Transgender people have a higher risk of having a long-term mental health condition than their cisgender counterparts, according to analysis described as being the first of its kind in England.
Researchers from the University of Manchester said the study of 1.5 million people aged 16 and over, including almost 8,000 transgender people, is the first which can be said to be nationally representative.
The research, published in the Lancet Public Health journal, looked at self-reported mental health conditions.
A “mental health tsunami” is affecting kids and teens. And research shows a correlation between the internet, social media and an increase among children for suicidal thoughts and other health-related concerns, experts say.
That’s why Nicklaus Children’s Hospital near South Miami is calling on parents to help protect their kids from the dark side of today’s digital world, including cyberbullying, predators, pornography and other content that can affect a child’s self-esteem, health and safety.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen wants commercial companies to solve Space Force problems, but if the U.S. Space Force can help them, that’s OK with her, too.
That’s part of the message she delivered at the Space Mobility Conference at the Orange County Convention Center on Tuesday, bringing together a combination of military, civil and commercial players in the space game.
“We’re really trying to focus in on what the warfighters need and take it one step farther,” said Panzenhagen.
Back from the brink of extinction, sea otters in central California have started restoring the degraded landscape of a key estuary -- thanks to their insatiable appetite for crabs, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The research depicts the ripple effects of the sea otters' return to Monterey Bay, California, highlighting how successful conservation efforts can improve the health and resilience of whole ecosystems.
Once hunted for their fur to the verge of local extinction, sea otters have made a dramatic recovery in central California after more than four decades of extensive conservation efforts in the region.
The otters have returned to coastal kelp forests and the the salt marsh-dominated coastal estuary, Elkhorn Slough.
And their return has heralded wide-ranging improvements around the estuary, a critical habitat that protects the shoreline.
In a new paper published in Nature, scientists in the United States and Canada found that the marine mammal slowed the erosion of parts of the estuary by up to 90 percent between the time they recolonized the area in the mid 1980s and 2018.
"One of the most remarkable things about this is that it's truly a conservation success story," study author Christine Angelini, director of the Center for Coastal Solutions at the University of Florida, told AFP.
Previous studies on salt marshes have shown the physical and chemical explanations for erosion.
But this study points a pincer at another culprit -- the shore crab.
These abundant crabs eat plant roots, burrow into the salt marsh soils and eventually can cause erosion and even collapse.
Sea otters eat around 25 percent of their body weight every day and researchers said they have an especially large appetite for these crabs.
"After a few decades, in areas the sea otters had recolonized, salt marshes and creekbanks were becoming more stable again, said lead author Brent Hughes, associate professor of biology at Sonoma State University, in a statement.
This was "despite rising sea levels, increased water flow from inland sources, and greater pollution".
'Crab feast'
Researchers combined decades of data, over 35,000 observations of sea otters and three years of experiments manipulating the presence of top predators in a salt marsh ecosystem.
Top predators have declined in nearly every ecosystem on Earth, but conservation efforts over the past decades have helped recover species like wolves, brown bears, and eagles.
And growing research shows that reintroduction can have a wide-ranging impact on restoring ecosystems.
In this case researchers said sea otter conservation has unlocked several decades worth of benefits.
"It would cost tens of millions of dollars for humans to rebuild these creek banks and restore these marshes," said study author Brian Silliman, professor of Marine Conservation Biology at Duke University.
"The sea otters are stabilizing them for free in exchange for an all-you-can-eat crab feast."
A new treatment shows promise against the deadly neurodegenerative disease ALS, a study based on mice showed Tuesday.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease after the famous baseball player, devastates nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.
It affects about 30,000 Americans at any given time, causing progressive loss of motor and cognitive function. Most patients die within five years of their diagnosis.
In the new research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, a team led by Jeffrey Agar of Northeastern University investigated a way to target and stabilize an abundant enzyme that keeps cells safe from the toxic byproducts of consuming food and breathing oxygen.
Inherited mutations to the gene responsible for production of this protein, called SOD1, are involved in many cases of ALS, and at other times such mutations can occur without family history.
A malfunctioning SOD1 gene causes the protein to assemble into the wrong shape. This prevents it from doing its tasks, but can also trigger a build up of protein clumps that are also a hallmark of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other diseases.
