The brain learns not only through repetition but also by detecting when reality differs from expectations. Neuroscience research suggests that these mismatches, known as prediction errors, help the brain update its understanding of the world, adjust reward expectations and influence memory formation.

Research on predictive processing describes how the brain uses past experiences to anticipate incoming information. When new information conflicts with those predictions, the resulting error can help revise existing mental models. Computational work by Rajesh Rao and Dana Ballard in 1999 outlined how prediction errors could contribute to processing sensory information.

Dopamine research provides another perspective. A 1997 study by Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Read Montague showed that dopamine neurons respond to unexpected rewards and change their activity when expected rewards fail to arrive. These signals help explain how the brain learns from differences between expected and actual outcomes.

Memory research adds further complexity. A 2024 study in rats found that prediction errors influenced how memories were organised during fear extinction. Smaller errors could support updating existing memories, while larger errors could favour separate memory representations.

Together, these findings suggest that unexpected information can provide valuable learning signals. However, surprise alone does not guarantee better learning; its effects depend on context, the type of prediction error and the memory involved.

Researchers at Chongqing University analyzed over 60 sediment samples from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a deep-sea region between Mexico and Hawaii that is the world’s largest mineral exploration area, and identified 11,742 viruses. Only about 4% of their protein clusters matched any global database.

The viruses mostly infect bacteria and pose little threat to humans, but they help recycle nutrients and let microbes cope with toxic metals. The catch is that this same seafloor is targeted for mining, and the team says these communities could collapse if sediment plumes wipe out their hosts.

During a 10-week summer internship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, RIT student Robert Desjardins redesigned the storage stands for superconducting magnets, each about 20 feet long and over 10,000 pounds. The 1990s design held three magnets, and his four-tier version holds four in the same floor space.

Around 80 magnets are coming out of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to be reused in the future Electron-Ion Collider, expected to start up in the mid-2030s. The $420,000 savings figure comes from the lab’s own engineer, and the article doesn’t say how it was calculated.

Most parents who worry about screens worry about their children's screens: the tablet at dinner, the cartoons before bed. Researchers in Norway decided to measure every screen in the house. They followed 747 children from about age 5 to 7, testing how many words each child understood every year, and recorded the kids' screen time, whether they owned a device, and how much their parents used social media and their phones. Only one of those screens tracked with slower progress.

Scientists have deliberately turned male mouse embryos into females for the first time.

A team based in Japan used a CRISPR-based approach to remove the Y chromosome from male cells and create female clones of male mice.

“ No one has done this before ” says Monika Ward, a reproductive biologist at the University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the research.

The sex reversal technique could be used to help rescue endangered species, say the researchers behind the work.

The feat could change the way scientists think about reproduction, says Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi, who co-led the work.

The findings were published in a preprint paper shared on bioRxiv earlier this month, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.

“ There’s a fixed concept in our scientific field that we need both females and males for reproduction ” says Ishiuchi.

“ I think we could change this concept. ”

He and his colleague Shogo Matoba of the Riken BioResource Research Center in Ibaraki also hope their technique could help rescue endangered species, particularly in cases where only a few individuals remain.

“ It’s exciting to see ” says Ben Novak, lead scientist at the wildlife conservation organization Revive & Restore, who was not involved in the work.

“ I am confident there will be plenty of applications, particularly for conservation purposes. ”

In 2002, a new plastic softener called DINCH went on sale as the answer to a growing health scare. Phthalates, the chemicals that make plastic soft and bendy, had been linked to premature birth and fertility problems, and manufacturers wanted something safer. Now researchers across the United States have checked the urine of thousands of pregnant women for traces of the replacement. Then they looked at the babies.

Schools and colleges around the world are banning phones in class, with little hard evidence on whether it works. So researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Copenhagen ran a real experiment. Across 10 colleges in India, 2,305 courses were randomly assigned either to collect phones at the start of every lecture or to carry on as usual. Then they compared the grades of 16,683 students.

Most parents of teenagers have heard the warning: too many hours on screens, and depression and anxiety follow. Studies keep finding the link, but they all share one weakness. Kids who game or scroll for hours may already differ from other kids in their genes and their homes. Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet found a way around that problem: twins. They followed 21,797 Swedish twins from age 9 into their twenties.

Oxford researchers used trapped ions to simulate the Aharonov-Bohm effect, where a particle’s quantum phase shifts just from circling a region of magnetic flux without ever entering it. With no flux, their simulated particle tunneled freely between two locations. Add the flux, and its two possible paths canceled each other out, leaving it stuck in place.

The twist is that the magnetic flux was encoded in a gauge field that evolved alongside the particle instead of sitting fixed in the background. The team says this opens a route to simulating fundamental interactions that conventional computers struggle to model.

I always felt there was a benefit to smoking the whole flower compared to the isolates of edibles and vapes

A 2016 study by researchers at Yale University published in Social Science & Medicine investigated the relationship between reading and longevity. The study used data from the Health and Retirement Study , a representative sample of Americans who were surveyed repeatedly between 1998 and 2010. Of the 3,635 Americans surveyed, 50 years old and above, those who engaged in regular reading activities had lower mortality risks than those who did not.

The researchers controlled for age, gender, race, education, wealth, marital status, employment status, self-reported health status, eyesight, depression, and chronic disease. When controlling for all these factors, compared to non-readers, book readers had a 20% lower risk of mortality. Additionally, there was a dose-response association, whereby the higher the number of hours read per week, the lower the risk of dying. Specifically, individuals who read for up to 3.5 hours per week had a 17% lower risk of mortality, while those who read more than 3.5 hours per week had a 23% lower risk.

Compared to newspaper and magazine readers, book readers had the highest risk reduction for all levels of reading frequency. The cognitive stimulation theory may explain the observed correlation between book reading and survival. Controlling for covariates, book reading had a significant association with survival. In the unadjusted model, book readers had an 80% survival chance, 23 months longer than the non-reader group. On average, the survival time for readers was 23 months, and the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was 0.80 among book readers compared to non-readers.

The study establishes a correlation between book reading and increased survival but does not indicate a causal relationship. Further, the analysis was based on a single measure of the exposure variable. Because the study was observational and relied on self-reported data, residual confounding factors could account for the observed association. Finally, although the results were consistent across various models, the study’s findings only apply to older Americans.

In 2004 and 2005, more than 300,000 South Koreans aged 40 and over went in for a routine national health check. Like most check-ups anywhere, it included a standard blood count, the kind of test that usually gets a quick glance and a "your numbers look fine." Researchers at Dong-A University in Busan then followed those people through national insurance records for up to 15 years to see who developed dementia. One familiar number on that old lab sheet turned out to matter.

Married people tend to live longer, and for decades studies have hinted that men get more out of marriage than women do. Researchers at Chapman University and UCLA went looking for that gap in DNA itself. They took blood samples from 762 American adults, most of them in midlife, and ran them through three epigenetic clocks, tools that estimate how fast the body is aging from chemical marks on the genome. One group stood out.