A new study at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience has examined how the dopamine system processes aversive unpleasant events.

It is well known that the dopamine system plays a crucial role in motivation, learning and movement. One of the main functions of dopamine is to predict the occurrence of rewarding experiences and the availability of rewards in our environment. In this context, the dopamine system informs our brains about so-called ‘reward prediction errors’ — the difference between received and predicted rewards. Dopamine neurons become more active when a reward occurs unexpectedly or if it is bigger than expected, and they show depressed activity when we receive less reward than predicted...

Solving the riddle can reduce electric car battery consumption and make life tougher for currency speculators in the future. The discovery has just won the award for best research article and was honored at the field’s most prestigious conference in the United States.

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been struggling with an algorithmic problem known as “the single source shortest path problem.” The problem is essentially about how to devise a mathematical recipe that best finds the shortest route between a node and all other nodes in a network, where there may be connections with negative weights.

Sound complicated? Possibly...

Space scientists may need to rethink how gamma-ray bursts are formed after new research shows new-born supramassive stars, not black holes, are sometimes responsible for these huge extragalactic bursts of energy.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been detected by satellites orbiting Earth as luminous flashes of the most energetic gamma-ray radiation lasting milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. These catastrophic blasts occur in distant galaxies, billions of light years from Earth.

A sub-type of GRB known as a short-duration GRB starts life when two neutron stars collide...

Transforming bacterial cells into living artificial neural circuits; applications include biomanufacturing and therapeutics. Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions – “biocomputers” of sorts. Graduate students and researchers from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits...