From genetics to AI: Integrated approaches to decoding human language in the brain
Meeting Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 10-Jun-2026 08:16 ET (10-Jun-2026 12:16 GMT/UTC)
Learning French, reading the latest Andy Weir novel, hanging out with friends for St. Patrick’s Day — language is central to all these everyday activities. Seemingly effortless from childhood, language, it turns out, is quite complex, not constrained to one set of genes or one region in the brain. Cognitive neuroscientists are now using a diverse arsenal of tools, including novel genetic analyses and AI, to gain insights into both healthy and disordered communication across individuals, as will be presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in Vancouver, British Columbia.
What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens. Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing. Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning.
Researchers have developed a microscopic 3D-printed optical device that can efficiently combine light from dozens of small semiconductor lasers into a single multimode optical fiber with very low loss. The team demonstrated photonic lanterns that multiplex 7, 19, and 37 multimode VCSEL lasers directly into a fiber while preserving brightness and easing alignment constraints. By enabling scalable incoherent beam combining of many multimode lasers, the technology could simplify and improve high-power laser systems, optical communications, and other photonic applications where efficiently delivering large optical power through fibers is critical.
Check out the press program for the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit today. The conference will be held in Denver and online everywhere March 15-20.