Deep inside a limestone cave in southern China, paleontologists have uncovered an assemblage of thirteen fossilized teeth belonging to Gigantopithecus blacki, the largest primate species ever known to have lived.
The post Fossils from Chinese Cave Fill Crucial Gap in History of Gigantopithecus blacki appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers.
Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux.
AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public.
© Andrew Cunningham
In a mouse study conducted by scientists at the Dasman Diabetes Institute in Kuwait, rodents fed a sucrose-free diet developed insulin resistance, gut microbial imbalances and signs of fatty liver disease despite maintaining similar body weight.
The post Eliminating Sucrose from Low-Fat Diet Alters Gut Microbiome, Animal Study Suggests appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A Airbus apresentou em Berlim a nova frota de aeronaves não tripuladas. O destaque coube ao U145, uma versão autónoma e sem tripulação do popular helicóptero H145, concebido para missões civis e militares de transporte de carga. O primeiro voo está previsto ainda para 2026.
The post U145: Helicóptero autónomo reforça frota de aeronaves não tripuladas da Airbus e deverá voar até ao final do ano appeared first on Tek Notícias.
In 2021, scientists detected a cosmic ray entering Earth’s atmosphere with as much kinetic energy as a fast-moving tennis ball, all contained in a single subatomic particle. Named the “Amaterasu particle” after the Japanese sun goddess, the event left researchers questioning its origin because its arrival direction pointed to a region of space with no known source capable of producing such energy.
Researchers at Penn State now suggest that the puzzle may stem more from assumptions about the particle’s composition rather than its missing source.
A recent study in Physical Review Letters suggests that the Amaterasu particle, along with other extremely energetic cosmic rays, may actually be atomic nuclei heavier than iron. If correct, the idea could change how researchers search for the sources of cosmic rays.
Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are some of the rarest and most violent phenomena in nature. These particles slam into Earth’s atmosphere with more than 100 exa-electron volts of energy, which is about 10 million times more than what the Large Hadron Collider can produce. The Amaterasu particle, found by the Telescope Array in Utah in May 2021 and reported in Science in 2023, had about 244 exa-electron volts of energy. This makes it one of the most energetic natural events ever recorded.
The mystery extended not only to the particle’s energy, but also to its origin. It came from the direction of the Local Void, which is an almost empty area of space next to the Milky Way, where there is no known source that could create such a powerful particle.
“The origins and acceleration mechanisms of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have been among the biggest mysteries in the field for more than 60 years, since the first example was reported,” said Kohta Murase, professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science and the study’s lead researcher.
The Penn State team ran computational simulations to study how particles of different masses travel through intergalactic space. They found that atomic nuclei heavier than iron, known as ultraheavy nuclei, lose energy much more slowly than protons or lighter nuclei as they move through the radiation fields of deep space.
Most research on cosmic rays has assumed that the most extreme events involve protons, which are the simplest and lightest atomic nuclei. Ultraheavy nuclei lose energy much more slowly during their journey, allowing them to reach Earth carrying far more energy than lighter particles traveling similar distances. That makes them strong candidates for the most powerful cosmic ray events we’ve seen, including the Amaterasu particle.
“When we detect individual cosmic-ray particles such as the Amaterasu particle here on Earth, we can often use their energies, arrival directions and expected magnetic deflections to infer their possible cosmic sources,” Murase said.
The hypothesis that these particles are ultraheavy nuclei also changes the range of possible sources. If the particles are indeed heavier nuclei rather than protons, their production would require some of the most extreme environments in the universe. The researchers identify collapsars, which are massive stars collapsing directly into black holes, and binary neutron-star mergers as likely candidates. Both phenomena are also associated with gamma-ray bursts, which are among the most energetic explosions known to science.
The team’s calculations set new theoretical limits on how much ultraheavy nuclei may contribute to the overall population of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Murase also noted that these sources could help explain a possible asymmetry in the ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray spectrum between the northern and southern hemispheres.
“The most promising sites for producing and accelerating such ultraheavy nuclei are massive star deaths involving explosive collapse into black holes or strongly magnetized neutron stars, as well as binary neutron-star mergers known to be powerful gravitational-wave emitters,” Murase said.
The researchers stress that they are not saying all ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are ultraheavy nuclei, but some of the most extreme ones might be. This could change what scientists look for in future studies. New observatories and upgrades, like AugerPrime in Argentina and the planned Global Cosmic Ray Observatory, could test these ideas. If ultraheavy nuclei are important, future observations should find evidence that protons alone cannot explain.
