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An international study led by the University of Oulu and Oulu University Hospital has identified six genetic regions associated with the inflammation of the eye’s iris, also known as anterior uveitis. The research also uncovered a genetic correlation between anterior uveitis and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). These findings contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms behind anterior uveitis and its connection to common autoimmune diseases.

Each year, approximately 600 Finns are diagnosed with anterior uveitis. This is an intraocular inflammation that can occur at any age but is most common in individuals aged 20–50. Anterior uveitis is known to be associated with several , and certain tissue types may also predispose individuals to it. However, the precise mechanisms underlying the disease remain largely unknown, and the root cause often remains unclear.

The aim of the study was to investigate the genetic background of anterior uveitis, a field in which knowledge has been limited. This extensive international collaboration utilized biobank data from Finland, Estonia, and the United Kingdom, enabling comparisons between more than 12,000 patients with anterior uveitis and nearly 1 million controls.

You can stop a clock from ticking, but it’s a lot harder to figure out how to stop humanity’s relentless march toward self-annihilation.

The keepers of the metaphorical Doomsday Clock have now determined we are closer than ever to catastrophe, and they have moved the second hand forward by one tick.

It now sits 89 seconds away from midnight, aka ‘Doomsday’

“I was able to piece together that this might be something I was experiencing,” said Burk, of Columbus, Ohio. She subsequently underwent her own testing and was diagnosed with ADHD — at age 42.

More adults are being diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Diagnoses have been rising for decades but seem to have accelerated in the past few years.

Artificially engineered biological processes, such as perception systems, remain an elusive target for organic electronics experts due to the reliance of human senses on an adaptive network of sensory neurons, which communicate by firing in response to environmental stimuli.

A new collaboration between Northwestern University and Georgia Tech has unlocked new potential for the field by creating a novel high-performance organic electrochemical neuron (OECN) that responds within the frequency range of human neurons. The team also built a complete perception system by designing other organic materials and integrating their engineered neurons with artificial touch receptors and synapses, which enabled real-time tactile signal sensing and processing.

The research, described in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could move the needle on intelligent robots and other systems currently stymied by sensing systems that are less powerful than those of a human.

Detecting dark matter particles and understanding their underlying physics is a long-standing research goal for many researchers worldwide. Dark matter searches have been aimed at detecting different possible signals that could be associated with the presence of these elusive particles or with their interaction with regular matter.

A promising technology for conducting dark matter searches is the SENSEI (Sub-Electron Noise Skipper-CCD experimental instrument) detector, a highly sensitive imaging sensor located at the SNOLAB research facility in Canada.

The research group analyzing data collected by this detector, dubbed the SENSEI collaboration, have published the results of their first search for sub-GeV dark matter at SNOLAB in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The idea of traveling through interstellar space using spacecraft propelled by ultrathin sails may sound like the stuff of sci-fi novels. But in fact, a program started in 2016 by Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner, known as the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, has been exploring the idea. The concept is to use lasers to propel miniature space probes attached to “lightsails” to reach ultrafast speeds and eventually our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

Caltech is leading the worldwide community working toward achieving this audacious goal.

“The will travel faster than any previous spacecraft, with potential to eventually open interstellar distances to direct spacecraft exploration that are now only accessible by remote observation,” explains Harry Atwater, the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science and the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech.

Detecting dark matter, the elusive type of matter predicted to account for most of the universe’s mass, has so far proved to be very challenging. While physicists have not yet been able to determine what exactly this matter consists of, various large-scale experiments worldwide have been trying to detect different theoretical dark matter particles.

One of these candidates is so-called light dark matter (LDM), particles with low masses below a few giga-electron volts (GeV/c2). Theories suggest that these particles could weakly interact with ordinary matter, yet the weakness of these interactions could make them difficult to detect.

The NEON (Neutrino Elastic Scattering Observation with Nal) collaboration, a group of researchers analyzing data collected by the NEON detector at the Hanbit nuclear reactor in South Korea, have published the results of their first direct search for LDM.