The Mosquito Magnet Trial got personal. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Countless factors may (and may not) contribute to a mosquito's thirst for blood over others. And while there's no single answer to this millennia-old question, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands think they identified at least a couple influences that may increase your insect attractiveness: booze and certain nocturnal activities. While the team's study is still in review ahead of its publication, their experiment offers an interesting and possibly life-saving approach to studying mosquito behavior.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable. Most people can relate to booking a trip or making plans expecting a sunny day, only to have it disappointingly rained out. While seven-day weather forecasts are accurate about 80 percent of the time, that figure drops to around 50 percent when extended to 10 days or more. Recent staffing cuts at the National Weather Service have already led to reduced weather balloon data collection, which experts warn could further degrade forecast accuracy.

For centuries, the Rub' al-Khali desert near Saudi Arabia and Dubai -- known as the Empty Quarter -- was dismissed as a lifeless sea of sand. In 2002, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, spotted unusual dune formations and a large black deposit while flying over the desert. That led to the discovery of Saruq Al-Hadid, an archaeological site rich in remnants of copper and iron smelting, which is now believed to be part of a 5,000-year-old civilization buried beneath the sands. Researchers have now found traces of this ancient society approximately 10 feet beneath the desert surface, hidden in plain sight and long overlooked due to the harsh environment and shifting dunes of the Empty Quarter. This discovery brings fresh life to the legend of a mythical city known as'Atlantis of the Sands.'

Researchers have developed a new method for intercepting neural signals from the brain of a person with paralysis and translating them into audible speech--all in near real-time. The result is a brain-computer interface (BCI) system similar to an advanced version of Google Translate, but instead of converting one language to another, it deciphers neural data and transforms it into spoken sentences. Recent advancements in machine learning have enabled researchers to train AI voice synthesizers using recordings of the individual's own voice, making the generated speech more natural and personalized. Patients with paralysis have already used BCI to improve physical motor control function by controlling computer mice and prosthetic limbs. This particular system addresses a more specific subsection of patients who have also lost their capacity to speak.

Anyone who has tried to keep porch plants or a home garden alive through seasonal changes knows it's a task easier said than done. Abrupt temperature changes--like cold snaps--and prolonged periods of drought can stress plants, disrupting their normal biochemistry. If not addressed quickly enough, those stresses can eventually kill the plant. Disappointed growers often only see the tell-tale signs (like shriveling or browning leaves) after it's too late. But a new plant-wearable device developed by researchers at the American Chemical Society could offer an early warning system. The wearable, detailed this week in the journal ACS Sensors, comes in the form of an electromagnetic sensor attached directly to plant leaves.

Researchers from Columbia University have successfully developed an autonomous robot arm capable of learning new motions and adapting to damage simply by watching itself move. The robot observed a video of itself and then used that data to plan its next actions--a practice the researchers refer to as "kinematic self-awareness." This unique learning process is designed to mimic the way humans adjust certain movements by watching themselves in a mirror. Teaching robots to learn this way could reduce the need for extensive training in bespoke 3D simulations. It could also one day make future autonomous robots operating in the real world better equipped to adapt to damage and environmental changes without constant human intervention.

A significant and growing number of published scientific articles is found to involve fraudulent practices, posing a serious threat to the credibility and safety of research in fields such as medicine. We propose Pub-Guard-LLM, the first large language model-based system tailored to fraud detection of biomedical scientific articles. We provide three application modes for deploying Pub-Guard-LLM: vanilla reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-agent debate. Each mode allows for textual explanations of predictions. To assess the performance of our system, we introduce an open-source benchmark, PubMed Retraction, comprising over 11K real-world biomedical articles, including metadata and retraction labels. We show that, across all modes, Pub-Guard-LLM consistently surpasses the performance of various baselines and provides more reliable explanations, namely explanations which are deemed more relevant and coherent than those generated by the baselines when evaluated by multiple assessment methods. By enhancing both detection performance and explainability in scientific fraud detection, Pub-Guard-LLM contributes to safeguarding research integrity with a novel, effective, open-source tool.

Humanity has entered the Fifth Industrial Revolution (IR 5.0): a new and deeper collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence across the economy. While Industry 5.0 is believed to have started in 2020, the rise of AI in recent years has pushed it into overdrive - leading experts to say it is just now'coming.' Researchers predict this new revolution will be a'sensory leap' from today's AI -- which mostly interacts with human beings via text commands -- to so-called'multimodal interaction,' which will be much more human. And some are calling the shift the'Cognitive Age.' Imagine AI-powered robots that see, hear, touch and more, pooling fresh data from across those suites of sensors to synthesize that data with the vast arrays of digital data stored elsewhere online. Brain-computer interfaces, like Elon Musk's Neuralink, will also play a role in IR 5.0.

A mathematician has created an entirely new curse word based on a list of 186 offensive terms - and she said it is'the world's ultimate swear word. Sophie Maclean, a student at Kings College London, found'banger' is the supreme offensive term or'ber' for short. The researcher fed a list of popular'bad words' to a computer model, which then found the supreme word begins with the letter'b,' has four letters and ends in '-er.' Mclean found that when no inputs were given, the model made up words like'ditwat.' Most people have their favorite curse word, but a mathematician used their coding skills to create a new one deemed the world's ultimate swear word Maclean told BBC Science Focus: 'I think neither is as satisfying as a'f*ck' when you've stubbed your toe, or a'sh*t' when you realize you've forgotten your parent's birthday. But both feel like they could be quite good insults for people.'

Dengue fever, malaria, Zika, West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne diseases may have finally met their match in crowded cities across the tropics. An unmanned, subterranean, robotic probe dispatched into the sewers of Kaohsiung City, Taiwan has proven lethally effective at locating the hidden pools of stagnant water where mosquitos breed. The sewer robot searches, so Taiwan's exterminators can destroy it. Researchers with Taiwan's National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center found that their robotic hunter helped dramatically curb the city's mosquito population -- dropping the number of blood-sucking bugs by nearly 70 percent. Researchers with Taiwan's National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center found that their robotic hunter helped dramatically curb the city's mosquito population, dropping the number of blood-sucking bugs by nearly 70 percent, based on their'gravitrap index' Researchers designed an unmanned ground vehicle (top) to scour cracks and crevices deep in the sewers of Kaohsiung.