In a new Northwestern Medicine study, scientists sought to better understand how humans evolved to become so skilled at thinking about what’s happening in other peoples’ minds. The findings could have implications for one day treating psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression.

The one-year project is assessing how spongy moth defoliation shapes the survival of blacklegged ticks, the main vectors of the pathogens that cause Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis.  “We know from our previous research that if it's very warm and dry, that's really bad for some life stages of ticks,” said Ostfeld. “So if this defoliation by the spongy moths is changing temperature and humidity conditions on the ground, it could influence their survival, and as a consequence, our risk of getting sick from tick-borne disease.” 

Researchers from Princeton and MIT have found a way to intercept underwater messages from the air, overturning long held assumptions about the security of underwater transmissions. The team created a device that uses radar to eavesdrop on underwater acoustic signals by decoding the tiny vibrations those signals create on the water’s surface. The technique could also roughly identify the location of an underwater transmitter. In the paper, the researchers detail the technology and offer ways to guard against the attakcs it enables.