Using fMRI images of people who exhibit features indicating a high risk for psychosis, the Yale team noted increased functional connectivity in the cerebello-thalamo-cortical circuitry, an extensive network involved in the coordination of a host of brain functions, they report September 21 in the journal Nature Communications. Higher degrees of functional connectivity of this network were found in those who later developed psychosis. In a second experiment, they confirmed this hyperconnectivity pattern was present among those who already have a diagnosis of schizophrenia but not in those with other psychiatric disorders....

“We found that facial analysis services performed consistently worse on transgender individuals, and were universally unable to classify non-binary genders,” said lead author Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, a Ph.D. student in the Information Science department. “While there are many different types of people out there, these systems have an extremely limited view of what gender looks like.” The study comes at a time when facial analysis technologies—which use hidden cameras to assess and characterize certain features about an individual—are becoming increasingly prevalent, embedded in everything from smartphone dating apps and digital kiosks at malls to airport security and law enforcement surveillance systems....

The breakthrough comes from Georgia Tech’s Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) research lab and is a significant step toward enabling intelligent agents to devise more advanced tools that could prove useful in hazardous – and potentially life-threatening – environments. The concept may sound familiar. It’s called “MacGyvering,” based off the name of a 1980s — and recently rebooted — television series. In the series, the title character is known for his unconventional problem-solving ability using differing resources available to him....

“The most shocking result was that even though most countries decide to stop burning coal for electricity during the simulation, this has almost zero impact on total future coal use,” says Bi. “We then dug deeper into this perplexing result to identify what policymakers can do to actually achieve the coal exit.” Carbon pricing and coal mining phase-out would be effective policies Investigating the Powering Past Coal Alliance, launched at the world climate summit COP23 in 2017, the scientists sought to understand whether these countries’ efforts to cut coal would make it easier or harder for other countries to follow suit....

Ouzo is a popular liquor enjoyed throughout Greece, often served as an aperitif before a meal. Its “effect” happens because the anise extract used to flavor it is soluble in alcohol but not in water. So, when water is added to ouzo or other anise-flavored liquors, such as absinthe, the extract precipitates into tiny, light-scattering droplets that make the drink take on a murky, opaque appearance. But exactly how these beads of liquid achieve such high stability in ouzo without the addition of any other substances, aside from water, isn’t well understood....

“It was something we had never seen before,” said Simone Dichiara, assistant research professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and member of the Swift team. “We knew it wasn’t associated with a supernova, the death of a massive star because it was too close. It was a completely different kind of optical signal, one that we associate with a kilonova, the explosion triggered by colliding neutron stars.” The Swift team was able to rapidly identify the explosion’s location, in the constellation Boötes, enabling other facilities to quickly respond with follow-up observations....

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, carrying Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, splashed down under parachutes in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida at 2:48 p.m. EDT Sunday and was successfully recovered by SpaceX. After returning to shore, the astronauts immediately will fly back to Houston. “Welcome home, Bob and Doug! Congratulations to the NASA and SpaceX teams for the incredible work to make this test flight possible,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine....

Launched 10 years ago, on October 25, 2006, the twin spacecraft of NASA’s STEREO mission – short for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory – have given us unprecedented views of the sun, including the first-ever simultaneous view of the entire star at once. This kind of comprehensive data is key to understanding how the sun erupts with things like coronal mass ejections and energetic particles, as well as how those events move through space, sometimes impacting Earth and other worlds....

Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability. The researchers’ primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue. The scientists used 3D printing of cells and nanoparticles followed by cell culture to combine a small coil antenna with cartilage, creating what they term a bionic ear....

New research has now shed new light on this story by establishing for the first time that these amines themselves volatilize, frequently more than dicamba itself. The research was conducted by the lab of Kimberly Parker, an assistant professor of energy, environmental, and chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. The study was recently published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The volatilization of amines when combined with dicamba may help explain the mechanisms that cause dicamba drift....

Around 50 newly identified footprints on the Isle of Skye have helped scientists confirm that stegosaurs — with their distinctive diamond-shaped back plates — roamed there around 170 million years ago. The site on the island’s north-east coast — which was at the time a mudflat on the edge of a shallow lagoon on a long-lost island in the Atlantic — contains a mixture of footprints, and reveals that dinosaurs on Skye were more diverse than previously thought....

To produce functional superconductors, these experiments are conducted inside cryostats at a temperature of around 100 millikelvins. However, this is still far from low enough to truly enter the quantum world. In order to observe quantum effects on large-scale objects, they must be cooled to nearly absolute zero through advanced cooling techniques. Physicists led by Gerhard Kirchmair from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) have now demonstrated a nonlinear cooling mechanism with which even massive objects can be cooled well....

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The team chose to observe this target with Webb after carefully reviewing targets of interest from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which hinted at the planet’s existence....

Atomically thin layers are of great technological interest because of potentially useful electronic properties that emerge as the layer thickness approaches the 2D limit. Such materials tend to form weak bonds outside the layer and are thus generally assumed to be unaffected by substrates that provide physical support. To make further progress, however, scientists must rigorously test this assumption, not only to better understand single-layer physics, but also because the existence of substrate effects raises the possibility of tuning layer properties by tweaking the substrate....

ADHD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders, with a worldwide prevalence of roughly 2.5 percent in adults. It often coexists with other physical and mental disorders, some of which have been linked to an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, there hasn’t been as much focus on whether ADHD is independently linked to overall and specific cardiovascular diseases. The present study aimed to uncover the link between ADHD and 20 different cardiovascular diseases when it was separated from other known risk factors such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, smoking, sleep problems, and mental disorders....

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and University of Dundee have screened thousands of drug and chemical molecules and identified a range of potential antivirals that could be developed into new treatments for COVID-19 or in preparation for future coronavirus outbreaks. While COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out, there are still few drug options that can be used to treat patients with the virus, to reduce symptoms and speed up recovery time....

A new study from Yale University shows that eight beneficial gut bacteria common in honeybees and bumblebees have acquired genes that make them resistant to tetracycline, possibly contributing to the health problems of bee colonies. The gut bacteria of honeybees have acquired several genes that confer resistance to tetracycline, a direct result of more than five decades of use of antibiotics by American beekeepers and a potential health hazard for bee colonies, a new study by Yale University researchers show....

Traditionally, new proteins are created by either mimicking existing proteins or manually editing the amino acids that make up the proteins. This process, however, is time-consuming, and it is difficult to predict the impact of changing any one of the amino acid components of a given protein. In this week’s APL Bioengineering, from AIP Publishing, researchers in the United States and Taiwan explore how to create new proteins by using machine learning to translate protein structures into musical scores, presenting an unusual way to translate physics concepts across disparate domains....

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) astronomer Glen Petitpas was a member of a large team of astronomers who used the SCUBA-2 (Submillimeter Common User Bolometer Array) instrument to confirm 188 of the reddest of these sources as indeed being distant, dusty star formation galaxies, typically so far away that their light has been traveling towards us for over eleven billion years, and so bright that they must be making stars at a rate many thousands of times faster than does the Milky Way....

The astronomers used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study a star-forming galaxy that lies directly between a more-distant quasar and Earth. The galaxy’s gravity serves as a giant lens, splitting the quasar’s image into two separate images as seen from Earth. Importantly, the radio waves coming from this quasar, nearly 8 billion light-years away, are preferentially aligned, or polarized. “The polarization of the waves coming from the background quasar, combined with the fact that the waves producing the two lensed images traveled through different parts of the intervening galaxy, allowed us to learn some important facts about the galaxy’s magnetic field,” said Sui Ann Mao, Minerva Research Group Leader for the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany....