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With the explosive growth of technology, businesses are more vulnerable than ever to malicious cyber attacks. And as cybercriminals become more sophisticated, new methods of attack are popping up left and right.

To add fuel to the fire, the average cost of a data breach increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021. That’s costly enough to put most SMBs into the red. Not to mention the reputational damage it can cause for your brand.

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When people are in a negative mood, they may be quicker to spot inconsistencies in things they read, a new University of Arizona-led study suggests.

The study, published in Frontiers in Communication, builds on existing research on how the brain processes language.

Vicky Lai, a UArizona assistant professor of psychology and , worked with collaborators in the Netherlands to explore how people’s brains react to language when they are in a happy versus a .

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Piasecki Aircraft Corp. (PIAC) and edm aerotec have signed an agreement to develop the world’s first hydrogen-powered helicopter. Based in Pennsylvania, PIAC has a long history of designing experimental aircraft for civil and military applications.

CEO John Piasecki told a recent symposium at the Vertical Flight Society that his company would be performing the world’s first human-carrying flight tests aboard edm aerotec’s CoAX-2D helicopter. The hydrogen-powered CoAX-2D would use an 80-kW HyPoint high-temperature proton-exchange membrane (HTPEM) fuel cell, according to EVTOL.news.

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There’s a new nanomaterial on the block. University of Oregon chemists have found a way to make carbon-based molecules with a unique structural feature: interlocking rings.

Like other nanomaterials, these linked-together molecules have interesting properties that can be “tuned” by changing their size and chemical makeup. That makes them potentially useful for an array of applications, such as specialized sensors and new kinds of electronics.

“It’s a new topology for , and we’re finding new properties that we haven’t been able to see before,” said James May, a graduate student in chemistry professor Ramesh Jasti’s lab and the first author on the paper. May and his colleagues report their findings in a paper published in Nature Chemistry.

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Will the supersonic Dream Chaser soon be competing with Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in the space-tourism race? That’s the plan—eventually.

Sierra Space is developing the Dream Chaser as the world’s “first and only winged commercial spaceplane.” The aircraft is designed to take off atop a rocket, and then return to Earth on its own wings, landing itself much as the original space shuttle designs.

The radical spaceplane will use New Mexico’s Spaceport America as part of a global network for takeoff and landing with “high-value” payloads.

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A quantum harmonic oscillator—a structure that can control the location and energy of quantum particles that could, in the future, be used to develop new technologies including OLEDs and miniature lasers—has been made at room temperature by researchers led by the University of St Andrews.

The research, conducted in collaboration with scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and published in Nature Communications recently, used an to produce polaritons, which show quantum states even at room temperature.

Polaritons are quantum mixtures of light and matter that are made by combining excitations in a with photons, the fundamental particles that form light. To create polaritons, the researchers trapped light in a thin layer of an organic semiconductor (the kind of light-emitting material used in OLED smartphone displays) 100 times thinner than a single human hair, sandwiched between two highly reflective mirrors.

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Excessive fear is a hallmark of anxiety disorders, a major cause of disease burden worldwide. Substantial evidence supports a role of prefrontal cortex-amygdala circuits in the regulation of fear and anxiety, but the molecular mechanisms that regulate their activity remain poorly understood. Here, we show that downregulation of the histone methyltransferase PRDM2 in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex enhances fear expression by modulating fear memory consolidation. We further show that Prdm2 knock-down (KD) in neurons that project from the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex to the basolateral amygdala (dmPFC-BLA) promotes increased fear expression. Prdm2 KD in the dmPFC-BLA circuit also resulted in increased expression of genes involved in synaptogenesis, suggesting that Prdm2 KD modulates consolidation of conditioned fear by modifying synaptic strength at dmPFC-BLA projection targets.

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Anyone who has visited the small island of Venice, full of its romantic canals and pedestrian paths with abrupt dead ends aplenty, knows that distance does not always go hand in hand with navigational ease. Fifteen years ago, NASA performed one of its most complex navigational routes to reach the Solar System’s smallest planet: Mercury. The MESSENGER mission made its first flyby of Mercury 15 years ago today, January 14, 2008, with two more flybys of the planet after, with NASA finally inserting it into orbit on April 4, 2011.

Between its launch on April 3, 2004, at Cape Canaveral and its orbital insertion in 2011, MESSENGER had a total of six flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. However, these weren’t just passive flybys; they were gravitational assists. Sean Solomon, the principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission and former director / current adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, tells Inverse that the challenge isn’t so much getting to Mercury, but getting into orbit.

“By celestial mechanics, if you send a spacecraft in towards the Sun and gain speed from the gravitational well of the Sun without slowing down en route, the speed is about 10 km/s,” Solomon explains. “That’s too fast to do an orbital insertion with a propulsive burn using any conventional propulsion system that you can carry.”

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In the first case of its kind, artificial intelligence (AI) will be present throughout an entire U.S. court proceeding, when it helps to defend against a speeding ticket.

San Francisco-based DoNotPay has developed “the world’s first robot lawyer” – an AI that can be installed on a mobile device. The company’s stated goal is to “level the playing field and make legal information and self-help accessible to everyone.”

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