It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Brain imaging shows music evokes emotion, imaginings, and high-level meaning comparable to spoken narratives
Study maps brain areas activated by music and speech that affirms imaginings converge across listeners
image: Distinct activation patterns emerge in higher order areas for imagined stories whether prompted by music or by speech or by telling a story out loud.view more
Credit: Courtesy of the researcher.
In a new paper appearing Aug. 18 in Nature Communications,Princeton University researchers show how music produces distinct patterns in the regions of the brain associated with imagination and meaning, similar to those prompted by spoken narratives.
The new study, “Music Evokes Shared Neural Representations of Imagined Narratives Across Sensory Modalities,” used fMRI to scan people’s brains while they listened to 10 of the same unfamiliar pieces of instrumental music and 10 of the same spoken stories across two different sessions. After each excerpt of music or speech, they described what they had imagined while listening.
The fMRI scans showed that imaginative and meaning-making networks were similarly activated whether prompted by music or speech, and that varied listeners reported shared associations to the same unfamiliar musical excerpts. Researchers found that an average of 71 percent of participants matched the “consensus” story for each musical excerpt.
Additionally, fMRI scans showed that matched excerpts of speech and music, which triggered the same imagined story, also evoked similar patterns in the same regions of the brain. This included not only auditory regions, which process the sounds of speech and music, but also the brain’s higher-level default mode network, which interconnects regions for imagination, memory and meaning.
“What we’re seeing here is this whole other dimension of meaning making in music,” said principal investigator Elizabeth Margulis, a Princeton music professor and director of the University’s Music Cognition Lab, and author of “Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams” (Liveright, 2026). “People sometimes characterize music as an abstract stimulus, but what we’re seeing is that listeners are engaging in a very concrete meaning-making process.”
The research could open a window into what happens in the brain during spontaneous thought as the mind wanders, Margulis said. The research may in the future also suggest clinical applications in treating cases of depression or anxiety in which patients become fixated on a particular thought pattern.
Uri Hasson, a Princeton professor of psychology and neuroscience and a co-author of the new Nature Communications paper, has previously found that the brains of people watching the same movie or listening to the same story also responded similarly.
In addition to Margulis and Hasson, co-authors of the study were Itamar Jalon, Jamal Williams and Grace Simmons of the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Karen Electra Christianson and Cara Turnbull of the Department of Music.
The research was funded by the Office of the Dean for Research’s Innovation Fund, which encourages partnerships between Princeton faculty in the arts and the sciences.
Scientists have described five new species of parasitoid wasp from Cyprus, more than doubling the number of chalcid wasps known to be found nowhere else on the island. The wasps, all belonging to the family Pteromalidae, are small insects that play an important role as natural pest controllers, yet remain poorly studied across much of Southeastern Europe and the Middle East.
“Before the start of this study, our knowledge regarding the chalcid wasp fauna of the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area (SBA) and the rest of the island of Cyprus was extremely limited,” said Koutsoukos.
Chalcid wasps comprise a hyperdiverse group of insects that serve as biological controllers both in natural and manmade ecosystems, and as such it is crucial to enrich our knowledge, towards understanding their true extend of biodiversity, ecology, and their role in the various trophic webs they participate across different ecosystems.
“Each of the five new species was named with a story behind it. Two of the species [Ablaxia makrisi and Erythromalus makrisi] were named after Mr. Christodoulos Makris, prominent Cypriot entomologist, for his contributions on the Cypriot biodiversity, and for collecting the holotypes of these two species,” Koutsoukos explained.
Hemitrichus akrotiriensis takes its name from the Akrotiri peninsula, described by Koutsoukos as “a protected area and one the greatest biodiversity hotspots in Cyprus, where the holotype was also collected from.” Another species, Ablaxia toxeftrae, was named after Toxeftra beach in the Akamas peninsula, where its holotype was found.
The final species carries perhaps the most evocative name of all.
Janssoniella aphrodite was named after the Greek Ancient Goddess Aphroditi, since the holotype of this species was collected in Yeroskipou area of Paphos, where the Goddess was worshipped during ancient times.
- said Koutsoukos
Before this study, only three chalcid wasp species were known to be unique to Cyprus. “Our collecting efforts yielded many more interesting specimens, which might represent new species as well,” said Koutsoukos, “and as such it is evident that these numbers are an underestimation of the true biodiversity of the island.”
“The outcomes of this project will contribute towards the enrichment of our knowledge of the biodiversity, not only of the island of Cyprus and the U.K. SBAs, but the whole region's as well,” Koutsoukos said.
Original study:
Koutsoukos E, Mitroiu M-D (2026) Enriching inventories of rare genera: five new species of Pteromalidae (Hymenoptera, Chalcidoidea) from Cyprus. ZooKeys 1286: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1286.196157
AUGUST 18, 2026 (Herndon, VA) – People rarely think about culverts until they are gone. These plain pipes and boxes carry roads over streams and span less than 20 feet -- the federal cutoff for what counts as a bridge. That means road-stream crossings stay out of the National Bridge Inventory and therefore, off the inspection schedule. Yet, when Tropical Storm Irene tore through New England in 2011, it destroyed more than 960 of them in Vermont's Green Mountains alone and left 13 communities entirely cut off for days.
A forthcoming study in the journal Risk Analysis is the first to ask what happens to a whole community when many of them fail at once. Using public data, a team made of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an engineering firm modeled the impact of culvert failures in the Deerfield watershed, which is home to 783 road-stream crossings.
Key findings:
Culverts fall through a regulatory crack. Anything spanning more than 20 feet counts as a bridge and gets regular federal inspection and a public rating. Culverts under that threshold get neither, and they are most common exactly where they matter most: rural roads that are narrow, lightly traveled and short on alternate routes. Several states have improvised their own rating systems, for example Utah uses a 5-point scale, and Massachusetts uses a 9-point scale.
Nearly a third of the culverts studied are single points of failure. Of the Deerfield watershed network of 783 culverts, 242 turned out to be articulation points, meaning one failure cuts off at least one neighborhood from the hospital. No cluster of failures required; just the one. In Vermont, a single collapsed culvert added as much as 70 miles to some residents' drives.
Disconnection leaves people stranded. Across the simulations, many scenarios left more than 30% of the population without a route to the hospital. In a western Massachusetts watershed of 42,498 people served by a single hospital, roughly a third of residents can lose their route to the emergency room.
Which culverts you call critical depends on how you ask. A method based on network efficiency clustered its picks along a single busy corridor and missed most single points of failure, because severing a sparsely populated area barely moves an efficiency score. However, weighting disconnection and travel time equally spread its picks across the map and caught far more of them. For agencies deciding what to fix first, the choice of metric is what makes the decision.
Counting broken culverts tells you almost nothing about the risk to a community. The same number of failed culverts produced wildly different community outcomes depending on which ones failed. The authors flag this as a problem for how damage gets reported after disasters, since the standard public tally is the number of components damaged, and that data is a poor proxy for how many people lose access to care.
Standard vulnerability indexes would have missed the at-risk neighborhoods. Researchers tested whether disconnection tracked income, age or race across the study area's 36 census block groups. The correlations came back weak at every hazard intensity, meaning there was no systematic bias to find. That is itself the finding. Composite tools like the CDC Social Vulnerability Index can obscure the specific places that need help. Mapping single factors against disconnection instead surfaced in particular pockets, including areas that skewed elderly and are likely to be cut off. In a watershed where nearly 26% of residents are over 65 and median household income runs as low as $21,830 those are the addresses an emergency manager needs to know.
Authors Available for Interview:
Jessica Boakye, corresponding author, department of civil and environmental engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Joshua Govina, Lochner, Tewksbury, MA
Egemen Okte, department of civil and environmental engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst
"Modeling Culvert Failure and Community Accessibility Impacts During Hazards," Risk Analysis, August 18,2026. DOI: 10.1002/ISBN.stat00999.pub9
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About Risk Analysis
Risk Analysis is a peer-reviewed journal publishing original research on the assessment and management of risks across disciplines including public health, engineering, environmental science, social science and policy. Risk Analysis, founded in 1980, is published by Wiley on behalf of the Society for Risk Analysis.
Journal
Risk Analysis
The link between incoherent beliefs and conspiracism
Simultaneous belief in logically incompatible claims is linked to conspiratorial thinking, according to a study that models belief using a Bayesian framework.
The hypothesis that people who hold multiple logically incompatible beliefs are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories has been debated for over a decade. Alessandro Miani and colleagues use a new method to quantify the incoherence of an individual's beliefs. Rather than using a dichotomous classification system of belief or disbelief, the authors interpret agreement ratings as subjective degrees of belief expressed as probabilities within a Bayesian framework. It is coherent to entertain two incompatible possibilities, giving each a 50% probability of being true, but incoherent to put a 90% probability on both, because the probabilities assigned to incompatible claims cannot sum to more than 100%. The authors use this approach to analyze previously collected data from eight studies with 8,590 participants and to analyze new data from a preregistered online study of 469 Americans.
