A smartphone’s glow is often the first and last thing we see as we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at the end of the day. It is increasingly becoming an extension of our body that we struggle to part with. In a recent study in Computers in Human Behavior, scientists observed that staying away from smartphones can even change one’s brain chemistry.

The researchers recruited young adults for a 72-hour smartphone restriction diet where they were asked to limit smartphone use to essential tasks such as work, daily activities, and communication with their family or significant others.

During these three days, the researchers conducted psychological tests and did brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effects of restricting phone usage...

A small team of AI engineers at Zoom Communications has developed a new approach to training AI systems that uses far fewer resources than the standard approach now in use. The team has published their results on the arXiv preprint server.

The new approach developed at Zoom is called Chain of Draft (CoD), an update of the traditional approach now in use called Chain of Thought (CoT). CoT uses a step-by-step approach to solving a problem, similar in many ways to human problem-solving...

If there were such a thing as a photo album of the universe, it might include snapshots of pancake-like disks of gas and dust, swirling around newly formed stars across the Milky Way. Known as planet-forming disks, they are believed to be a short-lived feature around most, if not all, young stars, providing the raw materials for planets to form.

Most of these planetary nurseries are short-lived, typically lasting only about 10 million years—a fleeting existence by cosmic standards. Now, in a surprising find, researchers at the University of Arizona have discovered that disks can grace their host stars much longer than previously thought, provided the stars are small—one-tenth of the sun’s mass or less.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Letters Journal, a research tea...

Research into immunotherapy against cancer typically focuses on better recognition of cancer cells by the body’s own immune system. Researchers at Amsterdam UMC and Moffitt Cancer Center have taken a different approach.

They investigated how cancer affects the energy management of a patient’s T cells and showed for the first time that contact with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells leads to a serious energy crisis in these cells.

These findings are published in Cellular & Molecular Immunology, building on a publication in the Blood Journal.

CLL is the most common type of leukemia in the Western world and mainly affects the elderly. Despite new therapies, the disease remains incurable, and treatments are becoming increasingly expensive.

Some c...