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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 58 minutes ago

The team used a powerful microscope to discover that microscopic channels in coral tissues align shortly after contact, creating a pathway for transport between corals. Beneficial algae and the nutrients they produce then flow through these channels. The team observed that beneficial algae moved from healthy to bleached fragments within three days of contact.

The team also tested how different contact durations influenced recovery rates. They separated coral pairs at varying time intervals and found that after one week of contact, and in some cases after just five days, bleached fragments received enough beneficial algae to complete recovery on their own.

After separation, recovery took just seven weeks, matching the recovery time of coral pairs left in continuous contact. This led the team to realize that algae replicating within the bleached fragment, rather than traveling from the healthy fragment, primarily drove continued recovery.

Once beneficial algae enter bleached corals, they don't just spread out. They flood in and start dividing at the fastest rates seen in corals.
During the second week of contact with healthy corals, algae within bleached fragments doubled every four days, roughly 10 times faster than the rate observed in wild corals.

Daniel S. Collins et al., Rapid coral bleaching recovery via symbiont transfer from healthy corals, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh1580

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 1 hour ago

Scientists discover a way to reverse coral bleaching at record speed

For the first time, scientists have observed bleached corals on the brink of death fully recover through brief contact with healthy clones. Ghostly white corals returned to full health in a laboratory setting within seven weeks, the fastest documented recovery to date, according to a study published in Science Advances.
Bleached coral fragments recovered within seven weeks in laboratory tests after 5–7 days of contact with healthy, genetically identical fragments; those without contact died. Contact enabled transfer of beneficial algae, which then multiplied rapidly. Requiring healthy clones limits reef-scale application.
The findings could inspire the development of new methods to rapidly restore corals, which, by some estimates, could disappear within a few decades as climate change drives more frequent and intense marine heat waves.

When waters warm, corals expel colorful, beneficial algae that live in their tissues and provide the energy that corals need to grow. The loss of their algae partners leaves corals pale, starving and vulnerable to the invasion of harmful algae. If corals survive these bleaching events, it can take months to years for them to fully recover.

"While bleached corals may be dying, they are not dead yet".
So scientists asked, 'why can't we make them recover again?'

Sometime back these scientists observed something curious about coral biology in their research lab. Two coral fragments—one bleached, one healthy—sampled from the same colony had tipped over in a tank and were now touching. Where they made contact, colour returned to the bleached fragment, signalling the return of beneficial algae.
So they set up an experiment.
They assembled 10 pairs of coral fragments—one bleached, one healthy—from the same animal. They arranged five pairs close enough to touch and left gaps of just a few millimeters between the remaining pairs. The bleached fragments in touching pairs fully recovered within seven weeks, while those without contact died.

Genetically identical corals recognize one another when they come into contact.
Their tissues fuse if they are from the same clone. We see something similar in humans. Organ transplants are often successful if the donor is your identical twin.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

When LLMs are trained on frivolous online content, they can get brain rot like humans do

As humans and AI models roam the internet, they encounter lots of junk: clickbait headlines, misinformation, hashtags. Research indicates that this junk-filled environment could be a cause for concern.
"Brain rot" has emerged as a term to describe cognitive changes—like diminished attention spans—in humans who engage with an abundance of frivolous, attention-grabbing content.

Training four LLMs on low-quality, attention-grabbing Twitter posts impaired reasoning and memory, increased skipped reasoning steps, and weakened ethical safeguards. Subsequent training on higher-quality data did not fully restore performance, underscoring the importance of training data quality.
The main message from this research is that the language models can pick up some bad cognitive habits from the low-quality information from social media, similar to how people can be influenced by trivial, clickbait content.
Junk data is popular, short and written to grab attention rather than inspire deep thought. Posts that are considered junk data may include words like "WOW" or "TODAY ONLY" written in all caps, or they may focus on superficial lifestyle content, unsupported claims or conspiracy theories.

In addition to diminished attention spans, prior research has linked brain rot in humans to changes in memory processes and personality. Similarly, the researchers in this study found the main cognitive change in LLMs trained on junk data was thought-skipping, meaning the model will skip steps, or not "think" at all, before providing an answer.

The researchers also found that once brain rot takes hold, it is difficult to root out. "Even after we use some higher-quality data to train the model or deploy some techniques to improve the model's response, it is very hard to recover the model's performance.
Their findings highlight the importance of data quality when training LLMs.

Shuo Xing et al., LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot": A Pilot Study on Twitter/X, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2510.13928

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

Who really made China's Terracotta Army? Fingerprints reveal new clues

The Terracotta Army near Xi'an, China, is a breathtaking sight: thousands of life-size terracotta figures created in the third century B.C. to guard the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang. They were discovered in 1974, and people have assumed they were built exclusively by men. But new research on this underground army and its chariots, horses and weapons suggests women and children lent a helping hand.
To find out who really did the work, researchers led by Xiaoxi Li at the Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an searched for clues on the figures themselves.

The team studied 79 fingerprints from 36 figures in a single excavation pit. These prints were pressed into the clay in different parts of the statues, including the arms, body armor and heads. The scientists photographed them and measured the distance between the fingerprint ridges, which tends to increase as children grow older.

Previous studies struggled to tell the difference between adult women and teenage boys based on the fingerprints they left behind. So in this research, the scientists turned to a clever statistical model.

Called a Bayesian mixture model, the technique analyzes the entire group of prints at once rather than trying to classify every single mark individually. And it compares ancient prints with modern fingerprint data for different ages and sexes.

The results, published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, suggested a far more diverse workforce than expected. "The model results indicate that the artisan community was not exclusively composed of adult males," the study authors wrote in their paper.

In fact, the model estimated that adult men accounted for only about 45% of the fingerprints. Adult women made up nearly 33%, while juveniles under 15 were estimated to have left 22%.

While these results suggest the involvement of women and children, they may not tell the whole story for the entire site. The sample size is small and only from a single spot within this vast burial complex. Additionally, multiple prints could belong to a single individual, which could skew the overall demographic results.

"Unit T23 represents only a localized area of Pit 1, so the results may reflect the labour structure of a specific phase or production group rather than the entire project."

But even with all these caveats, the findings challenge long-held assumptions about the labour force at this historic site.

Xiaoxi Li et al., Who produced Emperor Qin Shihuang's Terracotta Army, China? A Bayesian mixture model approach to fingerprint age and sex determination, Journal of Cultural Heritage (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.culher.2026.09.014

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

Second-ever case of rare fungus resistant to four antifungal drug classes detected in Kenya

Candidozyma auris is a yeast that can cause invasive infections and has been flagged in World Health Organization lists as a top-priority threat, as it spreads easily in hospitals. This notorious fungus survives for long periods on surfaces and often resists major classes of antifungal medications used to treat fungal infections.

A recent study uncovered an extremely rare fungal strain that can withstand all four major classes of antifungal drugs—azoles, echinocandins, polyenes and flucytosine.

Researchers isolated the pan-drug-resistant strain from a 28-year-old patient who developed a surgical wound infection while hospitalized in Nairobi, Kenya. This is the first time a pan-drug-resistant strain of the fungus has been identified in Africa and only the second documented case worldwide. The first case was reported in New York.

Genetic testing traced the fungus to a lineage already circulating in Kenya and identified a specific combination of drug-resistance mutations that could explain why the antifungal medicines failed.

Erick Odoyo et al., Emergence of pan-drug resistant Candidozyma auris in Kenya, the second globally documented case, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-70653-9

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

The team then analyzed the activity of neurons in the claustrum, anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala in conjunction with the changing conditions in the game and the participants' ability to avoid asteroids. Using a mathematical model of how expectations are updated with new evidence, they estimated participants' uncertainty and prediction error at specific moments.

"Claustrum and anterior cingulate neurons displayed structured, task-related responses," wrote the authors. "Distinct subpopulations encoded stimulus onset and action-contingent outcomes, with outcome representations diverging between regions."

Essentially, the researchers found that different neurons responded to distinct events. Some changed their activity when a stimulus (i.e., an asteroid belt) appeared on the screen, while others appeared to respond to outcomes associated with a participant's actions in the game.
The team's findings suggest that neurons in both the claustrum and the anterior cingulate cortex track hidden quantities, or more specifically, estimated uncertainty and prediction error. However, during the experiment, signals in the two regions appeared at different stages of the task.

"Critically, both regions encoded model-derived latent variables, including uncertainty and prediction error, but with different temporal profiles; only the anterior cingulate carried uncertainty signals during the intertrial period, whereas both regions encoded uncertainty and prediction error during the active-avoidance period," wrote the authors. "By contrast, the amygdala showed minimal latent-variable modulation."

The researchers observed that neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex carried uncertainty-related signals between trials as well as during the active-avoidance phase. In the claustrum, however, signals linked to uncertainty and prediction error were evident primarily during the active-avoidance phase.
These findings provide evidence that human claustrum neurons track higher-order cognitive variables not directly observable from sensory input and reveal dissociable roles for the claustrum and anterior cingulate cortex in tracking latent task states," wrote the authors in their research paper.

Mingyue Hu et al., Human claustrum neurons encode uncertainty and prediction errors during aversive learning, Nature Neuroscience (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-026-02475-x.

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

A poorly understood brain region tracks the gap between expectations and reality

Adapting to changing situations requires people to continuously revise their expectations about what might happen next when new information becomes available. These expectations are believed to be represented by mental models that help the brain predict outcomes and plan future behaviour.
The contribution of different brain regions to the updating of expectations in changing circumstances has not yet been clearly delineated. One brain region that could play a role and yet remains poorly understood is the claustrum, a thin sheet of nerve cells deep inside the brain.

Researchers recently carried out a study investigating the possible contribution of the claustrum to aversive learning, the process through which humans and other animals learn about unpleasant outcomes in specific situations. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that neurons in this brain region track uncertainty about outcomes and prediction error (i.e., the difference between an expected outcome and what ultimately happens) during aversive learning.
The claustrum, which is reciprocally connected to nearly the entire neocortex, is uniquely positioned to influence cortical processing.
Researchers recorded the activity of individual neurons using electrodes that had been implanted in the brains of seven patients with epilepsy as part of clinical monitoring to identify where their seizures began. They specifically monitored neurons in the claustrum, the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps to monitor outcomes and guide behaviour, and the amygdala, which contributes to processing emotions and learning about threats. Not every participant had recordings from all three regions.
While they were collecting their recordings, the participants were asked to play a game on the computer.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

High-speed video reveals how honey bee stingers keep pumping venom after detachment

A stinger that works independently
After a worker bee lands and thrusts its stinger into the target, it flies away, leaving the stinger behind in a process called "autotomy." The stinger then continues to penetrate the target tissue and inject venom under its own power.

Scientists have used high-speed video to uncover the unique mechanism that allows a honey bee's stinger to continue to pump venom into its target even after it has separated from the bee's body.

Australian scientists have used high-speed video to uncover the unique mechanism that allows a honey bee's stinger to continue to pump venom into its target even after it has separated from the bee's body.

A new study, published in the journal PNAS, reveals for the first time that the tiny 2-millimeter (0.08-inch) stinger of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) works as a sophisticated double-piston micropump.

Detached honey bee stingers deliver venom autonomously using two reciprocating lancets with collapsible valves that act as pistons. The valves seal during pumping strokes and collapse during return strokes, limiting backflow and sustaining continuous flow. High-speed imaging and a scaled-up model confirmed this mechanism.

The stinger contains several different components, including a venom sac and pumping chamber, muscles and nerves. It also has two sharp, pointed lancets that slide backward and forward on a system of rails (called the olistheter) in a motion similar to that of a reciprocating saw; the lancets are responsible for working the stinger deeper into the skin and also pumping the venom.

Each of the long lancets has a valve attached that sits inside the pumping chamber. The researchers found these valves dynamically change shape to form a seal during the downstroke and collapse during the upstroke, generating pressure for pumping while minimizing backflow during refilling.
High-speed video showed that the valves inflate like a parachute on the downstroke, functioning as pistons to apply downward pumping pressure on the venom in the chamber, then deflate on the upstroke.
Finally, and perhaps most dramatically, as the valves meet in the middle of the stroke, they change shape again to push past each other.
This is a remarkable strategy to pump fluid since maintaining a seal is vital to effectively transmit pressure.

The unique geometry of the valves is the key; they act as collapsible pistons and—by pumping in opposite directions—they're able to deliver a continuous flow of venom.

The honey bee stinger: An unusual pump with collapsible double pistons, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2603916123

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

How bionic eyes are becoming a reality

Researchers have developed bionic eyes that can restore some lost vision. These devices' capabilities are currently basic, but they have been steadily improving in recent years.

Bionic retinal implants restore limited vision but face durability and surgical challenges. In a small trial, Prima restored functional central vision in 81% of patients with dry age-related macular degeneration. Cortical implants may bypass retinal and optic nerve damage, but achievable resolution and long-term effectiveness remain uncertain.

 original article

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Duct tape kept out more floodwater than sandbags in laboratory tests
In laboratory tests, exterior duct tape reduced water leakage through household doors by 97%–98%, compared with a maximum reduction of 70% for sandbags with plastic sheeting. Tape offers temporary protection at door gaps but cannot prevent entry through other routes or replace property-specific flood protection.

https://zenodo.org/records/23220942

original article.

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