When it comes to fine-tuned motor skills like playing the piano, practice, they say, makes perfect. But expert musicians often experience a "ceiling effect," in which their skill level plateaus after extensive training. Passive training using a robotic exoskeleton hand could help pianists overcome that ceiling effect, according to a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpracticing,” coauthor Shinichi Furuya of Kabushiki Keisha Sony Computer Science Kenkyujo told New Scientist . “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing.” Recalling that his former teachers used to place their hands over his to show him how to play more advanced pieces, he wondered if he could achieve the same effect with a robotic hand.

So Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robot hand capable of moving individual fingers on the right hand independently, flexing and extending the joints as needed. Per the authors, prior studies with robotic exoskeletons focused on simpler movements, such as assisting in the movement of limbs stabilizing body posture, or helping grasp objects. That sets the custom robotic hand used in these latest experiments apart from those used for haptics in virtual environments.

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I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home's fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.

Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions, coupled with a lack of square footage. "I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?" Geerling says in the announcement video . It's a keen launching point for a new "homelab" or "minilab" project, also known as bringing the networking and hardware challenges of a commercial network deployment into your home for "fun."

It's a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there's a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.

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Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It’s a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. “When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain,” Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.

Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. “Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process,” Hauglund explains.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

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When ya gotta go, ya gotta go, and if it sometimes seems like the urge to pee seems more pressing when others nearby are letting loose—well, there's now a bit of science to back that up. It turns out that humans may not be the only species to experience "contagious urination," according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. Chimpanzees living at the Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan are also more likely to relieve themselves when others are doing so nearby, and the behavior seems to be hierarchical, "flowing down" from dominant chimps to more passive ones.

“In humans, urinating together can be seen as a social phenomenon,” said coauthor Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “An Italian proverb states, ‘Whoever doesn’t pee in company is either a thief or a spy’ ( Chi non piscia in compagnia o è un ladro o è una spia ), while in Japanese, the act of urinating with others is referred to as 'Tsureshon' (連れション). This behavior is represented in art across centuries and cultures and continues to appear in modern social contexts. Our research suggests that this phenomenon may have deep evolutionary roots.”

Onishi, et al decided to study the phenomenon after noticing that many chimps in the sanctuary seemed to synchronize when they peed, and they wondered whether the phenomenon might be similar to how one person yawning can trigger others to follow suit—another "semi-voluntary physiological behavior." There had been no prior research into contagious peeing. So they filmed the 20 captive chimps over 600 hours, documenting over 1,300 "urination events."

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From the flamboyant blossoms and birds of rainforests to the living rainbows of coral reefs, Earth’s surface is teeming with life. But some of its most diverse and fascinating biomes are thriving in the darkness below.

We used to think that the subsurface was a far-from-ideal place for living things. Habitats that can soak up light and warmth from the Sun have the energy to sustain many forms of life and so were viewed as the most diverse. That view is now changing.

Led by Emil Ruff of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., new research has unearthed communities of underground microbes that are almost as—and sometimes more—diverse than even reefs and rainforests. Ruff and his team found that subsurface bacteria and archaea are flourishing, even at depths where the energy supply is orders of magnitude lower than enjoyed by organisms in habitats that see the sun.

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TikTok disappeared for a portion of the weekend, following a Supreme Court decision that upheld a 2024 federal law requiring the app to cease operations in the US unless it was sold by its Chinese owner, ByteDance. TikTok is gradually resuming service in the US, but it has an unclear road ahead.

TikTok started greeting US users late Saturday night with a notice stating that "Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now," noting that "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US."

The message changed after it was first deployed, adding a note that "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"

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With just hours left in office, President Joe Biden has issued a preemptive pardon for Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert.

For nearly four decades, Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He advised seven presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan and, among his many accomplishments, played a crucial role in the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fauci was a leading architect of PEPFAR, the global AIDS response program begun by President George W. Bush that is estimated to have saved 25 million lives . Fauci served as Biden's medical advisor until his retirement at the end of 2022 .

"For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci served our country," Biden said in a statement released this morning . "He saved countless lives by managing the government’s response to pressing health crises, including HIV/AIDS, as well as the Ebola and Zika viruses. During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor, he helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him."

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Elon Musk has objected to a lack of reciprocity in the US-China tech relationship, a rare criticism from the billionaire on issues sensitive to Beijing after US president-elect Donald Trump prepared to offer a reprieve to TikTok on a ban in the US.

Musk, who has long sought to maintain close ties with Communist party officials in China, a core market and production centre for his electric-car company Tesla, has for years been careful in his statements about Beijing.

But he said on Sunday that “something needs to change” after Trump said he would “most likely” extend a deadline for Chinese tech group ByteDance to divest from TikTok, which faced a ban under a US law that briefly forced it offline.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here .

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

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