Using machine learning to predict how people diagnosed with major depressive disorder respond to treatment

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating mental health condition characterized by persistent low mood, loss of interest in everyday activities, appetite changes, sleep disturbances and, in extreme cases, suicidal thoughts. Millions of individuals worldwide have experienced a depressive episode throughout the course of their lives and reached out to psychiatrists seeking treatment.

Biosensing platform simultaneously detects vitamin C and SARS-CoV-2

In the COVID-19 pandemic era, at-home, portable tests were crucial for knowing when to wear a mask or isolate at home. Now, Penn State engineering researchers have developed a portable and wireless device to simultaneously detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and vitamin C, a critical nutrient that helps bolster infection resistance, by integrating commercial transistors with printed laser-induced graphene.

Long-range connections between brain regions are scarce, but essential to speed up information transmission

The human brain is formed by a complex network of neural connections and most of them link neighboring brain regions, which are also the most studied to date. But a recent neuroscientific study by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the University of Oxford, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revealed that connections between distant brain regions, though rarer and less frequent, play a fundamental role in explaining brain dynamics.