Rice lab’s RAMBO reveals unexpected influence on compound’s crystal lattice.
Phonons are collective atomic vibrations, or quasiparticles, that act as the main heat carriers in a crystal lattice. Under certain circumstances, their properties can be modified by electric fields or light. But until now, nobody noticed they can respond to magnetic fields as well.

That may be because it takes a powerful magnet.

Rice Un...

Convergence research project integrated neurobiology with data science techniques. Using experiments and a deep machine learning data analysis approach, scientists uncovered the fundamental workings of the hippocampus region of the brain as it organizes memories into time sequences. The work could help future research into cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia.

Combining electrophysiological recording techniques in rodents with a statistical machine learning analysis of huge troves of data, the UCI researchers uncovered evidence suggesting that the hippocampal network encodes and preserves progressions of experiences to aid in decision-making. The team’s work is the subject of a paper published recently in Nature Communications.

“Our brain ...

In a new Nature Astronomy study, an international team led by astrophysicists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College report how, when tiny galaxies collide with bigger ones, the bigger galaxies can strip the smaller galaxies of their dark matter—matter that we can’t see directly, but which astrophysicists think must exist because, without its gravitational effects, they couldn’t explain things like the motions of a galaxy’s stars.

It’s a mechanism that has the potential to explain how galaxies might be able to exist without dark matter—something once thought impossible.

It started in 2018 when astrophysicists Shany Danieli and Pieter van Dokkum of Princeto...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in developing a simple hydrocarbon molecule with a logic gate function, similar to that in transistors, in a single molecule. The discovery could make electric components on a molecular scale possible in the future. The results are published in Nature Communications.

Manufacturing very small components is an important challenge in both research and development. One example is transistors – the smaller they are, the faster and more energy efficient our computers become...