Sustained Energy.

Sneezing hamsters.

1. Our section of the universe has been mapped into the "most accurate simulation to date" by scientists using a supercomputer. The simulations, which were unveiled at Durham university, capture the Big Bang to the present and the entire evolution of the cosmos. Scientists used advanced statistical techniques so that the simulations were conditioned to reproduce our specific patch of the universe - therefore containing the present-day structures in the vicinity of our own galaxy. At the centre of the simulation is a pair of galaxies - virtual representations of our own Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy. (Source: news.sky.com)

2. A 24-year-old nuclear-fusion record has crumbled. Scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, announced on 9 February that they had generated the highest-ever sustained energy from fusing together atoms, more than doubling their own record from experiments performed in 1997. “These landmark results have taken us a huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all,” said Ian Chapman, who leads the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), where JET is based, in a statement. JET is owned by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, but it’s scientific operations are run by a European collaboration called EUROfusion. If researchers can harness nuclear fusion — the process that powers the Sun — it promises to provide a near-limitless source of clean energy. But so far no experiment has generated more energy out than it puts in. JET’s results do not change that, but they suggest that a follow-up fusion reactor project that uses the same technology and fuel mix — the ambitious US$22-billion ITER, scheduled to begin fusion experiments in 2025 — should eventually be able to achieve this goal. Video here. (Source: nature.com, bbc.com)

3. A team of neuroscientists created a semantic map of the brain that showed in remarkable detail which areas of the cortex respond to linguistic information about a wide range of concepts, from faces and places to social relationships and weather phenomena. When they compared that map to one they made showing where the brain represents categories of visual information, they observed meaningful differences between the patterns. And those differences looked exactly like the ones reported in the studies on vision and memory. The finding, published last October in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that in many cases, a memory isn’t a facsimile of past perceptions that gets replayed. Instead, it is more like a reconstruction of the original experience, based on its semantic content. That insight might help to explain why memory is so often such an imperfect record of the past — and could provide a better understanding of what it really means to remember something. (Sources: nature.com, quantamagazine.org)

4. The use of genetically modified (GM) crops in agriculture remains contentious, especially in Europe. According to surveys, many people fear that these could have negative effects for human health and the environment. However, a new study shows that genetically modified crops could actually be good for the environment, and for the climate in particular. Results suggest that the adoption of GM crops in the European Union (EU) could reduce greenhouse gas emissions considerably. (Source: uni-bonn.de)