Content or form? The two possible paths of our memories
Peer-Reviewed Publication
This month, we’re focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that continues to capture attention everywhere. Here, you’ll find the latest research news, insights, and discoveries shaping how AI is being developed and used across the world.
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Dec-2025 08:11 ET (20-Dec-2025 13:11 GMT/UTC)
If memories are the black box of our past, they can also shed light on the present by giving meaning to new situations. But how does memory retrieve either surface matches (based on same places, same people) or deeper, more conceptual ones (based on similar intentions or actions)? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has shed light on this question, showing that memory tends to favour the substance of a situation —its concept or underlying problem — when it can be linked to familiar mental categories. Otherwise, it defaults to surface-level cues. These findings open up new possibilities for enhancing analogical learning, particularly in educational settings. The results have been published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science.
Severe weather events, such as heavy rainfall, are becoming increasingly commonare on the rise worldwide. Reliable assessments of these events can save lives and protect property. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have presented developed a new method that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert low-resolution global weather data into high-resolution precipitation maps. The method is fast, efficient, and independent of location. Their findings have been published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-025-01103-y
While automatized vocabulary knowledge has been shown to strongly predict general listening ability, its role in speech production remains unknown. Now, researchers have compared conscious recognition of simple word meanings (declarative knowledge) with instant, automatic access to contextualized word meanings (automatized knowledge) in Japanese students learning English as a second language. The findings revealed that automatized vocabulary knowledge better predicts fluency, and practicing vocabulary in real-life contexts may help learners speak more smoothly and confidently.
CZI announced its latest AI model, GREmLN, aimed at helping researchers better understand how cells behave by focusing on the key networks that control cell behavior.
Researchers from Seoul National University (Prof. Seung-Kyun Kang), the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, KIST (Dr. Hyojin Lee), Kwangwoon University (Prof. Jeonghyun Kim), and Gyeongsang National University (Prof. Seongchan Kim) have developed a wireless implantable drug delivery system that enables anticancer drugs to penetrate deep into solid tumors—without harming surrounding healthy tissue. The multidisciplinary team, led by experts in materials science, bioelectronics, and pharmaceutical engineering, offers a new strategy to enhance the efficacy of chemotherapy while minimizing side effects.
ChemELLM, a 70-billion-parameter LLM tailored for chemical engineering, outperforms leading LLMs (e.g., Deepseek-R1) on ChemEBench across 101 tasks, trained on ChemEData’s 19 billion pretraining and 1 billion fine-tuning tokens, accelerating lab-to-fab innovation.