In 2020, researchers globally spent an estimated 130 million hours – equivalent to 15,000 years – peer-reviewing manuscripts for scholarly journals, according to a study published last month.  Although academics are usually not paid for conducting peer review, the study estimates the monetary value of peer review conducted last year in the US alone to be […]

Like snowflakes, no two branches are alike. They can differ in size, shape and texture; some might be wet or moss-covered or bursting with offshoots. And yet birds can land on just about any of them. This ability was of great interest to the labs of Stanford University engineers Mark Cutkosky and David Lentink – now at […]

The oldest unequivocal evidence of upright walking in the human lineage are footprints discovered at Laetoli, Tanzania in 1978, by paleontologist Mary Leakey and her team. The bipedal trackways date to 3.7 million years ago. Another set of mysterious footprints was partially excavated at nearby Site A in 1976 but dismissed as possibly being made […]

Just as convincing images of cats can be created using artificial intelligence, new proteins can now be made using similar tools. In a report in Nature, a team including researchers at the University of Washington, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Harvard University describe the development of a neural network that “hallucinates” proteins with new, stable structures. “The potential to hallucinate brand-new proteins […]

Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory have discovered an unusually massive black hole at the heart of one of the Milky Way’s dwarf satellite galaxies, called Leo I. Almost as massive as the black hole in our own galaxy, the finding could redefine our understanding of how all galaxies — the […]

For the first time, mathematicians have partnered with artificial intelligence to suggest and prove new mathematical theorems. The work was done in a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the University of Sydney in Australia and DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence sister company. While computers have long been used to generate data for mathematicians, the task […]

A good night’s sleep plays an essential role in regulating brain health by removing the waste material and toxins that accumulate. Although many things can disturb sleep, one of the most common causes is snoring or other breathing issues that cause obstructive sleep apnea. A team of researchers from Center for BrainHealth® at The University […]

Insilico Medicine, an end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, today announced that the first healthy volunteer has been dosed in a first-in-human microdose trial of ISM001-055. The achievement is described in a lecture by Dr. Michael Levitt, the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, in the context of the history of AI-powered drug discovery and a brief video explainer. Since […]

An international team of scientists from the United States and Australia, led by Sarah Jacquet at the University of Missouri, has documented the discovery of two new species of fossilized armored worms in Australia — Lepidocoleus caliburnus and Lepidocoleus shurikenus — dating from about 400 million years ago. Then, using the micro-CT imaging capabilities of the MU X-ray Microanalysis Core facility, the […]

You might think the way you approach money is based on financial advice or past experiences, but new research from the University of Georgia shows that your personality may have a big impact on financial decision making and risk taking. In a new study, psychology Ph.D. student Jim Exley investigates the “Big Five” personality traits: […]