Agar told AFP that over the course of 12 years, he and colleagues had discovered and tested a "molecular stabilizer," S-XL6, that acts like a "stitch" and forces the protein to remain in the correct configuration.
A major challenge involved finding a molecular stitch that would only target the SOD1, not "off target" proteins, which would poison the host.
The team tested their molecule in mice that were genetically modified to have a form of ALS disease, and found it not only restored the protein's function, but stopped its secondary toxic effects too. Safety was also proven in rats and dogs.
It successfully stabilized 90 percent of SOD1 proteins in blood cells, and 60-70 percent in brain cells.
They are hoping to soon get permission to move the molecule to clinical trials in humans, and an investor has purchased the rights to a patent.
Eventually, if it proves out, Agar said he hoped it might become a co-treatment for Biogen's Qalsody, a breakthrough regimen that received accelerated approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023, which works by reducing the number of SOD1 gene copies the body produces.
A deep sea exploration company has released a sonar image they say may be the remains of the plane of Amelia Earhart, the famed American aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Deep Sea Vision (DSV), a South Carolina-based firm, said the image was captured after an extensive search in an area of the Pacific to the west of Earhart's planned destination, remote Howland Island.
Earhart went missing while on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan.
Her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore, fascinating historians for decades and spawning books, movies and theories galore.
The prevailing belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra in the Pacific near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.
DSV said the blurry image captured by an unmanned underwater submersible at a depth of 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) using side scan sonar "reveals contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale of her storied aircraft."
"We always felt that she would have made every attempt to land the aircraft gently on the water, and the aircraft signature that we see in the sonar image suggests that may be the case," DSV chief executive Tony Romeo said in a statement.
DSV said the exploration team spent 90 days searching 5,200 square miles (13,500 square kilometers) of the Pacific Ocean floor, "more than all previous searches combined."
DSV said it is keeping the exact location of the find confidential for now and is planning further search efforts.
But Romeo said the discovery was made applying what is known as the "Date Line theory" first advanced in 2010 by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee.
This theory posits that Noonan forgot to turn the calendar back a day as they flew over the International Date Line, resulting in a miscalculation of his celestial star navigation and a westward navigational error of 60 miles (100 kilometers).
Earhart, who won fame in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, took off on May 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world.
She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937 after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a challenging 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii.
Problems of racial and gender bias in artificial intelligence algorithms and the data used to train large language models like ChatGPT have drawn the attention of researchers and generated headlines. But these problems also arise in social robots, which have physical bodies modeled on nonthreatening versions of humans or animals and are designed to interact with people.
The aim of the subfield of social robotics called socially assistive robotics is to interact with ever more diverse groups of people. Its practitioners’ noble intention is “to create machines that will best help people help themselves,” writes one of its pioneers, Maja Matarić. The robots are already being used to help people on the autism spectrum, children with special needs and stroke patients who need physical rehabilitation.
But these robots do not look like people or interact with people in ways that reflect even basic aspects of society’s diversity. As a sociologist who studies human-robot interaction, I believe that this problem is only going to get worse. Rates of diagnoses for autism in children of color are now higher than for white kids in the U.S. Many of these children could end up interacting with white robots.
Given the diversity of people they will be exposed to, why does Kaspar, designed to interact with children with autism, have rubber skin that resembles a white person’s? Why are Nao, Pepper and iCub, robots used in schools and museums, clad with shiny, white plastic? In The Whiteness of AI, technology ethicist Stephen Cave and science communication researcher Kanta Dihal discuss racial bias in AI and robotics and note the preponderance of stock images online of robots with reflective white surfaces.
What is going on here?
One issue is what robots are already out there. Most robots are not developed from scratch but purchased by engineering labs for projects, adapted with custom software, and sometimes integrated with other technologies such as robot hands or skin. Robotics teams are therefore constrained by design choices that the original developers made (Aldebaran for Pepper, Italian Institute of Technology for iCub). These design choices tend to follow the clinical, clean look with shiny white plastic, similar to other technology products like the original iPod.
Kaspar is a robot designed to interact with children with autism.
