Happy Monday listeners. Let's get the week started by catching up on some of the latest science news.

For Scientific American science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

The winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes were announced last week,

so let's start with a quick little Laureate rundown. the Gary Rovkin for the quote discovery of micro RNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

The small snippets of RNA molecules known as micro-rna help control how our genes are expressed.

Here's a little primer for context.

DNA is of course the molecule that carries our genetic code.

RNA, which is short for ribonucleic acid, is chemically similar to DNA,

but it usually comes in a single strand instead of that iconic little double helix.

The molecules also serve different biological functions.

DNA stays put within the nucleus of our cells, but it sends out strands of RNA with

some of its genetic code so that those instructions can actually get relayed to the parts of the

cell that make proteins.

Messenger RNA, or MRNA, which got a nod in last year's Nobel Prize in this category,

thanks to its use in COVID vaccines, is the type of RNA that actually carries these protein coding instructions.

Micro RNA helps control gene expression by binding with messenger RNA

and keeping it from delivering its protein production message.

Let's keep moving right along to the Nobel Prize in physics,

which went to John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton for their work in machine learning.

Inspired by the way the human brain uses neurons linked

by synapses to retain and recall information,

Hopfield designed an artificial neural network in 1982.

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