Artificial Intelligence has learned to master language, generate art, and even beat grandmasters at chess. But can it crack the code of abstract reasoning—those tricky visual puzzles that leave humans scratching their heads? Researchers at USC Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute (ISI) are putting AI’s cognitive abilities to the test, pushing the multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to solve visual problems once reserved for human IQ tests. The result? A glimpse into how far AI has come—and where it still stumbles. USC Viterbi ISI Research ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oct. 9, 2024 – Though in this year’s presidential election healthcare has seemingly taken a back to other issues including the economy and democracy, nearly eight in 10 registered voters still say the issue that has been critical in nearly every presidential campaign in modern history, remains extremely (37%) or very important (42%) to whom they cast their vote, according to a new a West Health-Gallup poll of voters. This sentiment is consistent with what’s been expressed in most previous elections, although slightly more ...

Irvine, Calif., Oct. 9, 2024 — In the chaos of a wildfire, heat, wind, flames and fuel interact to produce embers that are lofted into surrounding areas, starting new spot fires and spreading destruction and property loss in California’s wildland-urban interface. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have conducted first-of-their-kind field experiments to better understand the physics of these firebrands, and their results can help authorities better model the outcomes of disasters that are happening with greater frequency in a warming climate. In a paper published recently in the journal Physics of Fluids, UC Irvine team members describe their ...

More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to come to a standstill, lessons in pandemic response are still being learned. What we know: the global pandemic disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minority groups across the U.S., with Black and Hispanic individuals being three to four times more likely to die from COVID compared to white individuals.  Daniel Harris, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the University of Delaware's College of Health Sciences (CHS), took a deep dive into rarely obtained COVID-19 ...

Baylor University researcher Aaron Wright, Ph.D., has earned a $5.6 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Transformative Research Award for a project that he and collaborators hope could lead to personalized – and revolutionary – treatments for gut microbiome diseases like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis and more. Wright, a nationally recognized microbiome researcher and chemical biologist who serves as The Schofield Endowed Chair in Biomedical Science in Baylor’s Department of Biology, will partner on the project with colleagues from Weill ...

October 9, 2024—(BRONX, NY)—Stem cell researcher Teresa Bowman, Ph.D., has been appointed chair of the department of developmental & molecular biology (DMB) at Albert Einstein College of Medicine after a comprehensive national search. Dr. Bowman will begin her new role on December 1, following the longtime leadership of Richard Stanley, Ph.D. “Dr. Bowman has demonstrated her leadership abilities, commitment to mentorship, and dedication to the College of Medicine since she ...

Changes need to be made to the UK legal system to protect people from exploitative litigation designed to prey on vulnerabilities, a new study warns. Reforms need to be made to protect adults from unfairness during copyright enforcement legal proceedings. This would also help to prevent children being exposed to adult pornography online. The malicious litigation typically involves copyright holders or their agents of online pornographic works obtaining contact details of internet users via a court order to ...

According to highly cited conventional models, cooling and a major drop in sea levels about 34 million years ago should have led to widespread continental erosion and deposited gargantuan amounts of sandy material onto the ocean floor. This was, after all, one of the most drastic climate transitions on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. Yet a new Stanford review of hundreds of studies going back decades contrastingly reports that across the margins of all seven continents, little to no sediment has ever been found dating back to this transition. The discovery of this globally extensive gap in the geologic record was published this week in Earth-Science Reviews. “The ...

Cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (CALD) is a rare progressive, genetic brain disease that primarily presents in young boys, causing loss of neurological function and ultimately leading to early death. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, Boston Children’s Hospital, and collaborators have shown that six years after treatment with the first gene therapy approved for CALD, 94 percent of patients have had no decline in neurological functioning, with over 80 percent remaining free of major disability. Findings, published in two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, describe long-term outcomes ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A new study has found some cancers to be slightly more frequent in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) than in people without MS. The study is published in the October 9, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Types of cancers found to have a small increased risk include bladder, brain and cervical cancers. The study does not prove that MS increases a person’s risk of cancer. It only shows an association. With MS, the body’s immune system attacks myelin, the fatty, white substance that insulates and protects the nerves. MS is chronic and can be unpredictable and disabling. “People ...

Using mechanisms inspired by nature to create new technological innovations is a signature of one Virginia Tech research team. The group led by Associate Professor Michael Bartlett has created an octopus-inspired adhesive, inspired by the shape of octopus suckers, that can quickly grab and controllably release challenging underwater objects. Having the ability to grab and release these underwater objects like heavy rocks, small shells, and soft beads, and other debris could be a powerful tool for underwater salvage and even rescue operations. Their findings have been published in Advanced Science. This work was performed with undergraduate researchers Austin Via, Aldo Heredia, ...

Newly discovered ancient birds from Late Cretaceous North America were hawk-sized and had powerful raptor-like feet, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alexander Clark of the University of Chicago, U.S. and colleagues. The most diverse birds during the Cretaceous Period were a now-extinct group called enantiornithines, known from all over the world during this time. However, enantiornithines and other Mesozoic birds are mainly known from Lower Cretaceous deposits, with a relatively poor record ...

