Articles Archives

Thought Leaders

Rethinking psychiatric medication: An interview with Will Hall

Influential mental-health advocate, therapist, and researcher Will Hall talks to us about his latest research on psychiatric drugs, carried out at Maastricht University in the Netherlands with fellow pioneers in the field. Drawing on his own clinical experience as a therapist and personal experience of the mental-health system, Hall’s research indicates that the current pharmaceutical approach to treating mental illnesses […]

Education & Training

Empathic engineering design for accessibility for deaf curling athletes

Deaf curling athletes are particularly disadvantaged as they rely on visual cues for their sweeping commands rather than audible ones. Professor Bob McLeod and Professor Marcia Friesen, from the University of Manitoba in Canada, have developed a team-based engineering design course for computer engineering students, built on the principles of empathic design and design for accessibility. Students form design groups […]

Engineering & Technology

Secret Manhattan Project ciphers finally solved

While working on the creation of the world’s first atomic bomb, mathematician Paul Olum challenged his colleague, the distinguished theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, to solve his two ciphers – Olum 1 and Olum 2. Feynman failed, and the ciphers went unsolved for more than 75 years. Paul Relkin, an American software developer and cryptanalysis enthusiast, has recently published the first […]

Health & Medicine

Bolstering brawn with the brain

Nervous system and muscle adaptations cause strength gains during resistance training. Nervous system adaptations primarily cause the gains during the first few weeks, while muscle adaptations primarily cause gains over the longer term. There remains a gap in the research regarding the effect of chronic resistance training on the nervous system, however, due to challenges involved in collecting data over […]

Physical Sciences

Cameleer: A deductive verification tool for OCaml

From social networking to space exploration, software is the mainstay that keeps our world operating. But how do we know that we can trust software? Dr Mário Pereira from the Nova School of Science and Technology, Lisbon, and his collaborators have developed Cameleer, a formal verification software tool for OCaml-written code that establishes mathematical proof that a system works according […]

Health & Medicine

Detecting dental diseases with AI dental image analysis

Dentists often use panoramic dental radiography, capturing the entire mouth in a single image, to diagnose dental diseases. The manual examination of these complex images is time consuming and laborious. Sangyeon Lee at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), together with Donghyun Kim, Dr Hogul Jeong, and Jaehyeong Park from InVisionLab, has developed a deep-learning model for […]

Health & Medicine

Pulmonary tuberculosis: Biomarker discovery in the quest for new therapies

Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) presents a significant health burden worldwide with treatments remaining suboptimal. In the pursuit of new or adjunctive therapies, Esmeralda Juárez and researchers at the Department of Research in Microbiology at the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases in Mexico City investigate the lungs’ immune-response mechanisms to TB infection. By sampling the breath of TB patients using a non-invasive […]

Health & Medicine

Knee pain: ‘The hidden lesions’ and novel treatments

Knee pain and osteoarthritis (knee OA) impact hugely on quality of life. Drawing from clinical experience and research studies, Professor Shaw-Ruey Lyu and colleagues at the School of Medicine, Tzu-Chi University, Taiwan, describe ‘the hidden lesions’ of knee OA and propose the concept of Knee Health Promotion Option (KHPO) for effective treatment. The team highlight the role of medial abrasion […]

Earth & Environment

Science education, new materialism, natural disaster, and the Anthropocene

Science education must adapt to new ways of thinking about how humans interact with the material world. That is the view of Catherine Milne, professor of science education at New York University in the US. In a new book, Dr Milne and co-authors argue that identification of the current human-centric ‘Anthropocene’ geological epoch, together with the many natural disasters the […]

Physical Sciences

Reality, information, and consciousness: The universe as a cosmic quantum computer

How does the world around us work, and what is real? Such questions are not only central to scientific and philosophical discourse but have been circulating since the dawn of human existence. Peter Verheyen of the Sola Society and Academy at Vienna University, Austria, explores the notion that the conscious reality we experience as human beings is drawn from […]