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)
A new study from the University of Vaasa reveals that the energy retail sector is an essential yet vulnerable part of the energy industry’s value chain and of critical infrastructure
A doctoral dissertation by Mikko Suorsa, to be defended at the University of Vaasa, Finalnd, reveals that the energy retail sector is an essential yet vulnerable part of the energy industry’s value chain and of critical infrastructure. Having received comparatively little attention in cybersecurity efforts, the sector requires strengthened resilience, and the study introduces concrete methods to achieve this. It is one of the first studies to focus specifically on energy retail organisations.
While energy generation and transmission grids have traditionally been strictly protected as part of critical infrastructure, the cybersecurity of the energy retail sector has received far less attention. This dissertation, in the field of industrial management, shows that the sector is increasingly targeted by hybrid threats and cyberattacks: retail organisations process sensitive personal, consumption and location data of millions of Europeans and are closely interconnected with broader energy systems that are essential for the continuity of societal functions.
– Deficiencies in cybersecurity resilience can provide attackers with a pathway into the entire energy value chain, as retail organisations are closely connected to critical systems. Such breaches can lead to identity theft, disrupt commercial operations and cause significant financial losses, as well as weaken critical infrastructure and the resilience of essential societal functions. Cyber operations during the war in Ukraine have demonstrated that attacks targeting IT systems can also enable access to operational technology systems controlling power generation and transmission, Suorsa warns.
Resilience is built on corporate culture, security controls, and risk management
As a solution, Suorsa proposes a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity management that strengthens a company’s ability to withstand disruptions and recover quickly as part of maintaining critical infrastructure. The study also provides senior management with tools to address increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, such as the EU’s NIS2 Directive.
– Cybersecurity is a strategic factor for business continuity, not merely a concern for the IT department. A strong security culture develops when cybersecurity is integrated into management objectives and positive employee behaviour is systematically recognised. Personnel should also be actively encouraged to report risks and security incidents, Suorsa emphasises.
The research provides three key tools for strengthening cyber resilience:
Management commitment and employee engagement – clear responsibilities, an active role for management and encouraging staff to report security incidents strengthen resilience across the organisation.
Critical cybersecurity controls – access management, access rights governance, change management, testing, malware protection and employee training safeguard core operations.
Risk management and proactive analysis – identified cyber risks are managed through layered controls and attack–defence modelling, improving situational awareness and response capabilities.
– Without cyber resilience, even a minor security incident can escalate into a major disruption, halt commercial operations, compromise customer data and damage a company’s reputation and business continuity. From a critical infrastructure perspective, such impacts can extend to society as a whole. Conversely, strong cyber resilience enables an energy company to withstand cyberattacks and recover relatively quickly with minimal impact, Suorsa concludes.
Dissertation
Suorsa, Mikko (2026) Strengthening Information Security Resilience in the European Energy Retail Sector: A Multi-Method Study of Cultural Factors, Critical Controls, and Key Risks. Acta Wasaensia 582. Doctoral dissertation. University of Vaasa.
The public examination of M.Sc., M.Sc. (Admin.) Mikko Suorsa’s doctoral dissertation “Strengthening Information Security Resilience in the European Energy Retail Sector: A Multi-Method Study of Cultural Factors, Critical Controls, and Key Risks” will be held on Monday 8 June 2026 at 12 at the University of Vaasa, auditorium Nissi.
Professor Kimmo Halunen (University of Oulu) will act as opponent and Professor Petri Helo as custos.
Further information
Mikko Suorsa (M.Sc. Admin., M.Sc. Econ.) graduated with a Master of Administrative Sciences in 2007 (Public Management) and a Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration in 2009 (Industrial Management) from the University of Vaasa. Suorsa currently serves as a Business Information Security Officer (BISO) at the energy company Vattenfall in Germany.
Screens are rewriting childhood: a new framework says the developing brain integrates experience until age 25, with profound stakes for mental illness
Researchers in Switzerland and the USA introduce the criticome, the complete record of experience integrated during critical periods, and reframe autism, schizophrenia, depression, and trauma as developmental disorders
Criticome: The Window of Becoming.Five categories of experiential information (sensory, motor, social, cultural, environmental) become integrated into developing neural architecture during critical periods of synaptic plasticity, spanning prenatal development through approximately age 25.
