In Finland, a new generation of energy-efficient data centers is transforming how cities manage heat.
Data centers have transformed urban heat management by recovering waste heat from servers and funneling it into the country's extensive district heating networks. This… pic.twitter.com/w0Nhcoyrs7
According to American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake, when the US struck Iran, it was easily foreseeable that Tehran would move against the Strait of Hormuz. Washington failed to predeploy forces to counter that, and now the US is paying for it. The distant blockade prevents Iran from fully profiting from its position, but it doesn’t reopen the waterway. Commercial shipping won’t run the risk of a potentially mined strait, and the US isn’t willing to force the issue.
That leaves two options, neither good, Shake says. Dramatic escalation, after 37 days of intensive military operations failed to produce Iranian capitulation, or accepting that Iran controls one of the world’s most critical chokepoints. As she puts it: “We’re at a Mexican standoff with the Iranians, which means we’re gonna have to negotiate some kind of arrangement that’s not just in our interests but also in their interests to get them to release the chokehold on the strait.”
The most likely path forward is a drawn-out negotiation, with Washington hoping economic pressure on Tehran outlasts economic pressure on everyone else. But that is a bet, not a strategy, and every week the Strait stays closed, the costs mount for US allies, global markets, and the credibility of American military power.
Vice President JD Vance takes questions during a White House press briefing today. Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images
Vice President JD Vance told reporters today that the Trump administration’s main goal in Iran is preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and beyond, Alex Fitzpatrick and Avery Lotz report.
Vance, taking questions in a jam-packed and sometimes raucous Brady Press Briefing Room: “Iran would really be the first domino, and that would set off a nuclear arms race all over the world. That’s very, very bad for the safety of our country.”
Vance added: “We are not going to have a deal that allows the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, so as the president just told me, we’re locked and loaded.”
“We don’t want to go down that pathway, but the president is willing and able to go down that pathway if we have to.
“President Trump convened a meeting on Iran with his top national security team last night that included a briefing on military options, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports.
Go deeper.Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images
Vance, using a “cheat sheet” to call on reporters while subbing for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, also took questions on the DOJ’s controversial new “anti-weaponization fund,” President Trump’s surprise endorsement of Texas AG Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn and more.
On the taxpayer-funded $1.776 billionIRS fund, and the possibility that some of that money could go to Jan. 6 defendants: “You’ve got to actually look at this stuff and figure out what were they accused of. … Maybe they had their entire lives ruined in a totally disproportionate way. That’s fundamentally illegitimate and political.
“On Trump’s endorsement: “I’ve known John Cornyn for a long time, but unfortunately, when it really counted, Ken Paxton was there for the country, was there for the president, and that’s why he ultimately earned the president’s endorsement.”Watch Vance’s briefing.
An NVIDIA powered farming machine uses Al vision and precision lasers to eliminate weeds in milliseconds without herbicides and without harming crops, a potential shift toward chemical free agriculture.
Functional neuroimaging demonstrates that the brain adapts to degraded visual navigation inputs by rigidly activating primary motor areas and explicitly amplifying the functional connection between executive cognitive control and physical motor execution centers. Credit: Neuroscience News
Brain Rewires to Stabilize Walking During Visual Impairment
Summary: A new study has deciphered how the human brain dynamically remodels its neural circuitry to maintain walking stability when visual input is compromised. By using specialized occlusion foils to simulate low vision in healthy adults, researchers combined visual evoked potentials (PR-VEPs) and resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) to track brain changes immediately following locomotion.
The data reveals that the brain compensates for degraded sight through a dual-action survival strategy: rigidly activating primary sensorimotor loops while aggressively boosting functional connectivity between motor execution and higher-order cognitive control networks. This discovery provides a concrete neurological blueprint for designing advanced, personalized multimodal mobility rehabilitation for low-vision individuals.
Key Facts
The Low-Vision Simulation: Investigators utilized Bangerter™ occlusion foils to model stable, low-quality visual input, confirming a significant reduction in signal-processing efficiency along primary visual pathways.
Paracentral Lobule Rebound: Under normal sight, walking naturally downregulates the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) in the right paracentral lobule compared to rest. When vision is blocked, this localized neural activity slightly rebounds, signaling a rapid, adaptive functional adjustment.
Rigid Path Activation: Navigating with impaired vision triggers widespread baseline activation across multiple interconnected sensorimotor pathways, including the bilateral calcarine gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, supplementary motor area (SMA), cuneus, precentral gyrus, and cerebellar lobule VI.
The Core Compensatory Switch: The most critical neuroplastic adjustment discovered was a powerful spike in functional connectivity between the right precentral gyrus (motor execution) and the middle frontal gyrus (cognitive control), serving as the brain’s main workaround for missing sight.
Clinical Translation Matrix: The study advocates for a shift toward visual-somatosensory multimodal integrated training, actively stimulating these target pathways to build personalized, brain-level rehabilitation programs for low-vision populations.
Source: Chinese Medical Journal
Vision acts as the navigation radar for human locomotion, transmitting environmental information to the brain and regulating motor decisions through sensorimotor integration. When visual input is impaired, how does the brain maintain walking stability via functional remodeling?
Deciphering this neural mechanism can provide a brand-new brain function regulation approach for motor rehabilitation in low-vision populations.
The present study adopted Bangerter™ occlusion foils to simulate visual impairment, combined with pattern-reversal visual evoked potentials (PR-VEPs) and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). It comparatively analyzed the visual electrophysiological characteristics and post-walking brain function changes of healthy young adults under normal vision and visual occlusion conditions.
This study was published in Volume 139, Issue 06 on March 20, 2026, in the Chinese Medical Journal.
