Four years ago, two hackers showed that they could derail a Jeep by seizing control of its WiFi. While a serious cyberattack involving many cars has not occurred yet, the possibility of that event happening still exists. This possibility inspired researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and the Massachusetts company Multiscale Systems, Worcester, to do a mathematical study.

The team considered a hacking scenario where multiple cars are brought to a stop, and they estimated how many cars would have to be affected in order to block Manhattan traffic.

The team started by simulating traffic on a single, multilane road, using known models for the way moving cars change speed or switch lanes in response to other vehicles. They then assumed some of the cars suddenly stopped, acting as obstacles. Their simulations for various car densities and fractions of stopped cars showed that traffic comes to a halt about 15% of the time. The researchers were able to predict the probability of these “no-flow” situations using a percolation model because a road is blocked when stopped cars span—or “percolate” across—all lanes.

To tackle Manhattan’s multitude of interconnected streets, the team folded their percolation model into a network theory. They predict that the city’s street network “fragments”—vehicles in one section can’t make it to another—when 13 cars per kilometer per lane are disabled. That’s about 30% of the cars on the road during mid-day traffic in Manhattan—a tall order for a hack, admits coauthor Jesse Silverberg. But it’s not inconceivable considering how many of the city’s cars are made by just a few manufacturers. And, Silverberg says, just because a problem is hard doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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It would be very tricky for an average person to distinguish a real smile from a fake one. Fortunately, we have scientists, who, at this point, could do pretty much everything.

Researchers at the University of Bradford have developed a computer software capable of spotting fake facial expressions.

By analysing the movement of the smile across a person’s face, the software can determine whether or not the expression is genuine. The most significant movements detected by the software were around the eyes, supporting popular theories that a spontaneous, genuine smile is one that can be seen in a person’s eyes.

“A smile is perhaps the most common of facial expressions and is a powerful way of signalling positive emotions,” says Hassan Ugail, Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Bradford, who led the research. “Techniques for analysing human facial expressions have advanced dramatically in recent years, but distinguishing between genuine and posed smiles remains a challenge because humans are not good at picking up the relevant cues.”

The software works by first mapping a person’s face from within a video recording, and identifying the mouth, cheeks and eyes of the subject. It then measures how these facial features move through the progress of the smile and calculates the differences in movement between the video clips showing real and fake smiles.

Researchers tested the software using two datasets, one containing images of people expressing real smiles, and the other one images of people with fake smiles.

Find out what happened next on Neuroscience News.

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We often associate rust with decay. Scientists at Caltech, however, view rust in a different light — as a way of gathering electricity.

Scientists, in their new study, show that thin films of rust, which is nothing more than iron oxide, could be used to generate electricity when they interact with salt water.

Combining metal compounds and salt water is a well-known way of conducting electricity, since chlorine and sodium ions can carry electrical currents. The process can even be replicated in your kitchen.

But the process at hand, developed by Caltech professor of chemistry Tom Miller and Dow Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern Franz Geiger, doesn't feature any chemical reactions. Instead, the team focused on Newton's 3rd Law—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—by converting the kinetic energy of moving salt water into electricity.

This process is more commonly known as the electrokinetic effect and has been seen before in thin films of graphene, tightly bound in a carbon atom's honeycomb lattice. At its best, the electrokinetic effect can generate electricity with around 30 percent efficiency—that's noticeably higher than modern solar panels.

"A similar effect has been seen in some other materials. You can take a drop of saltwater and drag it across graphene and see some electricity generated," Miller says in a press statement.

The problem with graphene is scaling up. It could be expensive to get enough graphene to generate enough current to be useful. Rust, on the other hand, is very easy to acquire.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Know more about the study over at Popular Mechanics.

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Pregnant women and their families might think about moving to a new home in order for the family to have a bigger space since there will be a newcomer in the family in a few months. Aside from bigger space, the family might also be thinking about a more convenient location.

A new study published on July 30, however, suggested that moving during pregnancy could increase the risk of preterm birth.

