Calibrated Severity Scores (CSS), part of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), measure ASD symptom severity based on clinical assessment. This figure illustrates the CSS scores that were predicted for each of the participants, based on machine learning algorithms applied to EEG data. Credit: William Bosl, Ph.D.

Early diagnosis by ‘digital biomarkers’ may allow early intervention, better outcomes. Autism is challenging to diagnose, especially early in life. A new study in the journal Scientific Reports shows that inexpensive EEGs, which measure brain electrical activity, accurately predict or rule out autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in infants, even in some as young as 3 months.

“EEGs are low-cost, non-invasive and relatively easy to incorporate into well-baby checkups,” says C...

A PLATED QUBIT DEVICE. PHOTO: D. PAPAS/NIST

A powerful new plated metal combination that superconducts at easily attained temperatures could pave the road for the next critical steps in the development of cutting-edge supercomputers. CIRES chemist and instrument designer Don David and colleagues Dave Pappas and Xian Wu just published the new recipe: an ultrathin layer of rhenium sandwiched between layers of gold, each measuring 1/1000th the diameter of a human hair that can superconduct at critical temperature over 6 Kelvin.

“The sheer magnitude of the critical temperature was unexpected,” said Don David, director of the CIRES Integrated Instrument Development Facility and coauthor on a paper published this week in Applied Physics Letters...

The birth of stars from dense clouds of gas and dust may be happening in a completely unexpected way in our own galaxy and elsewhere.

New findings reveal surprising distribution of star-forming cores outside of our galaxy. The birth of stars from dense clouds of gas and dust may be happening in a completely unexpected way in our own galaxy and beyond. This is according to an international team, including scientists from Cardiff University, who have found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as we think.

The underlying reasons as to why a star eventually grows to a specific mass has puzzled scientists for some time...

This “Manhattan plot” shows the locations of the 44 major depression loci on the human genome. The vertical axis shows statistical significance. The higher the more significant. Everything shown above the red horizontal line is statistically significant.

A new meta-analysis of more than 135,000 people with major depression and more than 344,000 controls has identified 44 genomic variants, or loci, that have a statistically significant association with depression. Of these 44 loci, 30 are newly discovered while 14 had been identified in previous studies. In addition, the study identified 153 significant genes, and found that major depression shared six loci that are also associated with schizophrenia.

Results from the multinational, genome-wide association study were published April 26 ...