The discovery of a major gear in the 
Imagine being able to use electricity to power your car — even if it’s not an electric vehicle. Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity.
Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) event simulation.
Credit: © 2012 CERN
Source: Simulations (made pre-2010) of the Higgs, Susy, and other events.
Researchers are suggesting that there is a link between the number of friends you have and the size of the region of the brain — known as the orbital prefrontal cortex — that is found just above the eyes. A new study shows that this brain region is bigger in people who have a larger number of friendships.
Me, My Money, and My Devices
Technology has yet to fundamentally change how we think about money. As the mobile Internet begins to take financial control out of the hands of bank tellers and regulators, innovators are connecting us to our money in new ways.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will eventually have to deal with the fact that all growth has limits.
The idea of limitless growth gives sleepless nights to environmentalists, but not to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He espouses a law of social sharing, which predicts that every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double.
That rule of thumb can be visualized mathematically as a rapidly growing exponential curve. More simply, our online social lives are set to get significantly busier. As for Facebook, more personal data means better ad targeting. If things work out, Zuckerberg’s net worth will follow a similar trajectory to that described in his law of social sharing.
At UCLA’s Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology, researchers use functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity. They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify the cognitive state — or sometimes the thought process — of human subjects. The technique is called “brain reading” or “brain decoding.”
The same principle that causes figure skaters to spin faster as they draw their arms into their bodies has now been used by Michigan State University researchers to understand how molecules move energy around following the absorption of light.
Overeating may cause brain aging while eating less turns on a molecule that helps the brain stay young.
A team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome have discovered that this molecule, called CREB1, is triggered by “caloric restriction” (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. They found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain.
This work was led by Giovambattista Pani, researcher at the Institute of General Pathology, Faculty of Medicine at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome, directed by Professor Achille Cittadini, in collaboration with Professor Claudio Grassi of the Institute of Human Physiology. The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