The study researchers analyzed data from more than 100,000 pregnant women in Washington state. The investigators found that women who moved during the first trimester of their pregnancy were 42% more likely to give birth prematurely (before 37 weeks of pregnancy) and 37% more likely to have a baby with a lower-than-average birth weight, compared with pregnant women who didn't move during the first trimester.

[...]

Still, the study found only an association and doesn't prove that moving causes preterm birth or other harmful birth outcomes. There may be other factors that the study researchers weren't able to take into account, such as the reason for the move, that may affect the risk.

Based on just this one study, it's too soon to make recommendations for women to avoid moving during pregnancy, the authors said.

Previous studies have found that pregnant women who experience stressful events in the first trimester — such as natural disasters, economic crises or job loss — are at increased risk for pregnancy problems such as preterm birth.

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NASA announced recently their plans to reach the moon by 2024. This announcement turned up the pressure to find a new replacement for NASA’s previous moon spacesuit, which still dates back to the 1970s.

“NASA still doesn’t have a suit because the decision was taken suddenly,” Pablo de Leon, engineer and director of a NASA financed spacesuit project at the University of North Dakota, told AFP. “On the one hand, there’s this order to get to the Moon by 2024, and on the other, we haven’t developed new spacesuits since 1977.”

The space agency has a lot of work ahead of it to get American astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface by 2024 — a deadline that is looking increasingly impossible to meet to experts.

There are a lot of factors to consider in designing a spacesuit, and it would surely take time before NASA is able to create a new one.

See more details of this news over at Futurism.

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Climate change is a serious challenge for all of planet Earth. It has thrown off the balance of all of the world, putting countless species on the brink of extinction. Thankfully, some species may have found ways to make their chances of survival better. However, they might not be able to make it.

Some will change their behaviors in response to soaring global temperatures; they might, say, reproduce earlier in the year, when it’s cooler. Others may even evolve to cope—perhaps by shrinking, because smaller frames lose heat more quickly.

For the moment, though, scientists have little idea how these adaptations may be playing out. A new paper in Nature Communications, coauthored by more than 60 researchers, aims to bring a measure of clarity. By sifting through 10,000 previous studies, the researchers found that the climatic chaos we’ve sowed may just be too intense... Some species seem to be adapting, yes, but they aren’t doing so fast enough. That spells, in a word, doom.

More details on Ars Technica.

What are your thoughts on this one?

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Before making joint decisions with another person, such as where to eat or what movie to watch, the person usually has to go to a personal decision: should he follow his personal preference, or should he put his preferences aside to make the other person happy? Will he be selfish or selfless?

When two people both behave selfishly or both behave selflessly, the ultimate choice tends to be farther from what they originally wanted than when one is more selfish and one is more altruistic, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

A team of researchers asked study participants to watch a collection of videos, such as clips of Saturday Night Live, and rate how much they enjoyed each one. The participants also completed surveys to measure how selfish or altruistic they typically were. Two weeks later, the participants returned to the lab. They were divided into pairs and instructed to pick one video to watch together.

Compared to pairs with two relatively selfish or two relatively selfless individuals—judged by high or low scores on the selfishness survey—pairs in which one was more selfless and less selfish tended to choose videos that were closer to what each person genuinely preferred. A similar finding appeared when participants were primed to act more or less selfishly by reading a made-up news story.

“When we got selfish people together or altruistic people together, they kind of blew it,” says Michael Lowe, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Tech. “They ended up picking something that neither of them really wanted to watch.”

So why does this kind of phenomenon happen between two people with similar temperaments? And if one has to be selfish and one has to be altruistic, then when is it okay to be selfish?

Find out the answers on Psychology Today.

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Yes, you’ve read the title correctly — this photo is not colored. It’s in black and white.

This optical illusion is made by digital media artist and software developer Øyvind Kolås as a visual experiment. Kolås calls the technique the “color assimilation grid illusion”.

...the technique… achieves its effect by simply laying a grid of selectively coloured lines over an original black-and-white image.

"An over-saturated coloured grid overlaid on a grayscale image causes the grayscale cells to be perceived as having colour," Kolås explains on his Patreon page.

