A research team led by Dr. TANAKA Toshiko and Dr. HARUNO Masahiko at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), investigated how avatar-mediated communication affects human decision-making. They discovered that participants were more likely to take risks when facial expressions (such as admiration or contempt) were displayed by avatars than when the same expressions were shown on real human faces. This increase in risk-taking was found to result from a more favorable valuation of the "uncertainty" of facial feedback in the avatar condition. Furthermore, fMRI analysis revealed that this valuation of uncertainty depends on activity in the amygdala.

Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22^nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.

The SETI Institute announced it will expand its pilot program funded through a grant from the Amateur Radio and Digital Communication (ARDC) Foundation now called ARISE Lab (arise.seti.org). This initiative brings SETI science to community colleges and provides hands-on training for community college instructors and students in astronomy, digital signal processing, and radio science.

"Hands-on experiences are proven to improve student engagement and retention," said Dr. Vishal Gajjar, project lead and radio astronomer at the SETI Institute. "With ARISE, we’re combining cost-effective tools like GNU Radio with one of the most captivating topics in science — the search for life beyond Earth — to spark curiosity and build skills across STEM disciplines.”

Can agriculture and solar energy work together instead of competing? A study led by Maddalena Curioni, Nikolas Galli, Giampaolo Manzolini and Maria Cristina Rulli, researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Energy at the Politecnico di Milano, sheds new light on the potential of agrivoltaics. Published in the prestigious journal Earth’s Future, the paper analyses how the coexistence of photovoltaic panels and agricultural crops can help solve the global conflict over land use.

A new tissue expansion method developed by researchers at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus and the University of Wisconsin-Madison enables scientists to use mass spectrometry imaging to simultaneously detect hundreds of molecules at the single cell level in their native locations.