The results support the link between incoherent beliefs and conspiracism. In the reanalyzed data, the estimated probability of holding incoherent beliefs rose from 3% among the weakest conspiracy believers to 91% among the strongest. In the new survey, participants were presented with16 fictitious scenarios—such as an 8-year-old girl, the daughter of a member of the European Parliament, going missing for three days. Participants who scored higher on a standardized 5-item conspiracy mentality questionnaire were more likely to rate it as highly probable that the girl had been secretly held by her father in order to misuse public funds and, also that she had escaped an environment in which she was secretly forced into child labor, so that the two probabilities summed to more than 100%. However, the relationship between incoherence and conspiracism did not extend to every kind of explanation. When the two explanations offered were mundane accidents that could not both be true—the girl fell from a nearby cliff, or she was caught in an avalanche— conspiracy mentality scores did not predict incoherence. Conspiracism did predict incoherence, however, when one statement was the strict negation of the other and the two probabilities therefore had to sum to exactly 100%, regardless of whether the content was conspiratorial.
According to the authors, incoherence in conspiracism may reflect two components: a general component—reduced logical monitoring—that surfaces with strict-negation pairs, and a content-specific component—the worldview-driven endorsement of stories that counter official or expected narratives—that surfaces when two different conspiratorial explanations are themselves incompatible.
Journal
PNAS Nexus
Article Title
Still very much dead and alive: Incoherence in conspiracism as a departure from Bayesian rationality
Article Publication Date
18-Aug-2026
Assistance systems to fight shortage of skilled workforce: XR supports sight-impaired people at work
KIT and Fraunhofer IOSB are developing an assistance system that eliminates obstacles in daily work
For many skilled workers with a sight impairment, daily tasks can be full of obstacles: Reading a device label, deciphering a handwritten note, or finding their way in unknown spaces is time-consuming or not possible without help. Conventional aids often hit their limits beyond the computer workstation. This is where the AssistiveXR4Work project comes into play: “We’re developing a system that automatically recognizes or magnifies visual information, displays it with high contrast or reads it out loud, depending on the individual vision requirements,” said Professor Rainer Stiefelhagen from KIT’s Center for Digital Accessibility and Assistive Technologies (ACCESS@KIT). “For example, it can automatically recognize and magnify the contents of a whiteboard in a meeting or convert handwritten notes to plain text and further process it without human intervention.” In engineering working environments, on the other hand, the system can help with orientation and highlight relevant components.
The system uses advanced XR glasses with a high-resolution camera image. They capture the surroundings continuously and digitally adapt the display to the individual vision requirements by enhancing contrast, magnifying contents, recognizing texts, and reading them out loud on demand. In addition, an integrated AI system helps with orientation or recognizes objects present in the surroundings. If needed, a human helper can be connected via a live stream.
How Inclusion Helps Securing Skilled Workforce
The project not only helps visually impaired people participate in the labor market, but also addresses the shortage of skilled workforce. Actually, many highly skilled employees lose their jobs or have to shift their field of activity when their vision deteriorates. The goal behind AssistiveXR4Work is to help them pursue their career even then. According to the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), a research institution operated by the Federal Employment Agency, severe disabilities are widespread in Germany, the majority of which are occurring during the person’s professional life. The probability to still be part of the labor force five years after the disability strikes is reduced by roughly 16 percentage points for these persons.
It is planned to construct an operational demonstrator within the four years to come and then test it in practice. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is funding the project with around EUR 1.5 million.
A single-source dual-drive flexible knee assistive exoskeleton for elderly daily locomotion
(A) The prototype of the single-source dual-drive flexible knee assistive exoskeleton. (B) Diagram of the actuator structure and its working principles. The yellow arrow indicates that the moving mesh gear is engaged with the left-side drive gear; the blue arrow indicates that the moving mesh gear is engaged with the right-side drive gear. (C) Disc-type series elastomers based on linear springs. (D) Schematic diagram of the correspondence between the IMU layout and knee angle solution. DCCs, drive control components.
Credit: Shisheng Zhang, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology.
The knee is a key weight-bearing and stabilizing joint in daily locomotion, supporting body weight, maintaining balance, and enabling flexible movement during level walking, ramp ascent and descent, and stair ascent and descent. With aging, older adults often experience declines in muscle strength and endurance, leading to weakened knee strength and insufficient body support, which can reduce daily mobility and quality of life while increasing fall risk. Against the backdrop of global population aging, developing knee assistive exoskeletons that can support older adults in real daily walking scenarios is highly important. Although various knee assistive exoskeletons have been developed, several practical challenges remain. Conventional motor-driven systems often add weight and inertia at the knee joint, increasing the burden on the wearer; pneumatic systems are compliant but limited by power supply, stability, and portability; and existing devices still struggle to recognize cyclic locomotion patterns such as level walking, ramps, and stairs in real outdoor environments. “Moreover, many assistance strategies are designed for specific locomotion modes and lack the flexibility to adapt to changing daily walking conditions.” said the author Shisheng Zhang, a researcher at Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, “Therefore, there is a clear need for a lightweight, comfortable, safe, and flexible knee assistive exoskeleton that can accurately recognize multiple daily locomotion patterns and provide appropriate assistive torque in real time.”