More than six decades after scientists first detected ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, researchers may finally have a new clue about what the most extreme particles in the universe are made of.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Two elusive groups of millipedes, Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida, were the last missing pieces in the evolutionary history of Earth’s oldest land animals, according to a team of entomologists led by Virginia Tech.
The post Entomologists Reconstruct Evolutionary History of Millipedes appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Author(s): Mark Buchanan
Researchers boosted the sensitivity for measurements of the motion of a levitated nanoparticle, with potential uses in dark matter searches.
[Physics 19, 84] Published Fri Jun 12, 2026
TAMPA, Fla. — Avanti Communications is moving to close a chapter on the debt-fueled geostationary expansion that once defined the British satellite operator, with plans to sell the youngest payload […]
The post Avanti trims GEO exposure with Hylas-3 sale appeared first on SpaceNews.
Scientists have often wondered how the brain can take in new experiences without erasing stored memories. However, a new study in Nature now identifies a circuit-level mechanism that may help answer this question—and it may also offer clues for improving artificial intelligence.
Researchers at NYU Langone Health recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons simultaneously across several brain regions in mice. By tracking how signals move from the hippocampus to the neocortex, where long-term memories are kept, they found that a subset of hippocampal neurons appears to participate in routing information between regions in distinct patterns. These cells participate in both incoming and outgoing signaling, but do so using distinct patterns of activity.
The study focused on a series of interconnected brain regions: CA3, which processes rapidly changing information; CA1, which serves as a central hub; and the retrosplenial cortex, which is important for navigation and spatial memory. About one in four CA1 neurons receives most of the signals from CA3. When these same neurons send signals to the retrosplenial cortex, they fire in a different pattern, creating a separate outgoing channel using the same cells.
Rather than using new neurons, the brain separates these channels by changing how the same neurons fire together. The researchers suggest this arrangement may help reduce interference between new learning and more stable cortical memories.
“Our findings help explain how memory can be both moldable and enduring,” said co-lead author Joaquín Gonzalez, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “By changing how the same cells fire together instead of turning on new cells, the brain can keep information organized and protect older memories.”
The CA1 neurons involved in learning during the day also stay active at night. The researchers found that these cells remain busy during sleep events called sharp-wave ripples, which are bursts of activity the hippocampus uses to replay and strengthen memories from the day.
Since overlapping neurons are recruited during both waking activity and sleep replay, the same circuit elements appear to participate in both learning and consolidation. This theoretically allows the brain to use a single system for both learning and storing memories, without the two processes interfering with each other.
“Our study shows how learning and memory consolidation can coexist in the same network,” said co-lead author Mihály Vöröslakos, MD, PhD. “Our discovery was made possible because for the first time, we were able to record hundreds of individual neurons across all the key regions simultaneously in animals that were moving around naturally.”
The system identified in this research may help explain how memory disorders begin. In Alzheimer’s disease, for example, the hippocampal circuits examined here are some of the earliest to deteriorate. These networks are essential for sorting and organizing new experiences.
“Our discovery of a ‘memory switchboard’ deep in the hippocampus may provide clues as to how memory circuits fail in Alzheimer’s disease,” said co-senior author Zhe S. Chen, PhD, a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Artificial intelligence systems have a hard time holding onto what they’ve already learned when faced with new tasks, a problem researchers call catastrophic forgetting. The human brain appears able to update memories without catastrophic forgetting by altering the use of existing neural circuits. By studying how our brains pull this off, scientists hope to design AI that can keep learning new things without forgetting the old.
“By showing how the mammalian brain can safeguard memories during learning, our research may offer a biological blueprint for designing next-generation AI technology that can update itself continuously without overwriting what it has already acquired,” said co-senior author György Buzsáki, MD, PhD, the Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
The researchers plan to investigate whether similar switchboard-like channels exist in other memory circuits. The authors caution that their findings in mice under controlled conditions do not yet allow conclusions about the human brain.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Hundreds of camera-trap records from Bolivia and Peru suggest the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), one of the world’s least-known canids and one of Latin America’s least-known carnivores, may be thriving in intact upland forests.
The post Amazon’s Elusive Short-Eared Dog May Be More Common than Researchers Once Thought appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Researchers have obtained the first-ever photographs of the Cozumel dwarf fox (Urocyon sp.), an elusive dwarf fox living on the Caribbean island of Cozumel, off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Captured in September 2023, the images provide the first confirmed evidence since 2001 that the elusive animal still survives on the island.
The post Scientists Capture First-Ever Images of Cozumel Dwarf Fox appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space won contracts to build the next generation of radar imaging satellites for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program.
The post ESA awards contract for next-generation radar imaging satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
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