Science

Neuroscientists Find That Cognitive Skills Peak at Different Ages

Scientists have long known that our ability to think quickly and recall information, also known as fluid intelligence, peaks around age 20 and then begins a slow decline. However, more recent findings, including a new study from neuroscientists at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), suggest that the real picture is much more complex.

The study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, finds that different components of fluid intelligence peak at different ages, some as late as age 40.

“At any given age, you’re getting better at some things, you’re getting worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things. There’s probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them,” says Joshua Hartshorne, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the paper’s authors.

“It paints a different picture of the way we change over the lifespan than psychology and neuroscience have traditionally painted,” adds Laura Germine, a postdoc in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental genetics at MGH and the paper’s other author.

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Researchers detect possible signal from dark matter

Scientists have picked up an atypical photon emission in X-rays coming from space, and say it could be evidence for the existence of a particle of dark matter. If confirmed, it could open up new perspectives in cosmology.Could there finally be tangible evidence for the existence of dark matter in the Universe? After sifting through reams of X-ray data, scientists in EPFL's Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC) and Leiden University believe they could have identified the signal of a particle of dark matter.

Researchers Demonstrate Superconductivity without Cooling

New research details how scientists used an infrared laser pulse to briefly modify the structure of a high-temperature superconductor, removing its electrical resistance at room temperature.
The resonant excitation of oxygen oscillations (blurred) between CuO2 double layers (light blue, Cu yellowy orange, O red) with short light pulses leads to the atoms in the crystal lattice briefly shifting away from their equilibrium positions. This shift brings about an increase in the separations of CuO2 layers within a double layer and a simultaneous decrease in the separations between double layers. It is highly probable that this enhances the superconductivity.

NASA's new Orion spacecraft lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral and rocketed to orbit Friday morning the first test flight for a program that NASA hopes eventually will get astronauts to asteroids and Mars. The 4½-hour, uncrewed, two-orbit flight is taking Orion farther from Earth than any craft designed for human flight has been since the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972.

"The launch itself (was) just a blast," NASA Orion program manager Mark Geyer quipped on NASA TV shortly after liftoff, "as you see how well the rocket did.

Microbullets Confirm the Strength of Graphene

The researchers built a custom stage to line up multilayer graphene sheets mechanically drawn from bulk graphite. They tested sheets ranging from 10 to 100 nanometers thick (up to 300 graphene layers). They then used a high-speed camera to capture images of the projectiles before and after hits to judge their speed and viewed microscope images of the damage to the sheets.

Mysterious Ecosystem May Hold Clues to Alien Life

Shrimp called Rimicaris hybisae at deep hydrothermal vents in the Caribbean seem to have different dietary habits depending on the proximity of other shrimp. In dense clusters, the shrimp live moslty off bacteria, but when the shrimp population is sparse, they are more likely to turn carnivorous.

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Scientists Estimate the Magnetic Field of an Exoplanet

A team of scientists has developed a new method that allows them to estimate the magnetic field of a distant exoplanets. Using this method they managed to estimate the value of the magnetic moment of the planet HD 209458b.

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Scientists Create Dual-Purpose Film for Energy Safe-keeping

A whole new stuff developed at Almond College dependant on molybdenum disulfide exposes as often of the border as you can, turning it into useful as both equally a new switch for hydrogen manufacturing and for strength storage devices. Thanks to the particular Visit Party

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Earths Water Most Likely Accreted at the Same Time as the Rock

In this illustration of the early SOLAR SYSTEM, the dashed white line represents the snow line the transition from the hotter inner solar system, where water ice is not stable (brown) to the outer Solar system, where water ice is stable (blue). Two possible ways that the inner solar system received water are: water molecules sticking to dust grains inside the “snow line” and carbonaceous chondrite material flung into the inner solar system by the effect of gravity from protoJupiter. With either scenario, water must accrete to the inner planets within the first ca. 10 million years of solar system formation.

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Researchers from MIT have developed a new target-finding mechanism that allows microscopic devices to autonomously find their way to areas of a cell surface.

This diagram symbolizes just how microwalkers produced by a MIT Team along with made up of some paramagnetic beans can certainly drop all over the area under the influence of the spinning permanent magnet discipline. They drop right up until that they come across places exactly where friction is usually greatest on account of higher levels of organic receptors with virtually no improve understanding of exactly where individuals places could be. (Blue symbolizes low-friction places; lime symbolizes high friction places. ).

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Sun Resembles Jack-o-Lantern Face

The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy.These are prints of the powerful as well as complicated number of magnetic fields areas flying inside the sun’s surroundings, your corona. This image integrates together a pair of units involving severe ultraviolet wavelengths from 171 as well as 193 Angstroms, usually colorized in Gold as well as yellowish, to make a in particular Halloween-like overall look.

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Coding Scheme for Interactive Communication is the First to Near Optimality

In a new research paper, MIT engineers describe the first interactive coding scheme to near optimal on the three classical measures: How much noise can they tolerate? What’s the maximum transmission rate they afford? And how time-consuming are the encoding and decoding processes?

Error-correcting codes are one of the glories of the information age: They’re what guarantee the flawless transmission of digital information over the airwaves or through copper wire, even in the presence of the corrupting influences that engineers call “noise.”

But classical error-correcting codes work best with large chunks of data: The bigger the chunk, the higher the rate at which it can be transmitted error-free. In the Internet age, however, distributed computing is becoming more and more common, with devices repeatedly exchanging small chunks of data over long periods of time.

So for the last 20 years, researchers have been investigating interactive-coding schemes, which address the problem of long sequences of short exchanges. Like classical error-correcting codes, interactive codes are evaluated according to three criteria: How much noise can they tolerate? What’s the maximum transmission rate they afford? And how time-consuming are the encoding and decoding processes?

At the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science this month, MIT graduate students past and present will describe the first interactive coding scheme to approach the optimum on all three measures.

“Previous to this work, it was known how to get two out of three of these things to be optimal,” says Mohsen Ghaffari, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and one of the paper’s two co-authors. “This paper achieves all three of them.”

Vicious noise

Moreover, where Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking 1948 analysis of error-correcting codes considered the case of random noise, in which every bit of transmitted data has the same chance of being corrupted, Ghaffari and his collaborator — Bernhard Haeupler, who did his graduate work at MIT and is now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University — consider the more stringent case of “adversarial noise,” in which an antagonist is trying to interfere with transmission in the most disruptive way possible.

“We don’t know what type of random noise will be the one that actually captures reality,” Ghaffari explains. “If we knew the best one, we would just use that. But generally, we don’t know. So you try to generate a coding that is as general as possible.” A coding scheme that could thwart an active adversary would also thwart any type of random noise.

Error-correcting codes — both classical and interactive — work by adding some extra information to the message to be transmitted. They might, for instance, tack on some bits that describe arithmetic relationships between the message bits. Both the message bits and the extra bits are liable to corruption, so decoding a message — extracting the true sequence of message bits from the sequence that arrives at the receiver — is usually a process of iterating back and forth between the message bits and the extra bits, trying to iron out discrepancies.

In interactive communication, the maximum tolerable error rate is one-fourth: If the adversary can corrupt more than a quarter of the bits sent, perfectly reliable communication is impossible. Some prior interactive-coding schemes, Ghaffari explains, could handle that error rate without requiring too many extra bits. But the decoding process was prohibitively complex.

Making a list

To keep the complexity down, Ghaffari and Haeupler adopted a technique called list decoding. Rather than iterating back and forth between message bits and extra bits until the single most probable interpretation emerges, their algorithm iterates just long enough to create a list of likely candidates. At the end of their mutual computation, each of the interacting devices may have a list with hundreds of entries.

But each device, while it has only imperfect knowledge of the messages sent by the other, has perfect knowledge of the messages it sent. So if, at the computation’s end, the devices simply exchange lists, each has enough additional information to zero in on the optimal decoding.

The maximum tolerable error rate for an interactive-coding scheme — one-fourth — is a theoretical result. The minimum length of an encoded message and the minimum decoding complexity, on the other hand, are surmises based on observation.

But Ghaffari and Haeupler’s decoding algorithm is nearly linear, meaning that its execution time is roughly proportional to the length of the messages exchanged.

“It is optimal in the sense that it is linear,” says Mark Braverman, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University who has also worked on interactive coding. “That’s an important benchmark.”

But linear relationships are still defined by constants: y = x is a linear relationship, but so is y = 1,000,000,000x. A linear algorithm that takes an extra second of computation for each additional bit of data it considers isn’t as good as a linear algorithm that takes an extra microsecond.