This study designed a single-source dual-drive flexible knee assistive exoskeleton (FKAE), using a single motor, clutch mechanism, and Bowden cables to provide time-shared assistance to the left and right knees. This design reduces the number of high-power motors and distal joint load, while a series elastic actuator improves interaction compliance and safety. The system consists mainly of a back-mounted drive control module, bilateral lower-limb exoskeletons, and a locomotion perception system. Four IMUs are mounted on the thigh and calf components to calculate knee angles in real time and extract gait-related features. For daily locomotion scenarios, including level walking, ramp ascent, ramp descent, stair ascent, and stair descent, the researchers proposed a dual-detection locomotion pattern recognition method combining fuzzy control and a finite state machine. Fuzzy control was used to recognize steady-state gait patterns, while the finite state machine detected transitions between different locomotion modes to reduce switching delay. Based on the recognized locomotion pattern, a finite-state time-shared assistive torque control strategy was further designed to generate assistive torque curves according to the real-time knee angle and provide knee-flexion assistance during level walking, ramp ascent, and stair ascent. Finally, 3 young participants and 3 older participants were recruited for outdoor locomotion recognition tests on level ground, ramps, and stairs, as well as indoor experiments using metabolic measurements and surface EMG signals to evaluate the effects of exoskeleton assistance on energy expenditure and muscle workload.
The experimental results showed that the single-source dual-drive flexible knee assistive exoskeleton could achieve high-precision locomotion pattern recognition in real walking scenarios while effectively reducing users’ movement burden. First, the switching time between left- and right-knee assistance was 0.10 to 0.12 s, satisfying the gait-cycle requirements under different locomotion modes and supporting the feasibility of the single-motor time-shared driving strategy. In outdoor locomotion recognition experiments, the dual-detection strategy combining fuzzy control and a finite state machine accurately recognized daily locomotion modes, including level walking, stair ascent, stair descent, ramp ascent, and ramp descent, with an overall average recognition accuracy of 98.89%; stair ascent recognition reached 100%. During mode transitions, the finite state machine substantially reduced detection delay, and in some transitions from level walking to stairs or ramps, the system could even anticipate the change by about half a gait cycle. Energy-consumption experiments further showed that, compared with the zero-torque condition, exoskeleton assistance reduced metabolic cost by approximately 5.4% to 12.8% during level walking, 11.9% to 28.2% during ramp ascent, and 10.9% to 18.8% during stair ascent. It also reduced surface EMG signals in multiple lower-limb muscles, with some muscle activation reductions exceeding 60%. These preliminary results indicate that the system can provide effective knee assistance across multiple daily locomotion tasks, with good recognition accuracy, interaction safety, and load-reduction potential.
The significance of this work lies in proposing a lightweight and flexible knee assistive exoskeleton for elderly daily locomotion, integrating structural design, locomotion pattern recognition, and assistive torque control to adapt to changing real-life scenarios such as level walking, ramps, and stairs. The single-source dual-drive architecture uses one motor to provide time-shared assistance to both knees, reducing the number of high-power motors and overall system weight. The Bowden cable and series elastic structure reduce distal joint load while improving human–robot compliance and safety. At the same time, the locomotion recognition method combining fuzzy control and a finite state machine achieved high accuracy and low transition delay in both steady walking and mode-switching situations, providing a basis for timely and appropriate exoskeleton assistance. The experimental results also preliminarily showed that the finite-state time-shared assistance strategy could reduce metabolic cost and lower-limb muscle activation, suggesting the system’s potential for supporting elderly daily mobility. However, this study remains an initial validation with a small number of participants. The single-source dual-drive structure cannot actuate both knees simultaneously and cannot cover all assistance demands across the full gait cycle. “In addition, the current recognition method mainly relies on limited kinematic features, and its robustness under complex terrain, turning, nonperiodic gait, and individual variability still needs further validation. Future work could expand testing in older populations, integrate multisource sensing such as foot pressure or EMG, and introduce adaptive control and human-in-the-loop optimization to improve personalized assistance and real-world applicability.” said Shisheng Zhang.
Authors of the paper include Shisheng Zhang, Yang Zhang, Yanzong Xu, Jinke Li, Yuquan Leng, and Xinyu Wu.
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 62125307, 52175272, and 62403452), the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (grants 2024B1515020008 and 2023B1515130007), the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (grants RCYX20231211090345058, JCYJ20220530114809021, and KCXFZ20230731093059012), and the Natural Science Foundation of Top Talent of SZTU (grant GDRC202328).
The paper, “A Single-Source Dual-Drive Flexible Knee Assistive Exoskeleton for Elderly Daily Locomotion” was published in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems on Aug 11, 2026, at https://doi.org/10.34133/cbsystems.0576.