The results demonstrated that the simulated visual impairment significantly reduced the signal-processing efficiency of the visual pathway, verifying the stability of the low-quality visual input model. Further rs-fMRI analysis revealed that the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) in the right paracentral lobule decreased after walking under normal vision compared with the resting state. In contrast, the ALFF of this region slightly rebounded after walking under visual occlusion, reflecting the adaptive adjustment of local brain functional activities.
Meanwhile, walking activated functional connectivity in multiple sensorimotor pathways that support basic locomotion. These pathways included the bilateral calcarine and middle temporal gyrus, bilateral supplementary motor area and right cuneus, as well as bilateral precentral gyrus and right cerebellar lobule VI.
Most crucially, visual occlusion further strengthened the functional connectivity between the right precentral gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, which may serve as the core compensatory mechanism to make up for insufficient visual input.
The findings suggest that the brain achieves walking function compensation under low-quality visual input through a strategy of rigid activation of sensorimotor pathways combined with targeted enhancement of local functional connectivity.
This study provides a new way to enhance motor rehabilitation in low-vision populations. In the future, we can adopt visual-somatosensory multimodal integrated training. This training would be designed to strengthen the functional connectivity of key brain regions, such as the right precentral gyrus and middle frontal gyrus. On this basis, we will develop personalized motor rehabilitation programs for low-vision patients at the brain function level.
Funding information: This work was supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 81600760).
Key Questions Answered:
Q: How does the brain act like a “navigation radar” when we are just taking a casual walk?
A: Your eyes are continuously streaming real-time spatial and environmental data directly into your brain, which processes this visual information to regulate split-second motor adjustments. This seamless sensorimotor integration acts as an internal radar. When that radar is suddenly blinded or degraded, the brain loses its primary mapping tool and is forced to structurally remodel how it processes movement to keep you upright and stable.
Q: What makes the connection between the right precentral gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus so special?
A: This specific link is the crown jewel of the study’s findings. The precentral gyrus is primarily responsible for physically executing motor movements, while the middle frontal gyrus handles higher-level executive cognitive functions and decision-making. When sight fails, the brain hooks these two regions together in an aggressive compensatory handshake, essentially relying on conscious cognitive control to carefully guide and steady mechanical stepping.
Q: How can we use this data to help blind or visually impaired individuals walk more confidently?
A: Currently, a lot of mobility rehabilitation focuses purely on physical practice and external cues. This study allows us to design therapy from the brain level downward. By using targeted visual-somatosensory multimodal training—like combining tactile or balance exercises with residual visual inputs—clinicians can purposefully fire up and reinforce the precentral-to-frontal pathways, training the brain to rewire itself for maximum stability faster.
Editorial Notes:
This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
Journal paper reviewed in full.
Additional context added by our staff.
About this visual neuroscience research news
Author: Tingting Yang Source: Chinese Medical Journal Contact: Tingting Yang – Chinese Medical Journal Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
The Rundown: China has begun full commercial operation of what it says is the world’s first offshore wind-powered underwater data center, a $226M facility sitting more than 30 feet beneath the East China Sea off Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area.
The details:The data center sits between two phases of an offshore wind farm, drawing 95% of its electricity from wind generation while using seawater for passive cooling.The 24 MW facility houses nearly 2K servers, including GPU clusters from China Telecom and LinkWise, and is designed to handle AI workloads. Developers say the system cuts electricity consumption by 22.8%, eliminates freshwater use entirely, and reduces land use by more than 90%. Microsoft’s Project Natick previously proved submerged servers can be up to 8x more reliable than land-based ones, but the company shelved the program.
Why it matters: By ditching industrial chillers for passive seawater cooling, China says it has built a data center that runs at a PUE of 1.15 — while powering it almost entirely from wind.
The catch is the same one that sank Microsoft’s Project Natick: when a server fails 30 feet underwater, maintenance is a costly feat.
More news on everybody’s favourite cute-hoor. New Freedom of Information requests by the Irish Times just showed Michael Healy-Rae has pocketed over €370,000 from Kerry County Council since 2020 for leasing properties and providing homes under the Rental Accommodation Scheme. Payments rose from €55,566 in 2020 to €71,785 last year. But shure luk, it’s not like when he was making all that he was in a position to influence the goverment on accommodation laws during a housing crisis, to be shure. Ah isnt it grand that landlords like him, who was until recently a TD, that under schemes like RAS and HAP he received his guaranteed rent paid directly from the local authorities he represents, with no need for rent collectors and full mortgage interest relief available as an expense.
Ah tis grand like! Oh and thats just the Kerry end of it. He also receives payments under the Housing Assistance Payment scheme, administered nationally by Limerick City and County Council. That council refused to say how much, citing his privacy as a private individual engaged in a commercial arrangement. Aul Bertie taught him somethin!
Obviously all this social housing income is on top of €1.33 million his company Roughty Properties has received for housing Ukrainian refugees since 2022, as well as a modest €1,027.50 from Kerry County Council for diesel. Diesel….oh did I mention he resigned last month as Minister of State at Agriculture over the Government’s handling of fuel protests? Tis a grand aul cap on him.
Ah but shure with currently 14 houses, three guest houses, a commercial unit, an apartment, and various unspecified rooms and apartments declared in the register of interest he needs a lot of diesel! That aul hat won’t keep him warm. Make sure you pay your television licence and don’t complain about housing or immigration you jackeens. And if you do, don’t ask TDs any questions! Blame the innocent taking advantage of these laws and benefits, as they in turn are taken advantage of. And shure your paying for it all. Grand stuff to be shure!
Vice President JD Vance takes questions during a White House press briefing today. Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images
Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images 
Image source: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology
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