A device that can separate and recombine pairs of electrons may offer a way to study an unusual form of superconductivity, according to RIKEN physicists. This superconducting state would involve exotic particles, Majorana fermions that could prove useful in developing quantum computers.

In conventional superconductors, electrical current flows with no resistance due to electrons teaming up to make ‘Cooper pairs’. A superconductor touching a normal conductor can sometimes induce superconductivity in that conductor through Cooper pairs from the superconductor penetrating the normal conductor.

Now, Sadashige Matsuo of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collea...

“We’re facing a tremendous epidemic with teen anxiety and depression, and we wanted to find an early marker that predicted the development of anxiety, depression and attentional symptoms,” said the study’s lead author, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli. She’s a professor of psychology and director of the Northeastern University Biomedical Imaging Center, in Boston.

In a small sample of less than 100 children without known mental health concerns, the research team found that connections in certain areas of the brain seen at age 7 could help predict mental health concerns that developed four years later.

“The study could have great clinical implications,” Whitfield-Gabrieli said...

Novel spinal therapy/delivery approach prevented disease onset in neurodegenerative ALS disease model in adult mice and blocked progression in animals already showing disease symptoms.

Writing in Nature Medicine, an international team headed by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe a new way to effectively deliver a gene-silencing vector to adult amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) mice, resulting in long-term suppression of the degenerative motor neuron disorder if treatment vector is delivered prior to disease onset, and blockage of disease progression in adult animals if ...

Have you noticed that Orion the Hunter—one of the most iconic and familiar of the wintertime constellations—is looking a little… different as of late? The culprit is its upper shoulder star Alpha Orionis, aka Betelgeuse, which is looking markedly faint, the faintest it has been for the 21st century.

When will this nearby supernova candidate pop, and what would look like if it did?

The story starts, as all good astronomy and space stories seem to, on Friday night going into a holiday weekend...