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    Exercise slows tumor growth in mice by shifting glucose uptake to muscles

    December 4, 2025, Categories  Biology/Biotechnology, Health/Medical

    mice run wheel
    Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

    It’s well known that exercise is good for health and helps to prevent serious diseases, like cancer and heart disease, along with simply making people feel better overall. However, the molecular mechanisms responsible for preventing cancer or slowing its progression are not well understood. But, a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals how exercise can increase glucose and oxygen uptake in the skeletal and cardiac muscles, instead of allowing it to “feed” tumors.

    Reduced tumor growth in exercised mice
    To study how exercise-induced metabolic changes affect tumor growth, the research team injected mice with breast cancer cells and fed some of the mice a high-fat diet (HFD), consisting of 60% calories from ...

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    Engineers develop thin film to make AI chips faster and more energy efficient

    December 4, 2025, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    UH engineers making AI faster, reducing power consumption
    This is the two-dimensional thin film electric insulator designed in the University of Houston lab of Alamgir Karim to make AI faster and reduce power consumption. Credit: University of Houston

    Addressing the staggering power and energy demands of artificial intelligence, engineers at the University of Houston have developed a revolutionary new thin-film material that promises to make AI devices significantly faster while dramatically cutting energy consumption.

    The breakthrough, detailed in the journal ACS Nano, introduces a specialized two-dimensional (2D) thin film dielectric—or an electric insulator—designed to replace traditional, heat generating components in integrated circuit chips...

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    Sugars, ‘gum,’ stardust found in NASA’s asteroid Bennu samples

    December 4, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Graphic labeled "Bio-essential sugars ribose and glucose in samples from asteroid Bennu." The left half of the graphic has a background image of Bennu. In front of it are the RNA molecular components on Bennu: guanine, cytosine, ribose, adenine, uracil, and phosphate. Below them, the molecular structure of glucose is accompanied by text: "Ribose and glucose are sugars essential to life on Earth. RNA uses ribose for its structure. Glucose provides cells with energy and is used to make fibers like cellulose. A team of Japanese and US scientists have found ribose and glucose in samples of asteroid Bennu (collected by NASA'S OSIRIS-REx mission), suggesting that these simple sugars were brought to the early Earth by meteorites." The right half of the graphic has a background image of Earth. In front of it is the genetic code for protein synthesis, including ribose, phosphate, and the RNA nucleobases guanine, cytosine adenine, and uracil. Below that, the chemical process of energy production via glycolysis and the chemical structure of cellulose are annotated.
    A team of Japanese and US scientists have discovered the bio-essential sugars ribose and glucose in samples of asteroid Bennu that were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. This finding builds on the earlier discovery of nucleobases (the genetic components of DNA and RNA), phosphate, and amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) in the Bennu samples, showing that the molecular ingredients of life could have been delivered to early Earth by meteorites. Download this graphic from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio website: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14932
    NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Dan Gallagher 

    The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life...

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    LLMs choose friends and colleagues like people, researchers find

    December 3, 2025, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    When large language models (LLMs) make decisions about networking and friendship, the models tend to act like people, across both synthetic simulations and real-world network contexts.

    Marios Papachristou and Yuan Yuan developed a framework to study network formation behaviors of multiple LLM agents and compared these behaviors against human behaviors. The paper is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

    How LLMs form network connections
    The authors conducted simulations using several large language models placed in a network, which were asked to choose which other nodes to connect with, given their number of connections, common neighbors, and shared attributes, like arbitrarily assigned “hobbies” or “location.”

    The authors varied the network context, including simulations of fri...

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