When Muscles Work Out, they Help Neurons to Grow

Two textured green balls have a purple center.
Caption:In response to biochemical and physical cues of exercise, motor neurons (in purple) exhibit new growth (in green) faster than neurons that experience no exercise-induced cues.
Credits:Credit: Angel Bu

The findings suggest that biochemical and physical effects of exercise could help heal nerves. There’s no doubt that exercise does a body good. Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system.

Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines...

Read More

Adobe announces development of SLM that can Run Locally on a Phone with No Cloud Connection

app
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A small team of AI researchers at Adobe Inc., working with a colleague from Auburn University and another from Georgia Tech, has developed a small language model (SLM) that they claim can be run locally on a smart phone with no access to the cloud. The group has written a paper describing their new app, which they call SlimLM, and have posted it to the arXiv preprint server.

As LLM technology continues to mature, researchers across the globe continue to find new ways to improve it. In this new effort, the research team has found a way to cut the cord for a specific type of AI application—processing documents locally.

As LLMs such as ChatGPT become more popular, users have become more worried about privacy...

Read More

Making Mars’s Moons: Supercomputers offer ‘Disruptive’ New Explanation

A NASA study using a series of supercomputer simulations reveals a potential new solution to a longstanding Martian mystery: How did Mars get its moons? The first step, the findings say, may have involved the destruction of an asteroid.

The research team, led by Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, found that an asteroid passing near Mars could have been disrupted—a nice way of saying “ripped apart”—by the red planet’s strong gravitational pull.

The paper is published in the journal Icarus.

The team’s simulations show the resulting rocky fragments being strewn into a variety of orbits around Mars...

Read More

Cognitive Neuroscientists discover New Blueprint for Making and Breaking Habits

Cognitive neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin have published new research describing a brand new approach to making habit change achievable and lasting.

This innovative framework has the potential to significantly improve approaches to personal development, as well as the clinical treatment of compulsive disorders (for example obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, and eating disorders).

The research was led by Dr. Eike Buabang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Professor Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology, has been published as a paper titled “Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits” in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Dr...

Read More