Science Dinosaurs Fossilized tissue reveals largest known T. rex died from broken rib The blood vessels around the wound that killed Scotty were preserved for 66 million years. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . The largest fossils ever discovered belong to a 66-million-year-old apex predator named Scotty .

White matter tractography is an advanced neuroimaging technique that reconstructs the 3D white matter pathways of the brain from diffusion MRI data. It can be framed as a pathfinding problem aiming to infer neural fiber trajectories from noisy and ambiguous measurements, facing challenges such as crossing, merging, and fanning white-matter configurations. In this paper, we propose a novel tractography method that leverages Transformers to model the sequential nature of white matter streamlines, enabling the prediction of fiber directions by integrating both the trajectory context and current diffusion MRI measurements. To incorporate spatial information, we utilize CNNs that extract microstructural features from local neighborhoods around each voxel. By combining these complementary sources of information, our approach improves the precision and completeness of neural pathway mapping compared to traditional tractography models. We evaluate our method with the Tractometer toolkit, achieving competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches, and present qualitative results on the TractoInferno dataset, demonstrating strong generalization to real-world data.

X-ray imaging is indispensable in medical diagnostics, yet its use is tightly regu-ectilated due to radiation exposure.

Light field microscopy (LFM) has become an emerging tool in neuroscience for large-scale neural imaging in vivo, with XLFM (eXtended Light Field Microscopy) notable for its single-exposure volumetric imaging, broad field of view, and high temporal resolution. However, learning-based 3D reconstruction in XLFM remains underdeveloped due to two core challenges: the absence of standardized datasets and the lack of methods that can efficiently model its angular-spatial structure while remaining physically grounded. We address these challenges by introducing three key contributions. First, we construct the XLFM-Zebrafish benchmark, a large-scale dataset and evaluation suite for XLFM reconstruction. Second, we propose Masked View Modeling for Light Fields (MVM-LF), a self-supervised task that learns angular priors by predicting occluded views, improving data efficiency. Third, we formulate the Optical Rendering Consistency Loss (ORC Loss), a differentiable rendering constraint that enforces alignment between predicted volumes and their PSF-based forward projections. On the XLFM-Zebrafish benchmark, our method improves PSNR by 7.7% over state-of-the-art baselines.

Endoscopic imaging is indispensable for visualizing internal organs, yet conventional systems remain bulky and costly because they rely on large, multi-element optics, which limits their ability to access and image certain areas of the body. Achieving high-quality endomicroscopy with hundred micron-scale and inexpensive hardware remains a grand challenge. Optical fibers offer a sub-millimeter-scale imaging conduit that could meet this need, but existing fiber-based approaches typically require either raster scanning or multicore bundles, which limit resolution and speed of imaging. In this work, we overcome these limitations by combining dualcomb interferometry with optical ghost imaging and advanced algorithm. Optical frequency combs enable precise and parallel speckle illumination via wavelengthdivision multiplexing through a single-core fiber, while our dual-comb compressive ghost imaging approach enables snapshot detection of bucket-sum signals using a single-pixel detector, eliminating the need for both spatial and spectral scanning. To reconstruct images from these highly compressed measurements, we introduce Optical Ghost-GPT, a transformer-based image reconstruction model that enables fast, high-fidelity recovery at low sampling ratios. Our dual-comb ghost imaging approach, combined with the novel algorithm, outperforms classical ghost imaging techniques in both speed and accuracy, enabling real-time, high-resolution endoscopic imaging with a significantly reduced device footprint. This advancement paves the way for non-invasive, high-resolution, low-cost endomicroscopy and other sensing applications constrained by hardware size and complexity.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have begun to demonstrate robust reasoning capabilities on general tasks, yet their application in the medical domain remains in its early stages. Constructing chain-of-thought (CoT) training data is essential for bolstering the reasoning abilities of medical MLLMs.

While foundation models have shown promise across a variety of fields, astronomy lacks a unified framework for joint modeling across its highly diverse data modalities.

Seeing hidden structures and objects around corners is critical for robots operating in complex, cluttered environments. Existing methods, however, are limited to detecting and tracking hidden objects rather than reconstructing the occluded full scene.

This paper reviews how a diverse set of popular data-driven priors commonly used in Bayesian inverse problems can be unified through their respective score functions. By framing these priors under this common perspective, we show that they can benefit from their straightfoward and effective integration into a recently proposed sampling algorithm. The applicability of this common framework is illustrated by considering several data-driven priors, namely regularization-by-denoising, normalizing flow-based priors, score-based generative models, and convex-ridge regularizers. For these four particular priors, the performance of the method is evaluated when conducting image inpainting and single image super-resolution. These results, as well as those obtained when restoring real images acquired in a geological context, demonstrate the efficiency of the method. This unified framework proves versatile enough to handle any posterior distribution defined by a broad class of score function-based priors, beyond the specific cases considered in this paper.

Generating hyperspectral images (HSIs) from RGB images through spectral reconstruction can significantly reduce the cost of HSI acquisition. In this paper, we propose a Fractal-Based Recursive Spectral Reconstruction Network (FRN), which differs from existing paradigms that attempt to directly integrate the full-spectrum information from the R, G, and B channels in a one-shot manner. Instead, it treats spectral reconstruction as a progressive process, predicting from broad to narrow bands or employing a coarse-to-fine approach for predicting the next wavelength. Inspired by fractals in mathematics, FRN establishes a novel spectral reconstruction paradigm by recursively invoking an atomic reconstruction module. In each invocation, only the spectral information from neighboring bands is used to provide clues for the generation of the image at the next wavelength, which follows the low-rank property of spectral data. Moreover, we design a band-aware state space model that employs a pixel-differentiated scanning strategy at different stages of the generation process, further suppressing interference from low-correlation regions caused by reflectance differences. Through extensive experimentation across different datasets, FRN achieves superior reconstruction performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mongko007/frn.