Quantum light sources are fickle. They can flicker like stars in the night sky and can fade out like a dying flashlight. However, newly published research from the University of Oklahoma proves that adding a covering to one of these light sources, called a colloidal quantum dot, can cause them to shine without faltering, opening the door to new, affordable quantum possibilities. The findings are available in Nature Communications.

Quantum dots, or QDs, are so small that if you scaled up a single quantum dot to the size of a baseball, a baseball would be the size of the moon...

The first life on Earth formed four billion years ago, as microbes living in pools and seas: what if the same thing happened on Mars? If it did, how would we prove it? Scientists hoping to identify fossil evidence of ancient Martian microbial life have now found a way to test their hypothesis, proving they can detect the fossils of microbes in gypsum samples that are a close analogy to sulfate rocks on Mars.

“Our findings provide a methodological framework for detecting biosignatures in Martian sulfate minerals, potentially guiding future Mars exploration missions,” said Youcef Sellam, Ph.D. student at the Physics Institute, University of Bern, and first author of the article in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

“Our laser ablation ionization ma...

Researchers used visual threat manipulation in the virtual reality environment and thermal stimulation to investigate how the brain perceives pain. They found that the brain perceives pain more strongly when the perceived pain is out of alignment with reality. In particular, pain was amplified when unexpected events occurred.

Pain perception can vary greatly. Sometimes, we feel pain more intensely than expected due to an injury or physical ailment but may feel less intense pain at other similar instances. This variability indicates that our perception of pain is highly dependent on our expectations and uncertainty.

Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain how the brain perceives pain.

One is the Estimate Hypothesis, where the brain estimat...

Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly large language models like GPT-4, has shown impressive performance on reasoning tasks. But does AI truly understand abstract concepts, or is it just mimicking patterns? A new study from the University of Amsterdam and the Santa Fe Institute reveals that while GPT models perform well on some analogy tasks, they fall short when the problems are altered, highlighting key weaknesses in AI’s reasoning capabilities. The work is published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Analogical reasoning is the ability to draw a comparison between two different things based on their similarities in certain aspects...