news 2013

How do we come to recognize expertise in another person and integrate new information with our prior assessments of that person's ability? The brain mechanisms underlying these sorts of evaluations-which are relevant to how we make decisions ranging from whom to hire, whom to marry, and whom to elect to Congress-are the subject of a new study by a team of neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

New study uses network data to show communication patterns and divisions in many major nations. Many residents of Britain, Italy, and Belgium imagine there to be a kind of north-south divide in their countries, marking a barrier between different social groups and regional characteristics. Now a new study by MIT researchers reveals that such divides can be seen in the patterns of communication in those countries and others.

Two EPFL scientists have shown how to achieve a dramatic increase in the capacity of optical fibers.

Team from University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services develop new technique to determine if tumours fed by estrogen. University of Alberta researchers John Mackey (left) and Russ Greiner have developed a computer algorithm that predicts whether breast cancer cells are fuelled by estrogen, a technique that could one day replace traditional testing in a clinical lab.

Think you can figure out a way to unlock one of the biggest secrets of the universe? The recently launched third Gravitational Lensing Accuracy Testing challenge (GREAT3) is giving researchers the opportunity to do just that. GREAT3, which is led by Carnegie Mellon University's Rachel Mandelbaum and UCL's Barnaby Rowe, invites researchers from fields including astrophysics, statistics and machine learning, to test new and existing methods for measuring weak gravitational lensing.

A new app has been developed by researchers at Cardiff University that enables users to measure their understanding of different groups in society. The 'Masquerade' app is based on The Imitation Game (IMGAME); a new research method that can be used to compare societies across space and time. IMGAME is innovative in its combination of collecting quantitative measures as well as qualitative data by asking sociological questions.

Data miners have been hard at work trying to figure out the attributes of Twitter users - such as gender and age - that aren't explicitly revealed on Twitter feeds. That information could be hugely valuable to marketers, enabling them to target messages to their desired audience. Nearly all the research done so far, however, has focused on English users and content.

Scientists from Plymouth University are beginning to develop computer models of tadpole brains as part of a £1.3 million project to understand how the brain makes the decision to initiate motion. A collaborative project, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), will see the Plymouth team working in conjunction with biologists at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews to understand and build computer models of how sensory signals are interpreted by the brain and lead to the initiation of locomotion.

Extraterrestrial neutrinos identified by particle detector made of Antarctic ice with help from UAlberta researchers. The IceCube Laboratory, a particle detector made from one cubic kilometre of ice in Antarctica, has confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial neutrinos. More than 250 scientists from around the globe are involved in the project, including UAlberta's Darren Grant, who leads IceCube efforts in Canada.

19 November 2013 A University of Sydney researcher's proposal has led to a new world record for the largest quantum 'circuit board' ever produced - an essential component for a quantum computer made of laser light. The international collaboration with the University of Tokyo and the Australian National University has seen the largest number of quantum systems brought together in a single component jump from 14 to 10,000.

New work by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, could soon transform the building blocks of modern computing by making nanomagnetic switches a viable replacement for the conventional transistors found in nearly every computer. Semiconductor-based transistors, the on-off switches that direct the flow of electricity and form a computer's nervous system, have been consuming greater chunks of power at increasingly hotter temperatures as processing speeds grow.

AUSTIN, Texas — When faced with a choice, the brain retrieves specific traces of memories, rather than a generalized overview of past experiences, from its mental Rolodex, according to new brain-imaging research from The University of Texas at Austin. Led by Michael Mack, a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of psychology and neuroscience, the study is the first to combine computer simulations with brain-imaging data to compare two different types of decision-making models.

Current chip technology used for purchasing items via credit and debit cards in shops was developed in the mid-1990s. EMVCo, the standard body which manages, maintains and advances EMV Specifications, is in the process of designing the next generation payment technology to meet long-term industry requirements.

New study in the growing 'market design' field of economics explains how a job-market algorithm helps land couples in the same locations. Since World War II, women have entered the American workforce in greater numbers than ever before. For married couples, this presents a wrinkle, since it can be hard for both partners to find a desirable job in the same locale.

New research suggests that companies are leaving themselves open to potentially serious security and legal risks by employees' improper use of corporate mobile devices. Experts from the University of Glasgow looked at a sample of mobile phones returned by the employees from one Fortune 500 company and found that they were able to retrieve large amounts of sensitive corporate and personal information.

Forget the needle, consider the haystack: Uncovering hidden structures in massive data collections Posted October 28, 2013; 09:15 a.m. by John Sullivan, Office of Engineering Advances in computer storage have created collections of data so huge that researchers often have trouble uncovering critical patterns in connections among individual items, making it difficult for them to realize fully the power of computing as a research tool.

With optical fibre networks gradually approaching their theoretical capacity limits, new types of fibres such as multicore fibres have been at the focus of worldwide research to overcome critical capacity barriers, which threaten the evolution of the Internet. The University of Bristol in collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Technology (NICT) have demonstrated successfully for the first time a multicore fibre-based network, which will form the foundation for the future Internet infrastructure.

The award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics specifically honors the work of theorists Peter Higgs and François Englert, who helped predict the existence of the Higgs boson. But the discovery of the particle in 2012 also depended on contributions by thousands of scientists around the world, including many with deep roots in the University of Chicago research community.

Light might be able to play a bigger, more versatile role in the future of quantum computing, according to new research by Yale University scientists. A team of Yale physicists has coaxed an unprecedented number of light particles, or photons, to behave quantum mechanically, or to assume more than one state simultaneously, such as "alive" and "dead." In this case, the light is in the form of trapped microwave photons.

A team of scientists in Innsbruck, Austria, made an important step toward distributed quantum computing with cavities linking remote atom-based registers. They demonstrated precise control of the coupling of each of two trapped ions to the mode of an optical resonator. A key goal in quantum computing is the demonstration of a quantum network, that is, a framework for distribution and remote processing of quantum information.