The 19th century philosopher Thomas Carlyle once declared, “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”

One wonders what Tom would have thought about a later era serving up protopunk, death metal and gothic rock.

Moreover, what would he have had to say about current approaches to music composed not by angels but by CPUs, RAM and large language models?

Meta announced last week that it has developed an AI music processor that generates music based on natural language descriptions.

Meta’s MusicGen, which follows on the heels of Google’s January release of MusicLM that generates music based on text prompts or humming, was trained on 20,000 hours of music...

The discovery of tiny salt grains in a sample from an asteroid provides strong evidence that liquid water may be more common in the solar system than previously thought. Sodium chloride, better known as table salt, isn’t exactly the type of mineral that captures the imagination of scientists. However, a smattering of tiny salt crystals discovered in a sample from an asteroid has researchers at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory excited, because these crystals can only have formed in the presence of liquid water.

Even more intriguing, according to the research team, is the fact that th...

Have you ever wondered how drugs reach their targets and achieve their function within our bodies? If a drug molecule or a ligand is a message, an inbox is typically a receptor in the cell membrane. One such receptor involved in relaying molecular signals is a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR). About one-third of existing drugs work by controlling the activation of this protein. Japanese researchers now reveal a new way of activating GPCR by triggering shape changes in the intracellular region of the receptor. This new process can help researchers design drugs with fewer or no side effects.

If the cell membrane is like an Oreo cookie sandwich, GPCR is like a snake with seven segments traversing in and out of the...

An international team of astronomers led by Pierluigi Rinaldi of the University of Groningen has detected for the first time H-alpha emission in individual galaxies during the so-called Epoch of Reionization, or cosmic dawn. To do so, they used the deepest images taken so far by the MIRI instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. The result has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and is currently published on the arXiv preprint server.

Star-forming galaxies produce a large amount of UV photons, but during the Epoch of Reionization these photons are absorbed by the intergalactic medium. The best tracer to measure the level of star formation is the H-alpha emission line in the optical spectrum...