Bat species richness in San Diego, C.A. decreases as artificial lights, urbanization, and unconserved land increase, with Townsend's big-eared bat especially affected ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310812 Article Title: Quantification of threats to bats at localized spatial scales for conservation and management Author Countries: U.S.A. Funding: The United States Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center and Ecosystems Mission Area provided funding and support, and the National ...

Satellite data on the proximity of hundreds of M-84 bomb craters to hospitals in the Gaza Strip suggests that, as of November 2023, hospitals were not being given special protection from indiscriminate bombing, as mandated by international humanitarian law. That is one finding out of a new study published this week in PLOS Global Public Health by Dennis Kunichoff of Harvard University, and colleagues. On October 7, 2023, Israel launched a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas militant attacks in Israel. Among the munitions being used are United-States-provided Mark-84 (M-84) bombs, which are air-dropped explosive munitions that shoot more than 1000 pounds ...

The Hell Creek Formation in what’s now the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming was once home to some of the world’s most beloved dinosaurs, like Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex (including SUE, one of the largest, most complete, and best-preserved T. rex specimens ever found). But these giant dinosaurs weren’t alone in their ecosystem, and in a paper in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists have described two new species of birds that lived alongside these dinosaurs 68 million years ago. The researchers ...

Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world, with male-coded words appearing twice as often as female-coded words on average, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lee Crawfurd from the Center for Global Development, United Kingdom, and colleagues. School textbooks play an important role in shaping norms and attitudes in students—one reason why controversy ...

Interview with Lee Crawfurd   ###   What first drew you to study gender bias in school textbooks, and why did you choose to investigate this topic? I was raised by a gay feminist single mother who was a school teacher and loves to challenge gender stereotypes, so this is something I've always been interested in. This personal background, combined with recent advancements in computerized text analysis and the new availability of digital textbooks, led me to this line of research.   What are the key findings from your research? It's not really news that there is some ...

Researchers from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford have shown that weathering of rocks in the Canadian Arctic will accelerate with rising temperatures, triggering a positive feedback loop that will release more and more CO2 to the atmosphere. The findings have been published today in the journal Science Advances. For sensitive regions like the Arctic, where surface air temperatures are warming nearly four times faster than the global average, it is particularly crucial to understand the potential contribution of atmospheric CO2 from weathering. ...

A growing portion of Americans who are struggling to pay for their household energy live in the South and Southwest, reflecting a climate-driven shift away from heating needs and toward air conditioning use, an MIT study finds.  The newly published research also reveals that a major U.S. federal program that provides energy subsidies to households, by assigning block grants to states, does not yet fully match these recent trends. The work evaluates the “energy burden” on households, which reflects the percentage of income needed to pay for energy necessities, from 2015 to 2020. Households with an energy burden greater ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – If you smugly believe you’re right in a disagreement with a friend or colleague, a new study suggests why you may actually be wrong.   Researchers found that people naturally assume they have all the information they need to make a decision or support their position, even when they do not.   The researchers called it the “illusion of information adequacy.”   “We found that, in general, people don’t stop to think whether there might be more information that would help them make a more informed decision,” said study co-author ...

A new study from Karolinska Institutet, published in Science Translational Medicine, shows that people with type 2 diabetes have lower levels of the protein that breaks down and converts creatine in the muscles. This leads to impaired function of the mitochondria, the 'powerhouses' of the cell. Creatine is a natural compound in the body that is also found in foods such as meat and fish. It is also a popular supplement for improving exercise performance as it can make muscles work harder and longer before they become fatigued. Despite creatine's ...

A new study published in the journal Science Advances [1] by researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea shows that the patchwork of different ecosystems found in mountainous regions played a key role in the evolution of humans. A notable feature of the archeological sites of early humans, members of the genus Homo known as hominins, is that they are often found in and near mountain regions. Using an extensive dataset of hominin fossils and artifacts, along with high-resolution landscape data and a 3-million-year-long simulation of Earth’s climate, the team of scientists from ICCP have provided a clearer picture of how ...

Researchers at the University of Liverpool and collaborators have discovered new understanding of bacterial photosynthesis. Using cutting-edge techniques, investigators have unveiled intricate detailed images of the key photosynthetic protein complexes of purple bacteria. These images shed new light on how these microorganisms harness solar energy. The study, published today, not only advances scientists’ understanding of bacterial photosynthesis but also has potential applications in the development of artificial photosynthetic systems for clean energy production. Like plants, many ...

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) announces the appointment of retired Lt. Gen. Robert Miller, MD, MBA, MSS, FAAP, FACHE, FACPE, as the new Executive Director of the Military Health Institute at UT Health San Antonio. Miller will assume his role, effective October 15. Miller joins UT Health San Antonio with more than 30 years of service in the United States Air Force, where he held several top leadership roles. Throughout his distinguished career, Miller served as command surgeon, director of education ...

Philadelphia, October 9, 2024 – The Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior (JNEB) is pleased to announce the 2024 Best Article, Best Research Brief, and GEM (Great Educational Material) awards. These awards were presented at the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior's (SNEB) 2024 International Conference, held July 29 – August 1 in Knoxville, TN, and hosted online. These awards recognize the authors of the outstanding articles in each category published in the prior year in JNEB, as judged by members of the ...