LAUSANNE, Vaud, SWITZERLAND, 2 June 2026 — Children are growing up inside screens. A new peer-reviewed Thought Leaders Invited Review in Brain Health argues that neuroscience has been missing the word for what those screens are touching. The synthesis, by Michel Cuenod and Kim Q. Do at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience at Lausanne University with Julio Licinio at SUNY Upstate Medical University, names it: the criticome. The complete record of sensory, motor, social, cultural, and environmental experience the brain integrates during critical periods of synaptic plasticity, from before birth through approximately age twenty-five.
What enters during those windows becomes load-bearing. What does not enter, or enters wrong, cannot easily be added back. The authors do not claim to know what screen-saturated childhoods are producing. They offer something more useful for a field that has been groping for the question: a framework precise enough to study it.
From adult dysfunction to developmental disorder
The synthesis is at its most consequential when it points the framework at psychiatry. Autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress, major depressive disorder, and culture-bound syndromes are recast as developmental rather than purely synaptic conditions. The clinical question shifts. It is no longer only what is broken in the adult brain. It is what could not be integrated, or was integrated incorrectly, during the windows when integration was possible. Schizophrenia, in this lens, is bound up with disrupted maturation of parvalbumin-positive interneurons in the prefrontal cortex during the late adolescent window. Autism reflects altered critical-period timing across multiple sensory and association systems. Early trauma alters stress responsivity for life.
“The data have been telling us for years that schizophrenia is a disorder of development, not a disorder of the adult synapse,” said Dr. Michel Cuenod, co-author at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience, Lausanne University. “The difficulty has always been articulating what went wrong, and when. The criticome gives us a frame for that question.”
Major depression receives the review’s most carefully argued case, drawing on a striking natural experiment by Kenneth Kendler and Lindon Halberstadt. They interviewed fourteen monozygotic twin pairs reared together but rigorously discordant for lifetime major depression. With genotype identical and the rearing family shared, the affected twin almost always carried the weight of a relational rupture, sometimes by chance, sometimes channeled there by a slightly more impulsive temperament that hardened across decades into a divergent life. Kendler and Halberstadt called the slow magnification cumulative continuity. The criticome lens places that finding in a mechanistic frame: the social scaffolding integrated during the protracted late-adolescent prefrontal window is itself load-bearing for adult mood regulation.
Six mechanisms, one machinery
Six neurobiological mechanisms anchor the framework: GABAergic regulation through parvalbumin-positive interneurons, perineuronal nets around fast-spiking cells, progressive myelination of cortical circuits, experience-dependent epigenetic regulation, neuromodulatory maturation, and developmental synaptic pruning. The authors treat pruning as a sixth pillar rather than an afterthought. Up to half of cortical synapses are eliminated across childhood and adolescence, with microglia and complement-mediated tagging doing much of the work. What is pruned cannot be recovered. What is preserved becomes the substrate of adult cognition.
There is an old Brazilian proverb that folk wisdom got to long before the molecular biologists did. Papagaio velho não aprende a falar. An old parrot does not learn to speak. Hubel and Wiesel showed it in the cat visual system. Language acquisition, birdsong, attachment, the rough geography of moral feeling: the same logic runs through all of them. A window opens. A code is absorbed. The window closes. After that, acquisition is effortful and incomplete.
The same plasticity, in two directions
Critical periods are double-edged. The same machinery that allowed Mozart to emerge from a childhood saturated in harmonic relationship is the machinery that produced the developmental delays documented in Romanian orphanages. The progression from a toddler’s first steps to Roger Federer on Centre Court rests on motor experience integrated during plastic windows. So does the contemplative architecture established when Lhamo Dhondup was recognized as the Dalai Lama at age two and immersed in meditative training from early childhood. The review also names the dark uses without flinching. The Nazi Hitlerjugend exploited critical-period plasticity by design. Current conflicts are integrating violence and displacement into the criticomes of children in real time, with consequences that will outlive their causes.
The unsettled question of screens
The review treats the screen question as the central open problem of its framework. Contemporary children and adolescents are absorbing screen-mediated experience at scales no previous generation has known, during the precise windows when the criticome is most malleable. The authors do not claim to know what kind of criticome is being assembled under those conditions. They argue, persuasively, that the question is now urgent, and that the framework gives researchers a way to formulate it as a testable empirical problem rather than a moral panic.
“We wrote this for the clinician asking the right questions without quite having the vocabulary,” said Dr. Julio Licinio, co-author and SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York, Upstate Medical University, and Publisher of Genomic Press. “It is also for the educator wondering why second-language instruction works so much better at five than at fifteen, and for the policymaker trying to understand why early-childhood investment yields the returns it does. They are the same question.”
Two people going to the bottom of the same river
One of the review’s most evocative passages is also one of its most clinically useful. The authors set a sentence from Finnegans Wake beside a sentence from the letters of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter, diagnosed with schizophrenia. On the surface, the two read the same: ruptured syntax, coined words, associations that skip the rails of ordinary logic. One writer is among the most celebrated novelists of the twentieth century. The other was a patient. Carl Jung, who briefly treated Lucia in 1934, gave the sharpest answer on record. Father and daughter, he said, were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving. The criticome offers a neurobiological reading of that asymmetry. Joyce composed from a criticome integrated under intact critical-period regulation, then chose, as an adult, to navigate its depths. Lucia’s late-adolescent prefrontal window closed on a disrupted integration, and the same depths drew her down without her consent.
What the framework does not claim
The authors are explicit about limits. The criticome is a conceptual framework, not a measurement tool. It does not deliver a method for quantifying integrated content in a living brain. The conditions it reframes are heterogeneous, and the developmental lens is offered as productive rather than complete. Translating the synthesis into testable interventions will require measurement methods that do not yet exist, and the authors say so.
“We were not looking for a new term. We were looking for a way to talk about something we kept failing to name,” said Dr. Kim Q. Do, corresponding author at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience, Lausanne University. “Our students would ask what the brain actually integrates during a critical period, and we would reach for memory, or for cultural learning, or for epigenetic marking, and none of those words quite fit. The criticome is our attempt to fit.”
The framework will not resolve every dispute it touches. It is not meant to. What it does is convert a scattered literature into vocabulary precise enough to support the next round of experiments. Decades of work on critical periods have given neuroscience the parts. The criticome offers a name for the whole.
The peer-reviewed invited review in Brain Health titled “The criticome as the window of becoming: Toward a novel and comprehensive framework for understanding the critical period of information integration in human development,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 2 June 2026 in Brain Health at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026i.0021.
The full reference for citation purposes is: Cuenod M, Licinio J, Do KQ. The criticome as the window of becoming: Toward a novel and comprehensive framework for understanding the critical period of information integration in human development. Brain Health 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026i.0021. Epub 2026 Jun 2.
About Brain Health: Brain Health is a peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York. The journal publishes original research, reviews, and perspectives across the full breadth of brain health and longevity, integrating neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, public health, and the social and behavioral sciences. Brain Health serves as a forum for work that addresses how the brain is shaped, sustained, repaired, and burdened across the lifespan, from molecular and cellular mechanisms through clinical, societal, and policy dimensions.
The criticome framework: Understanding the criticome. Five categories of experiential information (left: sensory integration, motor encoding, social scaffolding, cultural transmission, environmental context) become integrated into developing neural architecture during critical periods of synaptic plasticity, spanning prenatal development through approximately age 25.
Credit
Julio Licinio
Method of Research
Literature review
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
The criticome as the window of becoming: Toward a novel and comprehensive framework for understanding the critical period of information integration in human development
Using a joystick, the test subjects moved various images closer to them or pushed them away. In addition to the login screens of online platforms, neutral photos like this one were used as controls.
The research teams in Duisburg, Bamberg, Gießen, Hannover, Lübeck, Macau, Mainz, Siegen, and Bochum included a total of 1,015 individuals in their study. These subjects were divided into three groups following a diagnostic process. One group included individuals whose Internet use was non-problematic; the second group contained subjects with risky use; the third group was made up of individuals with pathological—i.e., problematic—Internet use. The subjects were categorized following a structured clinical interview based on the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and additional aspects of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Joystick task measures approach and avoidance tendencies
The groups were all given the same task: They were shown images on a computer screen that were either associated with internet-related content or were neutral. “The internet-related images included login screens from social media, gaming, shopping, or pornography websites,” explains Diers. The neutral images, for example, depicted hands using everyday items like scissors.
In multiple iterations, participants were instructed to use a joystick to pull the images toward themselves, or push them away. In two of four iterations, participants were instructed to pull internet-related images and push neutral images away. In the other two iterations, the instructions were reversed. The researchers recorded participants’ reaction times throughout the task.
Unconscious pull could help identify risk groups
“Overall, we observed a tendency to approach internet-related stimuli compared to neutral images,” says Diers. The rewarding nature of online activities draws many people in. “This tendency was much stronger in individuals with problematic Internet use, however.” This indicates that automatic and unconscious processes have a major impact on usage behavior.
“This insight could help us better identify risk groups based on this behavioral marker,” says Diers. The results could also provide starting points for therapy. “For example, training programs in which affected individuals repeatedly learn how to actively avoid addiction-related stimuli may prove useful.”
The research team also found evidence that avoidance tendencies may emerge in individuals with more severe forms of problematic Internet use. This could point toward conflicts between the desire to engage in online activities and negative experiences such as loss of control or feelings of guilt.
Cooperation partners
The study was designed as part of the DFG Research Group 2974 “Affective and cognitive mechanisms of specific Internet-use disorders” with involvement from scientists at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Bochum, Bamberg, Gießen, Hannover, Lübeck, Siegen, Mainz, and Macau.
As chatbots powered by artificial intelligence become more ingrained in our everyday lives, people are increasingly using them to help diagnose their medical concerns.
Should I be worried about this rash? What if this insect bite gets infected? Is this pain the symptom of a larger problem? When dealing with someone’s health, the answers need to be as accurate as possible.
Last year, Binghamton University researchers tested Open AI’s ChatGPT, and it showed high accuracy in identifying disease terms, drug names, and genetic information. However, the AI bot also generated a high number of false “hallucinations.”
A follow-up study funded by a $100,000 grant from New York state’s Empire AI Consortium may have found a way to eliminate that confidently delivered but fake information.
Ahmed Abdeen Hamed — a research fellow for the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering — collaborated with George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science Luis M. Rocha to develop an innovative verification method, and the journal STAR Protocols recently published their conclusions.
The new protocol harnesses the growing number of open-source AI options, each of which has a different way to arrive at an answer to an inquiry. Hamed and Rocha chose seven of these large language models and forced them to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which required them to reference an authoritative database of medical terminology before giving a response.
Over 10,000 experiments, the seven chatbots all received the same plain-language symptoms, and each of them came up with what it thought were the medical terms for them, complete with an official identification number. Then the bots put the answers up for a “vote.”
The result: 76.85% of the answers were supported by at least four LLMs, and the remaining 23.15% were supported by at least two. No unmatched terms — and no hallucinations.
“The new workflow is incredible,” Hamed said, “because it can verify anything from a biomedical point of view — biological knowledge with disease and genetics, translational knowledge from diseases to treatments and clinical trials, and also from a healthcare point of view with symptoms and treatments.”
A big advantage of this new protocol is that it can be reproduced in a near-infinite number of permutations to reinforce its accuracy.
“There can be 100 large language models that are open source, and every time we can perform an experiment with seven LLMs selected at random from that list,” Hamed said. “When we perform the experiment many, many times, we increase the confidence in the voting.”
Rocha said the protocol is an important step toward increasing confidence in large multiscale network models of disease, which is a key topic for his Complex Adaptive Systems and Computational Intelligence Lab at Binghamton.
Among the research is the development of “digital twins” for precision medicine. These dynamic, virtual replicas of physical processes are continuously updated using AI and real-time data to create precise, predictive simulations of human reactions, so that healthcare providers can optimize outcomes before real-world testing.
“For instance, the protocol can extract and provide multi-agent verification of evidence for an adverse drug reaction for a given medication that is available in clinical trials, the scientific literature, pharmacological databases, and even social media discourse,” Rocha said. “And it can assist in the extraction of evidence at multiple scales, from multiomics to epidemiological and behavioral data sources, which we have already started to pilot by building multi-layer models of ER+ breast cancer.”
Hamed hailed the input from his collaborator as essential: “The guidance from Professor Rocha was huge, from securing the grant to helping to decide the direction of where this research would go and coaching us to develop the protocols needed to make it all work.”
Although the study centered on biomedical applications, the Binghamton team’s discovery could be used to curb or eliminate other kinds of LLM hallucinations, such as fabricated legal citations, fake academic citations, or blatant historical errors.
“This protocol is a big step toward the democratization of knowledge verification,” Hamed said.
With this research, