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Burnout Might Not Actually Be a Work Problem After All, Study Shows

When we hear the term “burnout”, most of us would think about working long hours, and the stress built up from our jobs and the people involved in them. However, a surprising new study suggests that only a minority of people with burnout actually think their symptoms are due to their work.

The research, which was led by a team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), could challenge the conventional thinking about how people reach burnout, and how we might be able to protect against it.

Less than 30 percent of the people surveyed blamed their job as the primary reason they felt burnt out.

Malware on Google Play, Apple App Store stole your photos—and crypto

A new mobile crypto-stealing malware called SparkKitty was found in apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store, targeting Android and iOS devices.

The malware is a possible evolution of SparkCat, which Kaspersky discovered in January. SparkCat used optical character recognition (OCR) to steal cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases from images saved on infected devices.

When installing crypto wallets, the installation process tells users to write down the wallet’s recovery phrase and store it in a secure, offline location.

Study tightens King plot-based constraints on hypothetical fifth force

While the Standard Model ℠ describes all known fundamental particles and many of the interactions between them, it fails to explain dark matter, dark energy and the apparent asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe. Over the past decades, physicists have thus introduced various frameworks and methods to study physics beyond the SM, one of which is known as the King plot.

The King plot is a graphical technique used to analyze isotope shifts, variations in the energy levels of different isotopes (e.g., atoms of the same element that contain a different number of neutrons). This graphical tool has proved promising for separating effects explained by the SM from signals linked to new physics.

Researchers at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, and ETH Zurich recently collected new measurements that tightened King plot-based constraints on the properties of a hypothetical particle that has not yet been observed, known as a Yukawa-type boson.

Mysterious fast radio burst turns out to be from long-dead NASA satellite

A team of astronomers and astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in Australia has found that a mysterious fast radio burst (FRB) detected last year originated not from a distant source, but from one circling the planet—a long-dead satellite. The team has posted a paper outlining their findings on the arXiv preprint server.

On June 13, 2024, a team working at the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder heard something unexpected—a potential FRB that lasted less than 30 nanoseconds. The pulse, they note, was so strong that it eclipsed all of the other signals coming from the sky.

It was originally assumed that the signal had come from some distant object because that is the case for most FRBs. But subsequent analysis showed that it had come from a nearby source.

New study locates neuron clusters that help the brain repay sleep debt

Sleeping deeply into the afternoon after an all-nighter or a late night out is one way the body repays its sleep debt. The sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a homeostatic process in which the body continuously adjusts its physiological systems to maintain a balanced state of rest and alertness.

A new study identified a specific group of neurons called REVglut2 located in the center of the brain, in the thalamus, that may help us uncover how lost sleep is recovered in animals.

The researchers found that in mice, this circuit, consisting of excitatory neurons, is triggered during and induces drowsy behavior, followed by that can last for hours.

Zoning out could be beneficial—and may actually help us learn faster

Aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring the new mall may seem unproductive, but new research from HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus suggests it could play an important role in how our brains learn.

By simultaneously recording the activity of tens of thousands of neurons, a team of scientists from the Pachitariu and Stringer labs discovered that learning may occur even when there are no specific tasks or goals involved.

Published in Nature, the new research finds that as animals explore their environment, neurons in the visual cortex—the brain area responsible for processing —encode visual features to build an internal model of the world. This information can speed up learning when a more concrete task arises.

A universal sleep pattern could help strengthen and separate memories

Although we know sleep is essential to our physical and mental well-being, it remains an incredibly enigmatic behavior, scientifically speaking. Researchers at the University of Michigan, however, may have developed a new hypothesis to account for one of sleep’s looming mysteries.

Every living thing that sleeps appears to follow the same basic pattern. From wakefulness, organisms transition to a repeating cycle of sleep with low followed by a stage where our brains are harder at work, among other things, generating vivid dreams. Humans’ eyes also dance around behind our eyelids during that high-activity stage, which is why it’s referred to as (REM) sleep.

Although there are a few notable exceptions—including people with narcolepsy and people who haven’t slept in days—this repeating non-REM to REM sleep cycle is remarkably prevalent across the .