If there’s one thing that should be learned by everyone with the most recent hacking fiasco of Wired’s Mat Honan, passwords aren’t secure. A team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities, as well as SRI International, have been experimenting with security to use the brain’s innate ability to learn and recognize patterns. The researchers presented their findings at the 2012 USENIX Security Symposium in Bellevue, Washington in August. The main goal of the scientists was to study ways of covertly storing secret data within the brain’s corticostriatal memory system, which is part of the neural architecture that reminds us how to do things....

“One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron,” says David Ehrenreich, a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He led a study, published today (March 11, 2020) in the journal Nature, of this exotic exoplanet. Known as WASP-76b, it is located some 640 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces. This strange phenomenon happens because the ‘iron rain’ planet only ever shows one face, its dayside, to its parent star, its cooler nightside remaining in perpetual darkness....

The discovery of planets continues to expand beyond the domain of professional astronomers. A joint effort of amateur astronomers and scientists has led to the first reported case of a planet orbiting a double-star that, in turn, is orbited by a second distant pair of stars. Aided by volunteer citizen scientists using the Planethunters.org website, a Yale-led international team of astronomers identified and confirmed discovery of the phenomenon, called a circumbinary planet in a four-star system....

Next week, government-sanctioned hunters will begin an effort to cull the badgers while animal rights activists are planning protests, boycotts, and sabotage. In the US, environmentalists and ranchers argue over wolves, which have been reintroduced to many states. In Western Australia, the government has proposed a cull of coastal sharks, angering activists. However, the badger issue has been systematically studied for more than a decade in universities. Badgers do carry TB and can infect cows through indirect and direct contact....

They hope that one day, monitoring perspiration could bypass the need for more invasive procedures like blood draws, and provide real-time updates on health problems such as dehydration or fatigue. In a paper appearing today (Friday, August 16) in Science Advances, the team describes a new sensor design that can be rapidly manufactured using a “roll-to-roll” processing technique that essentially prints the sensors onto a sheet of plastic like words on a newspaper....

The finding is valuable for western water managers and advances our understanding of how freshwater resources, in the form of snow and ice, will respond to warming temperatures in the future. By improving knowledge of what controls the melting of snow, it improves understanding of the controls on how much solar heat Earth reflects back into space and how much it absorbs — an important factor in studies of weather and climate....

According to the National indoor air survey by Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, people believe that the health risks related to indoor air are greater and more serious than they are according to the research data. Finns’ knowledge and risk beliefs related to indoor air were surveyed for the first time. Research on the subject is important, because differing beliefs on the role of indoor air in human health may cause confusion....

Since then, neuroscientists have attempted to understand the physical changes associated with memory formation. But visualizing and mapping synapses is challenging to do. For one, synapses are very small and tightly packed together. They’re roughly 10 billion times smaller than the smallest object a standard clinical MRI can visualize. Furthermore, there are approximately 1 billion synapses in the mouse brains researchers often use to study brain function, and they’re all the same opaque to translucent color as the tissue surrounding them....

The finding could have a big impact on how researchers estimate the structure, climate, and habitability of exoplanets as they try to identify planets that are similar to Earth. The research appears in the March 4 online edition of the journal Nature Astronomy. NASA’s Kepler mission revealed that about 30% of stars similar to our Sun harbor “Super-Earths.” Their sizes are somewhere between that of Earth and Neptune, they have nearly circular and coplanar orbits, and it takes them fewer than 100 days to go around their star....

Photodetectors work by converting information carried by light into an electrical signal and are used in a wide range of technologies, from gaming consoles to fiber optic communication, medical imaging, and motion detectors. Currently, photodetectors are unable to sense more than one color in the one device. This means they have remained bigger and slower than other technologies, like the silicon chip, that they integrate with. The new hyper-efficient broadband photodetector developed by researchers at RMIT University is at least 1,000 times thinner than the smallest commercially available photodetector device....