In anthropologist Lucy Suchman’s classic book on human-machine interaction, which was updated with chapters on robotics, she discusses a “cultural imaginary” of what robots are supposed to look like. A cultural imaginary is what is shared through representations in texts, images and films, and which collectively shapes people’s attitudes and perceptions. For robots, the cultural imaginary is derived from science fiction.
This cultural imaginary can be contrasted with the more practical concerns of how computer science and engineering teams view robot bodies, what Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora call the “engineered imaginary.” This is a hotly contested area in feminist science studies, with, for example, Jennifer Rhee’s “The Robotic Imaginary” and Atanasoski and Vora’s “Surrogate Humanity” critical of the gendered and racial assumptions that lead people to design service robots – designed to carry out mundane tasks – as female.
The cultural imaginary that enshrines robots as white, and in fact usually female, stretches back to European antiquity, along with an explosion of novels and films at the height of industrial modernity. From the first mention of the word “android” in Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel “The Future Eve,” the introduction of the word “robot” in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” and the sexualized robot Maria in the 1925 novel “Metropolis” by Thea von Harbou – the basis of her husband Fritz Lang’s famous 1927 film of the same name – fictional robots were quick to be feminized and made servile.
Perhaps the prototype for this cultural imaginary lies in ancient Rome. A poem in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (8 C.E.) describes a statue of Galatea “of snow-white ivory” that its creator Pygmalion falls in love with. Pygmalion prays to Aphrodite that Galatea come to life, and his wish is granted. There are numerous literary, poetic and film adaptations of the story, including one of the first special effects in cinema in Méliès’ 1898 film. Paintings that depict this moment, for example by Raoux (1717), Regnault (1786), and Burne-Jones (1868-70 and 1878), accentuate the whiteness of Galatea’s flesh.
The painting Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme depicts an ancient Roman tale of a statue brought to life. Peter Roan/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Interdisciplinary route to diversity and inclusion
What can be done to counter this cultural legacy? After all, all human-machine interaction should be designed with diversity and inclusion in mind, according to engineers Tahira Reid and James Gibert. But outside of Japan’s ethnically Japanese-looking robots, robots designed to be nonwhite are rare. And Japan’s robots tend to follow the subservient female gender stereotype.
The solution is not simply to encase machines in brown or black plastic. The problem goes deeper. The Bina48 “custom character robot” modeled on the head and shoulders of a millionaire’s African American wife, Bina Aspen, is notable, but its speech and interactions are limited. A series of conversations between Bina48 and the African American artist Stephanie Dinkins is the basis of a video installation.
The absurdity of talking about racism with a disembodied animated head becomes apparent in one such conversation – it literally has no personal experience to speak of, yet its AI-powered answers refer to an unnamed person’s experience of racism growing up. These are implanted memories, like the “memories” of the replicant androids in the “Blade Runner” movies.
Social science methods can help produce a more inclusive “engineered imaginary,” as I discussed at Edinburgh’s Being Human festival in November 2022. For example, working with Guy Hoffman, a roboticist from Cornell, and Caroline Yan Zheng, then a Ph.D. design student from Royal College of Art, we invited contributions for a publication titled Critical Perspectives on Affective Embodied Interaction.
One of the persistent threads in that collaboration and other work is just how much people’s bodies communicate to others through gesture and expression, as well as vocalization, and how this differs between cultures. In which case, making robots’ appearance reflect the diversity of people who benefit from their presence is one thing, but what about diversifying forms of interaction? Along with making robots less universally white and female, social scientists, interaction designers and engineers can work together to produce more cross-cultural sensitivity in gestures and touch, for example.
Such work promises to make human-robot interaction less scary and uncanny, especially for people who need assistance from the new breeds of socially assistive robots.
Colorful flowers, and the insects and birds that fly among their dazzling displays, are a joy of nature. But how did early relationships between flower colour and animal pollinators emerge?
In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, we have unravelled this mystery by analyzing the visual environments in which the ancestors of today’s bees foraged from flowers.
We measured and analyzed the light reflected from today’s flowers, as well as the rocks, soil, sticks, bark and leaves that form their natural backgrounds.
From this data we built computer simulations that recreate the ancient visual environment when the first flowers emerged.
