Astronomers have spotted centimeter-sized “pebbles” swirling around two infant stars 450 light-years away, revealing the raw ingredients of planets already stretching to Neptune-like orbits...

The skeletal muscles of men and women process glucose and fats in different ways. A study conducted by the University Hospital of Tübingen, the Institute for Diabetes Research and Metabolic Diseases of Helmholtz Munich and the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) e.V. provides the first comprehensive molecular analysis of these differences. The results, published in Molecular Metabolism, possibly give an explanation for why metabolic diseases such as diabetes manifest differently in women and men—and why they respond differently to physical activity.

Skeletal muscles are far more than just “movement driving motors...

Researchers have developed a technique that significantly improves the performance of large language models without increasing the computational power necessary to fine-tune the models. The researchers demonstrated that their technique improves the performance of these models over previous techniques in tasks including commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, instruction following, code generation, and visual recognition.

Large language models are artificial intelligence systems that are pretrained on huge data sets. After pretraining, these models predict which words should follow each other in order to respond to user queries...

Instead of a tempest in a teapot, imagine the cosmos in a canister. Scientists have performed experiments using nested, spinning cylinders to confirm that an uneven wobble in a ring of electrically conductive fluid like liquid metal or plasma causes particles on the inside of the ring to drift inward. Since revolving rings of plasma also occur around stars and black holes, these new findings imply that the wobbles can cause matter in those rings to fall toward the central mass and form planets.

The scientists found that the wobble could grow in a new, unexpected way...