At half the size of Earth and one-tenth its mass, Mars is a featherweight as far as planets go. Yet new research reveals the extent to which Mars is quietly tugging on Earth’s orbit and shaping the cycles that drive long-term climate patterns here, including ice ages.

The study is published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Stephen Kane, a professor of planetary astrophysics at UC Riverside, began this project with doubts about recent studies tying Earth’s ancient climate patterns to gravitational nudges from Mars. These studies suggest that sediment layers on the ocean floor reflect climate cycles influenced by the red planet despite its distance from Earth and small size.

“I knew Mars had some effect on Earth, but I assumed it was tiny,...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurological disease characterized by nerve damage and consequent impairments in vision, movement, balance and mental function. In MS, the immune system mistakenly starts attacking myelin, the protective sheath that surrounds axons (i.e., nerve fibers) in the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.

Macrophages, immune cells responsible for detecting damaged cells, germs or other debris in the central nervous system (CNS) and eliminating them, have been found to play a key role in MS...

As drones survey forests, robots navigate warehouses and sensors monitor city streets, more of the world’s decision-making is occurring autonomously on the edge—on the small devices that gather information at the ends of much larger networks.

But making that shift to edge computing is harder than it seems. Although artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to grow larger and smarter, the hardware inside these devices remains tiny.

Engineers typically have two options, neither are ideal. Storing an entire AI model on the device requires significant memory, data movement and computing power that drains batteries. Offloading the model to the cloud avoids those hardware constraints, but the back-and-forth introduces lag, burns energy and presents security risks.

Researchers ...

The platypus is one of evolution’s lovable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They’re egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it’s only fitting that astronomers describe some newly discovered oddball objects as “Astronomy’s Platypus.”

The discovery consists of nine galaxies that also have unusual properties and seem to defy categorization. The findings were recently presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix...