Is AI Leading to Declining Enrollment in Computer Science? - GovTech

As we get older, our episodic memory – managed by the hippocampus region – gradually gets worse. That's the memory related to specific details, like where the car's parked or what time an appointment is. In old age, the semantic memory, controlled by the frontal cortex, tends to become more dominant. This is the big picture, general knowledge, overall gist memory, covering the rules of hockey or capital cities. The conventional thinking amongst neuroscientists has long been that this brain shift is our way of adapting to increasing neural wear and tear: a compensatory mechanism. But what if it's a deliberate choice that better suits older people, who've amassed much more information in their brains than younger people? Researchers from the University of Arizona have now published a study in Perspectives on Psychological Science arguing that shifting from the hippocampus to the frontal cortex could be the brain optimizing itself rather than retreating. "Prevailing theories of cognitive aging depict late life as a period of compensatory decline – an effort to preserve performance despite progressive neural deterioration," write the researchers in their published paper.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.