The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. “There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” said the observation team’s principal investigator Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University ...

Irvine, Calif., Nov. 20, 2023 — A first-of-its-kind study led by the University of California, Irvine has revealed a new culprit in the formation of brain hemorrhages that does not involve injury to the blood vessels, as previously believed. Researchers discovered that interactions between aged red blood cells and brain capillaries can lead to cerebral microbleeds, offering deeper insights into how they occur and identifying potential new therapeutic targets for treatment and prevention.   The ...

In a new study, artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT outperformed an expert rhinoplasty surgeon in answering preoperative and postoperative patient questions related to nasal surgery. ChatGPT earned significantly higher ratings in accuracy, completeness, and overall quality, according to the study published in Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine. Click here to read the article now. Kay Durairaj, MD, and Omer Baker, from Pasadena, California , Dario Bertossi, MD, from University of Verona, Steven Dayan, MD, from University of Illinois, Chicago, Kian Karimi, MD, from Los Angeles California, Roy Kim, MD, from San Francisco, California, Sam ...

When researchers asked hundreds of people to watch other people shake boxes, it took just seconds for almost all of them to figure out what the shaking was for. The deceptively simple work by Johns Hopkins University perception researchers is the first to demonstrate that people can tell what others are trying to learn just by watching their actions. Published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study reveals a key yet neglected aspect of human cognition, and one with implications for artificial intelligence. “Just by looking ...

Long considered myth, freakishly large rogue waves are very real and can split apart ships and even damage oil rigs. Using 700 years’ worth of wave data from more than a billion waves, scientists at the University of Copenhagen and University of Victoria have used artificial intelligence to find a formula for how to predict the occurrence of these maritime monsters. The new knowledge can make shipping safer. EMBARGOED CONTENT UNTIL MONDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2023 3 PM US EASTERN TIME Stories about monster waves, called rogue waves, have been the lore of sailors for centuries. But when a 26-metre-high rogue wave slammed into the Norwegian oil ...

Machine learning algorithms designed to diagnose a common infection that affects women showed a diagnostic bias among ethnic groups, University of Florida researchers found.  While artificial intelligence tools offer great potential for improving health care delivery, practitioners and scientists warn of their risk for perpetuating racial inequities. Published Friday in the Nature journal Digital Medicine, this is the first paper to evaluate fairness among these tools in connection to a women’s health issue. “Machine learning can be a great tool in medical diagnostics, but we found it can show bias toward different ethnic groups,” said Ruogu Fang, an associate ...

In recent years, many police departments have mandated or encouraged anti-bias training. This has occurred in response to government-imposed measures such as consent decrees or as a proactive attempt to enhance public perceptions of police following actions that have raised concerns about racially motivated and other discriminatory practices. In a new study, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of an anti-bias training intervention in one Californian jurisdiction. The study found that officers who received the training had improved performance scores (measured by Body Worn Camera footage), decreased disparity in how they treated different groups of people, ...

The widespread use of digital technologies and the Internet has spurred a new type of personal intrusion, known as cyberstalking. Incidences of cyberstalking have risen, with the U.S. Department of Justice estimating that more than 1.3 million people experience this type of victimization annually. A new study explored research to identify the factors associated with perpetration and victimization in cyberstalking. The study’s findings can inform the development of efforts to prevent and address cyberstalking. Conducted by a researcher at Sam Houston State ...

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022 in the South Pacific, it produced a shock wave felt around the world and triggered tsunamis in Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru and the United States. It also changed the chemistry and dynamics of the stratosphere in the year following the eruption, leading to unprecedented losses in the ozone layer of up to 7% over large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National ...

Pasadena, CA—Galaxies that formed just 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang are unusually hot and glow with light from surprising elements, like nickel, according to new work led by Carnegie’s Gwen Rudie and Northwestern University’s Allison Strom. Studying “teenage galaxies” from the ancient universe can teach scientists about how these massive systems of stars mature and evolve. Their findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, are part of the CECILIA (Chemical Evolution Constrained using Ionized Lines in Interstellar Aurorae) ...

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the United States, healthcare workers faced new demands, childcare and grocery store workers became essential workers, businesses shut down, and churches and school doors closed. The pandemic also arrived amidst protests over police violence. Deep partisan divisions and record natural disasters amplified these challenges. The national government offered new funding for businesses and individuals and public health guidance, and local governments issued guidelines for gathering in public.  Litigating the Pandemic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), a new book by Susan Sterett, professor ...

Treating cancer is becoming increasingly complex, but also offers more and more possibilities. After all, the better a tumor’s biology and genetic features are understood, the more treatment approaches there are. To be able to offer patients personalized therapies tailored to their disease, laborious and time-consuming analysis and interpretation of various data is required. Researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now studied whether generative artificial intelligence ...

New Haven, Conn. — A Yale-led analysis of the genomes of more than 1 million people has shed light on the underlying biology of cannabis use disorder and its links to psychiatric disorders, abuse of other substances such as tobacco, and possibly even an elevated risk of developing lung cancer. For the study, researchers examined a genome-wide set of genetic variants in individuals from multiple ancestry groups enrolled in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Million Veteran Program, one of the world’s largest genetic databases, and ...

Young people may be more susceptible to the effects of the risk factors for developing atherosclerosis. According to a study carried out at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC), younger people are especially vulnerable to the damaging effects of elevated blood cholesterol and hypertension, two of the major modifiable cardiovascular risk factors. These findings, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, underline the need to implement aggressive control of cardiovascular risk factors at younger ages, requiring a change in primary prevention strategies to include “surveillance of subclinical atherosclerosis ...

Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have showcased its potential in a wide range of creative activities such as to produce works of art, compose symphonies, and even draft legal texts, slide presentations or the like. These developments have raised concerns that AI will outperform humans in creativity tasks and make knowledge workers redundant. These comments are most recently underlined by a Fortune article entitled ‘Elon Musk says AI will create a future where ‘no job is needed’: ‘The AI will be able to do everything’. In ...

Ambegaonkar Studying Physical & Mental Workload & Recovery In Collegiate Dancers  Jatin Ambegaonkar, Professor, School of Kinesiology, received funding for the project: "Physical and mental workload and recovery in collegiate dancers."  He and his collaborators, Kelley Wiese (PhD Student, CEHD – Kinesiology concentration) and Dr. Jena Hansen-Honeycutt (School of Dance, CVPA) aim to comprehensively assess the workload in collegiate dancers over the academic year.   Specifically, they are examining objective physical activity demands ...

A team led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine has used an AI-based approach to uncover underlying patterns among the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, termed social determinants of health (SDoH), and then linked each pattern to children’s health outcomes. Compared with traditional approaches, the strategy, in principle, provides a more objective and comprehensive picture of potential social factors that affect child health, which in turn, can enable better targeted interventions. As reported Oct. 16 in JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers analyzed data on more than 10,500 American children, in communities across 17 U.S. ...

Dere To Make Updates To CHIANTI Atomic Database & Software Kenneth Dere, Research Professor, Physics and Astronomy, received funding from NASA for: "Updates to the CHIANTI atomic database and software." CHIANTI is a database that contains a large quantity of atomic data for the analysis of astrophysical spectra.  Dere will also conduct maintenance on and make improvements to the ChiantiPy software package.  ChiantiPy is the Python interface to the CHIANTI atomic database for astrophysical ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—Can AI be trusted? The question pops up wherever AI is used or discussed—which, these days, is everywhere.   It’s a question that even some AI systems ask themselves.   Many machine-learning systems create what experts call a “confidence score,” a value that reflects how confident the system is in its decisions. A low score tells the human user that there is some uncertainty about the recommendation; a high score indicates to the human user that the system, at least, is quite sure of its decisions. Savvy humans know to check the confidence score when ...

Researchers at the University of Warsaw's Faculty of Physics have superposed two light beams twisted in the clockwise direction to create anti-clockwise twists in the dark regions of the resultant superposition. The results of the research have been published in the prestigious journal “Optica”. This discovery has implications for the study of light-matter interactions and represents a step towards the observation of a peculiar phenomenon known as a quantum backflow. “Imagine that you are throwing a tennis ball. The ball starts moving forward with positive momentum. If the ball doesn’t hit an obstacle, you are unlikely to expect it to suddenly ...

A team at the Medical University of South Carolina and Cincinnati Children’s has developed a sophisticated model for studying the diseased colon that could lead to the development of personalized treatments for colon-related diseases, such as cancer and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The researchers report their findings in the Nov. 2 issue of Cell Stem Cell. MUSC Hollings Cancer Center researcher Jorge Munera, Ph.D., collaborated with James Wells, Ph.D., and Daniel Kechele, Ph.D., both of Cincinnati Children’s, to grow miniature human colons complete with an immune system in the lab. This model improves upon existing organoids, or mini ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20, 2023 — There’s a century-old technology that’s taking the grid-scale battery market by storm. Based on water, virtually fireproof, easy to recycle and cheap at scale, vanadium flow batteries could be the wave of the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPtaDqLsbnM Reactions is a video series produced by the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. Subscribe to Reactions at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions and follow us on Twitter @ACSReactions. The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise ...

Mammals usually mate via penetrative sex, but researchers report November 20 in the journal Current Biology that a species of bat, the serotine bat, (Eptesicus serotinus) mates without penetration. This is the first time non-penetrative sex has been documented in a mammal. The bats’ penises are around seven times longer than their partners’ vaginas and have a “heart-shaped” head that is seven times wider than the vaginal opening. Both the penises’ size and shape would make penetration post-erection impossible, and the researchers show that, rather than functioning as a penetrative ...

Cambridge scientists have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system – in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints – allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order to solve tasks. As neural systems such as the brain organise themselves and make connections, they have to balance competing demands. For example, energy and resources are needed to grow and sustain the network in physical ...

Wild caviar, a pricey delicacy made from sturgeon eggs, has been illegal for decades since poaching brought the fish to the brink of extinction. Today, legal, internationally tradeable caviar can only come from farmed sturgeon, and there are strict regulations in place to help protect the species. However, by conducting genetic and isotope analyses on caviar samples from Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine—nations bordering the remaining wild sturgeon populations—a team of sturgeon experts found evidence that these regulations are actively being broken. Their results, ...