Insect color vision came before flowers
Today, bees are prolific pollinators of flowering plants, including food crops. Bees use colour vision based on ultraviolet, blue and green sensitive photoreceptors (light-sensing cells) to detect and discriminate the most rewarding flowers. In comparison, most humans perceive colour using blue, green and red sensitive photoreceptors.
When the first flowers evolved during the Mesozoic era, between 252 million and 66 million years ago, the ancestors of bees had to orientate themselves, maintain stable flight, avoid collisions, and find food among natural backgrounds. We suspect their visual systems may have been influenced by evolution to efficiently operate in that environment.
So, while bees weren’t initially around, their ancestors were. Flower colors likely evolved the vivid colours we see today to suit this ancient visual system. At the same time, the first bees emerged as the most efficient pollinators.
What colour were flower backgrounds on the ancient Earth?
Australia is an ideal place to collect data on natural background materials that early insects would have seen, as it is a geologically ancient continent.
We collected background samples from across Australia and measured their reflective properties using a tool called a spectrophotometer.
We used this data to create a database of materials that would have been present in the visual environment of flying insects more than 100 million years ago – when the first flowers appeared.
Flower colour evolved in response to bee colour vision
For our collection of natural backgrounds, insect and bird pollinated flowers, we calculated marker points – rapid changes in the intensity of light reflected from a surface, within a small wavelength band.
These marker points identify the key visual features of colored surfaces, and we can use them for statistical testing of the evolutionary process.
We then wrote computer simulations to generate possible flower backgrounds. By analysing their marker points, we tested the visibility of today’s flowers against the simulated backgrounds.
Interestingly, we showed that the distribution of marker points on petals from plants pollinated by bees clearly indicates these flowers are “salient” – that is, they stand out as stronger signals from natural backgrounds.
This finding matches with previous studies suggesting that in the Northern Hemisphere and Australia, flowering plants evolved colour signals to facilitate colour perception by bees.
The very first flowers were likely a dull greenish-yellow colour and initially pollinated by flies. However, as the first bees – with their tuned vision systems – started pollinating flowers, the flowers likely evolved new colours to match the bees’ visual capabilities.
The process of natural selection seems to have driven flower colors to stand out from their backgrounds in the eyes of pollinators.
Our analysis confirmed that bird-pollinated flowers evolved marker points towards longer wavelengths than bee-pollinated flowers. Our new discovery also showed that these flowers systematically differ from natural backgrounds.
As Earth’s climate changes, it is important to consider what might happen to ecosystems and our food production systems in a world without bees. It is vital that we understand how pollination and plant reproduction may be altered.
Our research shows that bees are a major driver of floral evolution. Unless we protect these insects and their habitat, we will lose fundamental and beautiful aspects of life we all enjoy and need.
Over the last two decades, and in particular over the last five years, there has been a growing scientific interest in conspiracy theories and people who believe in them. Although, some may think belief in such stories is linked to intelligence, research is beginning to show that how people think could be more important.
Scientists agree that having a measure of skepticism about official accounts of events is healthy and important, but conspiracy theorising can lead to dangerous consequences for the individual and for society.
Some conspiracy theories, for example the QAnon conspiracy, can be considered a minority belief, with a 2021 YouGov poll showing that 8% of those polled in the UK endorsed this conspiracy theory. However, some beliefs are more widespread. A 2018 survey of people from around Europe found 60% of British participants endorsed at least one conspiracy theory. So, who are the people who are more susceptible to conspiracy theorizing?
There is a dramatically growing body of research endeavoring to understand this question. First, let’s re-examine those assumptions about who engages with conspiracy theories.
People with high education levels, such as doctors and nurses, have been reported to propagate conspiracy theories. So it’s not just about intelligence – education won’t necessarily make you immune.
One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.
What you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as “I enjoy problems that require hard thinking” were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs. It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.
Similarly, a 2022 study across 45 countries used a cognitive reflection test, which measured engagement in analytical thinking in three questions. It found that participants who engaged in the labour intensive thinking style were less likely to endorse COVID 19 conspiracy theories.
Critical thinking is a valuable skill, particularly within education, and has been shown to buffer susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs. This is probably because this more arduous thinking style allows people time to identify inconsistencies in theories and look to additional resources to verify information.
