An international team of biotechnologists and neuroscientists has found the mechanism responsible for reducing depression symptoms in patients given two kinds of hallucinogenic compounds. In their mouse study, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the group isolated binding receptors involved in the types of neural plasticity associated with improvements in depression symptoms. The editors at Nature Neuroscience have published a Research Briefing in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.

For several years, mental health specialists have known that psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms and LSD can reduce symptoms in patients with chronic depression. But until now, it was not known how such compounds function...

An international team of astronomers observed the second one of the two supermassive black holes circling each other in an active galaxy OJ 287.

Supermassive black holes that weigh sever...

Tinnitus, the ringing, buzzing or hissing sound of silence, varies from slightly annoying in some to utterly debilitating in others. Up to 15% of adults in the United States have tinnitus, where nearly 40% of sufferers have the condition chronically and actively seek relief.

A recent study from researchers at the University of Michigan’s Kresge Hearing Research Institute suggests relief may be possible.

Susan Shore, Ph.D., Professor Emerita in Michigan Medicine’s Department of Otolaryngology and U-M’s Departments of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering, led research on how the brain processes bi-sensory information, and how these processes can be harnessed for personalized stimulation to treat tinnitus.

Her team’s findings were published in JAMA Network Open.

The study, a...

Researchers have trained a robotic ‘chef’ to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate the dish itself.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it.

In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own. Their results, reported in the journal IEEE Access, demonstrate how video content can be a valuable and rich source of data for automated food production, and could enable easier and cheaper deployment of robot chefs.

Robotic chefs have been fe...