Two progressively degenerative diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD, recently in the news with the diagnoses of actor Bruce Willis and talk show host Wendy Williams), are linked by more than the fact that they both damage nerve cells critical to normal functioning—the former affecting nerves in the brain and spinal cord ...

Performing a new task based solely on verbal or written instructions, and then describing it to others so that they can reproduce it, is a cornerstone of human communication that still resists artificial intelligence (AI).

A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has succeeded in modeling an artificial neural network capable of this cognitive prowess. After learning and performing a series of basic tasks, this AI was able to provide a linguistic description of them to a “sister” AI, which in turn performed them. These promising results, especially for robotics, are published in Nature Neuroscience.

Performing a new task without prior training, on the sole basis of verbal or written instruc...

Astronomers have charted the largest-ever volume of the universe with a new map of active supermassive black holes living at the centers of galaxies. Called quasars, the gas-gobbling black holes are, ironically, some of the universe’s brightest objects.

The new map logs the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, the furthest of which shone bright when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old. (For comparison, the universe is now 13.7 billion years old.)

“This quasar catalog is different from all previous catalogs in that it gives us a three-dimensional ma...

Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) identified a key metabolite in cells that helps direct immune responses and explains at a single cell level why immune cells that most efficiently recognize pathogens, vaccines, or diseased cells grow and divide faster than other cells.

The findings also indicate that a better understanding of this metabolite and its role in immune response could improve the design of immunotherapies and create longer-lived responses against different types of cancer as well as enhance vaccine strategies. The findings were published online by the journal Science Immunology in a paper titled “Single-cell NAD(H) levels predict clonal lymphocyte expansion dynamics.”

Antigens are foreign substances that our ...