So what’s happening here that makes our brains see this as a full-color image? Find out on Science Alert.

(Image Credit: Øyvind Kolås)

Gathering socioeconomic data is generally expensive and difficult to do. The most important data usually comes from censuses that reveal the size of the population and other essential details such as geographical distribution and age and gender structure. 

Censuses, however, require detailed planning and analysis, both of which cost a lot of time and money. They also need a relatively stable society. These factors make socioeconomic studies difficult to do in developing countries which suffer from poverty, war, disease, and famine. And that is why economists, sociologists, and policy experts would like to find faster and cheaper methods to gather data. Thanks to mobile phones, one such method emerged.

Mobile phones have spread widely in the developing world, more quickly than other services such as electrification. In Senegal, for example, only 24% of households are electrified, and yet 75% have mobile phones, with people presumably charging them from car engines, from neighbors, or wherever they can.

Mobile-phone data is a veritable treasure trove of detail about society and the human condition. Researchers have used it to better understand mobility patterns, to study human reproductive strategies, and to measure literacy levels. And economists have used it to map wealth in developing countries.

That raises the possibility that mobile-phone data could supplement and in some cases replace census results. But just how much more useful can this data be?

Know more about this topic over at Technology Review.

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North Carolina State University researchers have created a portable technology that lets farmers identify plant diseases in the field. The device is plugged into a smartphone and works by sampling the airborne volatile organic compounds or VOCs that are released by plants through their leaves.

"All plants release VOCs as they 'breathe,' but the type and concentration of those VOCs changes when a plant is diseased," says Qingshan Wei, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and corresponding author of a paper on the work. "Each disease has its own signature profile of VOCs. So, by measuring the type and concentration of VOCs being released by the plant, you can determine whether a plant is diseased and—if it is diseased—which disease it has.

"Our contribution here is the creation of a device that can be plugged into a smartphone and used to make those VOC measurements quickly in the field," says Wei, who is also a faculty member in NC State's Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security cluster.

Current disease identification techniques rely on molecular assays, which take hours to perform and—most importantly—have to be done in a lab. Getting a sample to the lab, where the sample may have to wait to be tested, can delay disease identification by days or weeks.

"Our technology will help farmers identify diseases more quickly, so they can limit the spread of the disease and related crop damage," says Jean Ristaino, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology at NC State, co-author of the paper and director of the cluster. "We are now ready to scale up the technology."

More details on PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: Zheng Li, NC State University)

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, depression affects 16 million people while anxiety disorders affect 40 million people. These numbers, which I believe are already overwhelming, are just from the United States.

A new study led by University at Buffalo revealed that a plant compound found in red wine, called resveratrol, shows anti-stress effects “by blocking the expression of an enzyme related to the control of stress in the brain”.

"Resveratrol may be an effective alternative to drugs for treating patients suffering from depression and anxiety disorders," says Ying Xu, MD, PhD, co-lead author and research associate professor in the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The study, published on July 15 in the journal Neuropharmacology, was also led by Xiaoxing Yin, PhD, professor at Xuzhou Medical University in China.

See more details of the study at EurekAlert.

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Some people don’t like to be called old. In fact, some people even deny that they are old, and they feel bad about when they get treated as old people. But this negative impression about aging not only affects us psychologically, but also physically.

The way these internalized attitudes about aging affect us physically is a focus within a growing field in social psychology known as mind-body studies. In the next few months, the World Health Organization is expected to publish the results of a global investigation of ageism — discrimination toward the aged, akin to racism and sexism — that will address how to fight the prejudice. The report will also outline the myriad ways that ageist attitudes can affect the health and well-being of older people.

Psychologist Becca Levy is a contributor to the forthcoming WHO report and has spent her career linking negative aging attitudes to such measures as walking speed in older people, a greater likelihood of developing the brain changes of Alzheimer’s disease and even a reduction in life span.

But it’s not all grim; Levy, at the Yale School of Public Health, has also shown that something as simple as subliminal exposure to age-positive words can lead to physical improvements in older people of the sort that typically come about only after a program of regular exercise. If Levy and other scientists are correct, putting a more positive spin on our general view of aging might make a profound difference in the health of people over 65, the fastest-growing age group in America today.

Check out the study over at Science News.

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Whether your family loves video games or not, I’m sure you’ll love to turn your whole family into cute 8-bit images. These custom-made family signs were created by Mozug Woodworking.

Each sign is laser-cut from baltic birch plywood, and features your family name prominently in a chunky, pixelated 8-bit font. Above that, you’ll get pixel people representing each of the members of your family. They feature a decorative zig-zag border in contrasting stain, with built in hanging holes at the top.

They’re available in two sizes – about 100 square inches or 200 square inches – the outside dimensions vary depending on the number of letters in your family name and the number of family members. Prices range from $54 to $80, and you can order yours on Etsy. They also make matching coasters and fridge magnets, which can be engraved with the names of family members.

What are your thoughts on this one? Would you buy one for your family?

(Image Credit: Mozug Woodworking/ Technabob)

A parasitic mite called the Varroa destructor has been wreaking havoc on bee colonies worldwide. Many bees die because of this mite. Fortunately, there are chemicals and methods designed to contain parasites like this. However, through time, mites such as Varroa develop resistance over these chemicals, which makes the treatments ineffective sometimes. Worse, the treatment backfires.

One such example of this event is when amateur beekeeper BartJan Fernhout gave a chemical to his bees in order to fight the deadly parasitic mite.

The chemical Fernhout used to fight his mites… stopped his queens from laying eggs. That caused the workers to kill the barren queens and begin to raise new royalty, a ruthless reaction the bees evolved long ago to ensure the future of their hives.

Frustrated by what happened to his queens, Fernhout made up his mind that there had to be a better way to combat the mites.

The next year, he took a buyout from his research job at a veterinary firm to found Arista Bee Research, a nonprofit that has joined a growing global quest to breed honey bees able to resist Varroa mites on their own.

It's been slow, laborious work. Since the mite jumped from Asian honey bees (Apis cerana) to the common domesticated European honey bee (A. mellifera) more than a half-century ago, researchers have discovered some bees can keep the mite in check through behaviors such as fastidious grooming and removing mite-infested larvae. But identifying bees able to mount these responses is tedious. A standard way to evaluate grooming, for example, is to count how many mite legs have been chewed off by vigilant bees. And the complexities of bee reproduction make it cumbersome to combine mite-resistance traits with others valued by apiarists. Although researchers and breeders have created bees that require fewer pesticides, even these colonies can be overrun by mites—and very few lines can yet survive without any treatment. "There is progress, but not very significant," says Benjamin Dainat, a bee researcher and breeder at the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Bern.

New molecular tools promise to accelerate those efforts. A new protein-based test, for example, would allow beekeepers to simply send a laboratory a few dozen antennae, plucked from their bees, to learn whether the insects have mite-detecting powers. Other scientists are sequencing the genomes of huge numbers of bees, hoping to create a relatively cheap and easy way to identify bees that carry genes for the protective behaviors. Such a test "is almost the Holy Grail" of anti-Varroa research, Fernhout says.

Know more about this over at Science Magazine.

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AI has become advanced over the years. AI algorithms can now make texts that can fool people, which can potentially provide a way to mass-produce fake news, bogus reviews, and even fake social accounts. Fortunately, AI can also be used to identify fake text.

Researchers from Harvard University and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have developed a new tool for spotting text that has been generated using AI. Called the Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR), it exploits the fact that AI text generators rely on statistical patterns in text, as opposed to the actual meaning of words and sentences. In other words, the tool can tell if the words you’re reading seem too predictable to have been written by a human hand.

GLTR highlights words that are statistically likely to appear after the preceding word in the text. As shown in the passage above (from Infinite Jest), the most predictable words are green; less predictable are yellow and red; and least predictable are purple. When tested on snippets of text written by OpenAI’s algorithm, it finds a lot of predictability. Genuine news articles and scientific abstracts contain more surprises.

You can try it out for yourself via this link.

Know more about the research over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: Technology Review)