Background Twitter offers a platform for rapid diffusion of information and its users' attitudes and behaviors. Insights about information propagation via retweets (the message forwarding function) offer observable explanations of ways in which modern human interactions get organ … | Continue reading
Author summary Snake envenoming affects approximately 2.5 million people and causes more than 100,000 deaths annually. The WHO includes envenoming as a category A Neglected Tropical Disease. Therapy involves intravenous delivery of animal-derived antivenoms, constituted by IgG fr … | Continue reading
Raptors are one of the most important causes of fatalities due to their collisions with aircrafts as well as being the main victims of collisions with constructions. They are difficult to deter because they are not influenced by other airspace users or ground predators. Because v … | Continue reading
Background While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of … | Continue reading
Neuroscience investigations are most often focused on the prediction of future perception or decisions based on prior brain states or stimulus presentations. However, the brain can also process information retroactively, such that later stimuli impact conscious percepts of the st … | Continue reading
Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Faceboo … | Continue reading
Author summary The genetic underpinnings of many phenotypic traits in domestic dogs remain undiscovered. Although two genetic loci are known to underlie blue eye color in dogs, these do not explain all cases of blue eyes. By examining > 3,000 dogs from the Embark Veterinary, Inc. … | Continue reading
Author summary Stem cells are unique cells that can differentiate to produce more stem cells or other types of cells and can divide both symmetrically (to produce daughter cells with the same fate) and asymmetrically (to produce one daughter cell that retains stem cell potential … | Continue reading
Author summary Biomedical research is one of the largest areas of present-day science and embeds the hope and potential to improve the lives of the general public. In order to understand how individual scientists choose individual research questions, we study why certain genes ar … | Continue reading
The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society. This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of … | Continue reading
Machine Learning (ML) methods have been proposed in the academic literature as alternatives to statistical ones for time series forecasting. Yet, scant evidence is available about their relative performance in terms of accuracy and computational requirements. The purpose of this … | Continue reading
In this work, we describe the first modular, and programmable platform capable of transmitting a text message using chemical signalling – a method also known as molecular communication. This form of communication is attractive for applications where conventional wireless systems … | Continue reading
Scientific communication through social media, particularly Twitter has been gaining importance in recent years. As such, it is critical to understand how information is transmitted and dispersed through outlets such as Twitter, particularly in emergency situations where there is … | Continue reading
Objective A growing body of preclinical and clinical literature suggests that brain-gut-microbiota interactions play an important role in human health and disease, including hedonic food intake and obesity. We performed a tripartite network analysis based on graph theory to test … | Continue reading
Researchers long ago rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism, yet many parents don't believe them. Can scientists bridge the gap between evidence and doubt? | Continue reading
One of the keys to understanding scholastic success is to determine the neural processes involved in school performance. The present study is the first to use a whole-brain connectivity approach to explore whether functional connectivity of resting state brain networks is associa … | Continue reading
Lucid dreaming is a remarkable state of consciousness in which one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming while continuing to dream. Based on the strong relationship between physiological activation during rapid eye-movement sleep and lucid dreaming, our pilot research investi … | Continue reading
Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity h … | Continue reading
Garnets from disparate geographical environments and origins such as oxidized soils and river sediments in Thailand host intricate systems of microsized tunnels that significantly decrease the quality and value of the garnets as gems. The origin of such tunneling has previously b … | Continue reading
Despite occupying a central geographic position, investigations of hominin populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Lower Palaeolithic period are rare. The colonization of Eurasia below 55 degrees latitude indicates the success of the genus Homo in the Early and Middle Ple … | Continue reading
Author summary Sleep is essential for optimal brain functioning and health, but the biological substrates through which sleep delivers these beneficial effects remain largely unknown. We used a systems genetics approach in a large, diverse reference population of mice and assembl … | Continue reading
Building on the notion that people respond to media as if they were real, switching off a robot which exhibits lifelike behavior implies an interesting situation. In an experimental lab study with a 2x2 between-subjects-design (N = 85), people were given the choice to switch off … | Continue reading
Fast-moving, competitive fields often inadvertently duplicate research. In a research environment that values being first over being robust, this results in one manuscript “scooping” ongoing research from other groups. Opportunities to demonstrate the solidity of a result through … | Continue reading
Short-wavelength visible light (blue light: 400–500 nm) has lethal effects on various insects, such as fruit flies, mosquitoes, and flour beetles. However, the most toxic wavelengths of blue light might differ across developmental stages. Here, we investigate how the toxicity of … | Continue reading
Using principal component (PC) analysis, we studied the genetic constitution of 3,112 individuals from Europe as portrayed by more than 270,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped with the Illumina Infinium platform. In cohorts where the sample size was >100, one hun … | Continue reading
Author summary Aerial dispersal of spiders, which is known as “ballooning,” enables spiders’ wide range of dissemination—sometimes transoceanic. However, little is known about the ballooning mechanism of spiders, due to the difficulty of observing the ballooning silks and little … | Continue reading
Why do people self-report an aversion to words like “moist”? The present studies represent an initial scientific exploration into the phenomenon of word aversion by investigating its prevalence and cause. Results of five experiments indicate that about 10–20% of the population is … | Continue reading
Over 500 million people interact daily with Facebook. Yet, whether Facebook use influences subjective well-being over time is unknown. We addressed this issue using experience-sampling, the most reliable method for measuring in-vivo behavior and psychological experience. We text- … | Continue reading
Massive amounts of fake news and conspiratorial content have spread over social media before and after the 2016 US Presidential Elections despite intense fact-checking efforts. How do the spread of misinformation and fact-checking compete? What are the structural and dynamic char … | Continue reading
Machine Learning (ML) methods have been proposed in the academic literature as alternatives to statistical ones for time series forecasting. Yet, scant evidence is available about their relative performance in terms of accuracy and computational requirements. The purpose of this … | Continue reading
Author summary Hair loss is a common disorder and can lead to psychological distress. Cyclosporine A, a fungal metabolite commonly used as an immunosuppressant, can potently induce hair growth in humans. However, it cannot be effectively used to restore hair growth because of its … | Continue reading