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It is possible to re-create a bird's song by reading only its brain activity, shows a first proof-of-concept study from the University of California San Diego. The researchers were able to reproduce the songbird's complex vocalizations down to the pitch, volume and timbre of the original. The study is a first step towards developing vocal prostheses for humans who have lost the ability to speak.

Quantum computers could outperform classical computers at many tasks, but only if the errors that are an inevitable part of computational tasks are isolated rather than widespread events. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found evidence that errors are correlated across an entire superconducting quantum computing chip -- highlighting a problem that must be acknowledged and addressed in the quest for fault-tolerant quantum computers.

When Betelgeuse, a bright orange star in the constellation of Orion, lost more than two-thirds of its brightness in late 2019 and early 2020, astronomers were puzzled.

A University of Iowa team has found that babies twitch during a sleep stage called quiet sleep, not just during REM sleep. The results may show there's more communication between snoozing infants' brains and motor systems than previously known. Results appear in the journal Current Biology.

Small modeling errors may accumulate faster than previously expected when physicists combine multiple gravitational wave events (such as colliding black holes) to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, suggest researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The findings appear June 16 in the journal iScience.

By repurposing common ingredients in hair conditioner, scientists have designed an inexpensive, transparent coating that can turn surfaces like windows and ceilings into glue pads to trap airborne aerosol droplets. This new strategy is described June 16 in the journal Chem.

Some of the world's most vulnerable cities suffer disproportionate economic losses because of the health consequences of in-car air pollution, finds a new study.

Fundamental signaling pathway is crucial for longevity.

Researchers from the University of Kent's School of Psychology have found that when people are presented with the idea of a COVID-19 'immunity passport,' they show less willingness to follow social distancing and face covering guidelines.

Research published in the journal ACS Materials and Interfaces has provided new understanding of how false-negative results in Lateral Flow Tests occur and provides opportunity for simple improvements to be made.

Many countries are already looking to adopt clean heating solutions more widely, with the International Energy Agency projecting that by 2045 nearly half of global heating will be done with heat pumps. A new study from Aalto University assesses the impact of heat pumps on energy consumption as well as how they should be subsidized.

Chinese researchers headed by Prof. CHEN Shengyun from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources (NIEER) and XUE Kai from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences have recently discovered links between reduction in microbial stability and soil carbon loss in the active layer of degraded alpine permafrost on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

With increasing vaccination rates and decreasing numbers of infections in Germany, the population's feeling of safety is also rising. As the results of the 37th edition of the BfR-Corona-Monitor, a regular survey conducted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), show, the majority of the population in Germany thinks it can control its risk of an infection well.

Proteins are encoded by genes - however, this information is divided into small coding sections, which are only assembled during a process called splicing. Various combinations are possible, some of which are still unknown. Dr. Robin Herbrechter and Professor Andreas Reiner from the junior research group Cellular Neurobiology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) now systematically analysed alternative splicing in the family of ionotropic glutamate receptors (iGluRs), which is essential for signal processing in the brain.

Diesel-polluted soil from now defunct military outposts in Greenland can be remediated using naturally occurring soil bacteria according to an extensive five-year experiment in Mestersvig, East Greenland, to which the University of Copenhagen has contributed.

The encryption algorithm GEA-1 was implemented in mobile phones in the 1990s to encrypt data connections. Since then, it has been kept secret. Now, a research team has analysed the algorithm and has come to the following conclusion: GEA-1 is so easy to break that it must be a deliberately weak encryption that was built in as a backdoor. Although the vulnerability is still present in many modern mobile phones, it no longer poses any significant threat to users, according to the researchers.

Getting energy and nutrients from the environment -- that is, eating -- is such an important function that it has been regulated through sophisticated mechanisms over hundreds of millions of years. Some of these mechanisms are only now beginning to be unraveled. A group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has found one of their key components -- a switch that controls the ability of organisms to adapt to low cellular nutrient levels.

An international team including researchers from The University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science has developed spherical colloidal particles for the visualization of rotational dynamics. The two-color fluorescent particles have an off-center core that allows tracking of dense suspensions using microscopy. The researchers observed coupling between the rotation of charged particles, correlation between local crystallinity and rotational diffusivity, and "slip-stick" friction between particles. The findings will enhance the understanding of biological systems and industrial processes.

Researchers from the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Perimeter Institute report in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters that nonlocality is a universal property of the world, regardless of how and at what speed quantum particles move.

1,660 routine diagnostic specimens that were collected at a Nottingham hospital between Jan. 2 and March 11, 2020, were retrospectively tested for SARS-CoV-2. Three people, who did not qualify for a PCR test for COVID-19 test at the time, were found to have the virus.