How do our bodies remember? The more we move, the more our muscle cells begin to make a memory of that exercise. Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. "Like riding a bike" is shorthand for the remarkable way that our bodies remember how to move. Most of the time when we talk about muscle memory, we're not talking about the muscles themselves but about the memory of a coordinated movement pattern that lives in the motor neurons, which control our muscles. Yet in recent years, scientists have discovered that have a memory for movement and exercise.

We introduce Grade School Math with Distracting Context (GSM-DC), a synthetic benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' (LLMs) reasoning robustness against systematically controlled irrelevant context (IC). GSM-DC constructs symbolic reasoning graphs with precise distractor injections, enabling rigorous, reproducible evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs are significantly sensitive to IC, affecting both reasoning path selection and arithmetic accuracy. Additionally, training models with strong distractors improves performance in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. We further propose a stepwise tree search guided by a process reward model, which notably enhances robustness in out-of-distribution conditions.

This synthetic fish is powered by human heart cells. Scientists say that they could help lead the way toward building replacement hearts from human tissue. This synthetic fish is powered by human heart cells. Scientists say that they could help lead the way toward building replacement hearts from human tissue. Scientists have built a school of robotic fish powered by human heart cells.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad and evolving scientific field, and the value it can deliver at various stages of the drug discovery process is now widely accepted in the pharmaceutical industry. This blog seeks to demystify the application of AI in drug discovery, focusing on its key challenges, opportunities and successes. Over one million scientific articles are published every year in the biomedical domain alone, and every new year brings new methods for data collection and more detailed data modalities. While scientists have access to an exponentially increasing amount of knowledge and data, biological data is messy and incomplete; it may contain conflicting or contradicting evidence, suppositions, biases, uncertainty, gaps in knowledge or misclassifications. This prevents us from understanding the full biology landscape and complicates decision making.

The biobot developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign couples engineered skeletal muscle tissue to a 3D printed flexible skeleton. Although robotic humanoids now perform backflips and autonomous drones fly in formation, even the most advanced robots are relatively primitive when compared with living machines. The running, jumping, swimming, and flying creatures that cover our planet's surface have long inspired engineers. Yet a subset of researchers are not just taking tips from living creatures. These roboticists, computer scientists, and bioengineers are combining artificial materials with living tissue, or making machines entirely from living cells.

Artificial intelligence has been embraced for its ability to offer insight from big data. By applying the technology to genetics, a research team led by Queen Mary University of London has found clues that they say could aid the development of new drugs for heart failure and identify people at risk of the disease. Based on an AI analysis of heart MRI images from 17,000 volunteers in UK Biobank, the researchers linked genetic factors to 22% to 39% of abnormalities in the size and function of the heart's left ventricle, which pumps blood into the aorta. They published the findings in the journal Circulation. The team identified or confirmed 14 regions in the human genome that play a part in determining the size and function of the left ventricle, because they contain genes that regulate the early development of heart chambers and the contraction of heart muscle.

As if the line between human and machine wasn't already blurry enough, researchers in Tokyo have developed a new method for using living rat muscle tissue in robotics. The "biohybrid" design, described today in the journal Science Robotics, simulates the look and movements of a human finger. Video shows how it bends at the joint, picks up a loop, and places it down. It's a seemingly simple movement but one that researchers say lays the groundwork for more advanced--and even more lifelike--robots. "If we can combine more of these muscles into a single device, we should be able to reproduce the complex muscular interplay that allows hands, arms, and other parts of the body to function," says study author Shoji Takeuchi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Tokyo. "Although this is just a preliminary result, our approach might be a great step toward the construction of a more complex biohybrid system."

Researchers at the Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, claim they have made an artificial human heart muscle that's big enough to be used to solve damage seen in heart attack victims. The team said that this development takes us closer towards the aim of repairing dead heart muscles in patients. The study called "Cardiopatch Platform Enables Maturation and Scale-Up of Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Engineered Heart Tissues" published on Nov. 28, 2017, appeared on Nature Communications. "Right now, virtually all existing therapies are aimed at reducing the symptoms from the damage that's already been done to the heart, but no approaches have been able to replace the muscle that's lost, because once it's dead, it does not grow back on its own," said Ilya Shadrin -- the first author of the study who is also a biomedical engineering doctoral student at Duke University. "This is a way that we could replace lost muscle with tissue made outside the body."

Genetic mutations already in the population today may make the X-men movies seem less like science fiction than you think. It turns out that there are some genetic mutations that seemingly give some people superhuman abilities. For example, some people have a very rare genetic mutation that makes muscle cells grow bigger and divide more than usual, resulting in a condition where people, and even children, can look like body builders. A gene mutation is a permanent alteration in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene, such that the sequence differs from what is found in most people. Mutations can be beneficial, harmful or neutral depending on their context and location.

Researchers have developed a type of walking'bio-bot' powered by skeletal muscle cells. The bots muscle cells can be controlled by blue light, causing the multi-legged bot to move forwards. The team that designed the bio-bot released a step-by-step guide of how to make one so that other researchers have the knowledge to build their own. Schematic of a bio-bot: Engineered skeletal muscle tissue is coupled to a 3D printed flexible skeleton. The researchers, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed the robot using 3D printing to make a skeleton for the bot.