Yeast is not the simple single-celled microorganism we always believed it was, but a competitive killer. When yeast is starved of glucose, it releases a toxin that can kill any other microorganisms that have entered its habitat, even clones of itself. This previously unknown venomous phenomenon adds to our knowledge of unicellular microorganism behavior and the evolution of unicellular to multicellular organisms. It also has potentially valuable uses in the food industry....

Vienna University of Technology researchers collaborated closely with the Hospital Favoriten, the Medical University of Vienna, the Health Service Centre of the Vienna Private Clinic, the Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna, and the Immunological Day Clinic Vienna to test their hypothesis that aVNS also aids in the healing process in severe COVID-19 cases. aVNS in severe Corona courses The research team was able to demonstrate in its most recent study that the positive effect that Vagus nerve stimulation has on the course of severe Corona diseases, which was predicted in 2020 — at the start of the COVID pandemic — actually exists....

Writing in Nature Communications today (March 10, 2020), researchers from Bangor University, Southampton University and The School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, reveal the speed at which ecosystems of different sizes will disappear, once they have reached a point beyond which they collapse — transforming into an alternative ecosystem. “Unfortunately, what our paper reveals is that humanity needs to prepare for changes far sooner than expected,” says joint lead author Dr....

A Bristol academic has achieved a milestone in statistical/mathematical physics by solving a 100-year-old physics problem – the discrete diffusion equation in finite space. The long-sought-after solution could be used to accurately predict encounter and transmission probability between individuals in a closed environment, without the need for time-consuming computer simulations. In his paper, published in Physical Review X, Dr. Luca Giuggioli from the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol describes how to analytically calculate the probability of occupation (in discrete time and discrete space) of a diffusing particle or entity in a confined space – something that until now was only possible computationally....

The alphabet was developed around 1800 BCE and was used by the Canaanites and later, many other languages throughout the world. Until recently, there had been very few Canaanite inscriptions found in the Land of Israel, with only a few isolated words having been discovered. However, a recent discovery has changed this, as an entire sentence in Canaanite was found engraved on a small ivory comb. This sentence, which dates back to around 1700 BCE, contains a spell against lice....

If you struggle with your weight, it might not just be bad food choices that are to blame. It’s also how you eat your meals. Choose what you put on your plate wisely, but also learn how to eat in a way that maximizes the satiety benefits you get from your diet. Here are five habits that can wreak havoc on your best-made weight loss plans. Grabbing Meals on the Run Eating on the run is a common habit that can lead to weight gain over time....

“We found that the more time a woman spent pregnant or on the contraceptive pill – when the body is exposed to less estrogen – was associated with a lower risk of endometrial cancer,” Dr. Moen said. “While previous studies have shown multiple pregnancies and using the oral contraceptive pill can reduce the risk of endometrial cancer, this is the first study that used genetics to study multiple risk factors at once....

Commentary by Princeton University and Sunnybrook Research Institute highlights eight behavioral challenges to COVID-19. During any crisis, timely, and sometimes life-altering, decisions must be made, requiring an extreme amount of sound judgment under uncertainty. The COVID-19 pandemic is no different. In a commentary piece for The Lancet, researchers from Princeton University and the Sunnybrook Research Institute review eight behavioral pitfalls that challenge these judgments. Among the issues they explore are common human traits: a fear of the unknown, personal embarrassment, and hindsight bias, among others....

In contrast to traditional lithium-ion batteries, which have charged particles called ions moving in a liquid, solid-state batteries have ions that travel through the battery inside a solid material. The new research shows that while solid-state cells have benefits, local variations or tiny flaws in the solid material might short or wear out the battery. “A uniform material is important,” said lead researcher Kelsey Hatzell, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment....

In 1900, Max Planck first mathematically described a pattern of radiation and ushered in the quantum era with the assumption that energy can only exist in discrete values. Just as a fireplace poker glows red hot, increasing heat causes all materials to emit more intense radiation, with the peak of the emitted spectrum shifting to shorter wavelengths as heat rises. In keeping with Planck’s Law, nothing can emit more radiation than a hypothetical object that absorbs energy perfectly, a so-called “blackbody....