Thinking style is not the same as intelligence
A 2021 meta-analysis study indicates that an intuitive thinking style is unrelated to intelligence. So, even really smart people could be susceptible to conspiracy beliefs – if they are more inclined to revert to faster, intuitive thinking styles.
Research shows that belief in conspiracy theories is predicted by cognitive biases that come from a reliance on mental shortcuts when processing information. First, conspiracy beliefs seem to be predicted by the flawed belief that big events must have big consequences.
This is known in psychology as proportionality bias. It is difficult to accept that events which have such world-changing consequences (for example, the death of a president or the COVID-19 outbreak) can really be caused by comparably “small” causes (for example, a lone gunman or a virus). This is how thinking styles reliant on gut feelings and intuition can lead people to endorse conspiracy theories.
Another example of intuitive thinking styles influencing conspiracy beliefs is the conjunction fallacy. A conjunction fallacy is the erroneous belief that the likelihood of two independent events occurring together is higher than the probability of the events occurring alone. Have a try at the Linda Problem:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
a) Linda is a bank teller.
b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
The most probable is a) Linda is a bank teller as, statistically, the probably probability of one event occurring is always higher than the combination. However, research shows that higher conjunction fallacy errors are associated with stronger conspiracy beliefs. So people prone to conspiratorial thinking would be more likely to say b.
Exposure to conspiracy beliefs have also consistently been shown to increase people’s susceptibility to them, even if they don’t realise that they have had a change in belief.
It may sound concerning that anyone could be susceptible to conspiracy beliefs. However, these studies are helping researchers find interventions which can increase analytical and critical thinking styles and so buffer against susceptibility to such beliefs. A 2023 review of 25 different studies found these types of interventions were a promising tool to tackle the dangerous consequences of conspiracy beliefs.
The more we understand about the psychology behind conspiracy theories, the better equipped we are to tackle them.
Japan's Moon lander has resumed operations, the space agency said, indicating that power had been restored.
"Last evening we succeeded in establishing communication with SLIM, and resumed operations," JAXA said on X, formerly Twitter.
"We immediately started scientific observations with MBC, and have successfully obtained first light for 10-band observation," it said, referring to the lander's multiband spectroscopic camera.
The agency also posted on X an image shot by the probe of "toy poodle", a rock observed near the lander.
The touchdown earlier this month made Japan only the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India.
But after the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down, JAXA had said that it could not confirm that the lightweight craft's solar batteries were generating power.
SpaceX is set to send up another Starlink launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sunday night while prepping for a unique cargo launch from Cape Canaveral now targeting Tuesday.
A Falcon 9 rocket is set to lift off at 6:15 p.m. Eastern from KSC’s Launch Complex 39-A on a southerly trajectory carrying another 23 satellites for the growing internet constellation.
Backup launch options run through 9:55 p.m. and on Monday beginning at 5:39 p.m.
Iran on Sunday said it simultaneously launched three satellites into orbit, nearly a week after the launch of a research satellite by the Revolutionary Guards drew Western criticism.
"Three Iranian satellites have been successfully launched into orbit for the first time," state TV reported.
The satellites were carried by the two-stage Simorgh (Phoenix) satellite carrier and were launched into a minimum orbit of 450 kilometers (280 miles), it added.
The Mahda satellite, which weighs around 32 kilogrammes and was developed by Iran's Space Agency, is designed to test advanced satellite subsystems, the official IRNA news agency said.
The other two, Kayhan 2 and Hatef, weigh under 10 kilograms each and are aimed to test space-based positioning technology and narrowband communication, IRNA added.
PHILADELPHIA — Ralphie fell in love with lobster at first bite. Steak too.
But the pounds started creeping up. And up. In time, Ralphie’s doctor confirmed what his family already knew: At 30% overweight, the time had come for the South Philly Bullmastiff to go on a serious doggie diet.
In the Keystone State, Ralphie is far from alone. Pennsylvania’s dogs are the most overweight in the country, according to a survey conducted by Veterinarians.org, a veterinarian-informed information group on pet issues. The study found that Pennsylvania dogs carry over 18 excess pounds on average.
Sea otters stabilize coastal ecosystem © Julia Han JANICKI, Anibal MAIZ CACERES / AFP
Sea otters eat around 25 percent of their body weight every day © MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
