.

They say the results advance the hope that supplementing with broccoli sprout extract, which contains high levels of the chemical sulforaphane, may someday provide a way to lower the doses of traditional antipsychotic medicines needed to manage schizophrenia symptoms, thus reducing unwanted side effects of the medicines.

“It’s possible that future studies could show sulforaphane to ...

What can fly like a bird and hover like an insect? Hummingbirds. If drones had this combo, they would be able to maneuver better through collapsed buildings and other cluttered spaces to find trapped victims. Purdue University researchers have engineered flying robots that behave like hummingbirds, trained by machine learning algorithms based on various techniques the bird uses naturally every day.

This means that after learning from a simulation, the robot “knows” how to move around on its own like a hummingbird would, such as discerning when to perform an esca...

Astronomers found that as planets form out of the chaotic churn of gravitational, hydrodynamic – or, drag – and magnetic forces and collisions within the dusty, gaseous protoplanetary disk that surrounds a star as a planetary system starts to form, the orbits of these planets eventually get in sync, causing them to slide – follow the leader7-style – toward the star.

The galaxy is littered with planetary systems vastly different from ours...

Scientists have succeeded in developing a piece of hardware which could pave the way for creating computers resembling the human brain. They produced a chip containing a network of artificial neurons that works with light and can imitate neurons and their synapses. This network is able to ‘learn’ information and use this as a basis for computing. The approach could be used later in many different fields for evaluating patterns in large quantities of data.

The researchers were able to demonstrate, that such an optical neurosynaptic network...