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SHIELD activated: Researchers build defense to protect drones from cyberattacks

Fooled into following a hacker’s rogue commands, a drone is liable to do any number of things. Fly erratically. Speed up. Slow down. Hang suspended in the air. Reverse course. Take a new course. And, most dangerously: Crash.

What the compromised drone cannot do, however, is regain control. Lost to its original assignment—whether it’s delivering a package, inspecting an aging bridge or monitoring the health of crops—the machine is essentially useless.

At FIU, cybersecurity researchers have developed a series of countermeasures to fight back mid-flight against hostile takeovers.

Computer advances and ‘invisibility cloak’ vie for physics Nobel

A math theory powering computer image compression, an “invisibility cloak” or the science behind the James Webb Space Telescope are some achievements that could be honored when the Nobel physics prize is awarded Tuesday.

The award, to be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT) in Stockholm, is the second Nobel of the season, after the Medicine Prize was awarded on Monday to a US-Japanese trio for research into the human immune system.

Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, of the United States, and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi were recognized by the Nobel jury for identifying immunological “security guards”

How hair and skin characteristics affect brain imaging: Making fNIRS research more inclusive

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a promising non-invasive neuroimaging technique that works by detecting changes in blood oxygenation linked to neural activity using near-infrared light. Compared to fMRI and various other methods commonly used to study the brain, fNIRS is easier to apply outside of laboratory settings.

This technique requires study participants to wear a special cap fitted with optodes, which consist of light sources that emit near-infrared light into the scalp and detectors that measure the light that is reflected back. These measurements can be used to estimate blood oxygenation in the brain’s outer layers. Despite its potential for conducting research in everyday settings, the quality of signals collected using fNIRS is known to be influenced by biophysical factors.

A team of researchers at Boston University recently set out to better delineate the extent to which people’s and skin color, age and sex impact the quality of fNIRS signals picked up from their scalp.

Sleep patterns linked to variation in health, cognition, lifestyle and brain organization

Researchers led by Aurore Perrault at Concordia University, Canada and Valeria Kebets at McGill University, Canada, have used a complex data-driven analysis to uncover relationships among multiple aspects of sleep and individual variation in health, cognition, and lifestyle.

Published in PLOS Biology, the study reveals five –biopsychosocial profiles and their associated patterns of functional connectivity among brain regions.

Most studies of sleep focus on a single aspect, such as duration, and examine how it relates to a single outcome, like poor mental health. However, trying to understand and predict outcomes by combining the results of many different single-association studies invariably fails. The new study by Perrault and team takes a different approach. Using a sample of 770 people from the Human Connectome Project dataset, they conducted a multivariate, data-driven analysis.

Depression genetics differ by sex: Study find females carry higher risk than males do

Important genetic differences in how females and males experience depression have been revealed for the first time in findings that could pave the way for more targeted intervention and treatments.

In the study, published in Nature Communications, scientists found that contribute more to risk in than in males. The team discovered about twice as many genetic “flags” for depression in the DNA of females as they did in that of males.

“We already know that females are twice as likely to suffer from depression in their lifetime than males,” said Dr. Brittany Mitchell, Senior Researcher at QIMR Berghofer’s Genetic Epidemiology Lab. “And we also know that depression looks very different from one person to another. Until now, there hasn’t been much consistent research to explain why depression affects females and males differently, including the possible role of genetics.”

Observing quantum weirdness in our world: Nobel physics explained

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists on Tuesday for discovering that a bizarre barrier-defying phenomenon in the quantum realm could be observed on an electrical circuit in our classical world.

The discovery, which involved an effect called , laid the foundations for technology now being used by Google and IBM aiming to build the quantum computers of the future.

Here is what you need to know about the Nobel-winning work by John Clarke of the UK, Frenchman Michel Devoret and American John Martinis.

First device based on ‘optical thermodynamics’ can route light without switches

A team of researchers at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has created a new breakthrough in photonics: the design of the first optical device that follows the emerging framework of optical thermodynamics.

The work, reported in Nature Photonics, introduces a fundamentally new way of routing light in nonlinear systems—meaning systems that do not require switches, external control, or digital addressing. Instead, light naturally finds its way through the device, guided by simple thermodynamic principles.

Two-step excitation unlocks and steers exotic nanolight

An international team of researchers has developed a novel technique to efficiently excite and control highly-confined light-matter waves, known as higher-order hyperbolic phonon polaritons. Their method not only sets new records for the quality and propagation distance of these waves but also uses a sharp boundary to create a form of pseudo-birefringence, sorting and steering the waves by mode into different directions.

This advance, published in Nature Photonics, opens new avenues for developing nanoscale optical devices for high-speed signal processing and ultra-sensitive chemical detection.

In the quest for ultra-compact, light-based circuits, scientists are turning to polaritons—hybrid modes formed from the coupling of light with optically active material excitations such as plasmons or phonons. These remarkable quasiparticles can squeeze light into spaces far smaller than its natural wavelength, overcoming the conventional limits of far-field optics. However, exciting most confined variants—higher-order polaritons—has been a major challenge, as they demand a much larger momentum boost than single-step excitation methods can deliver.

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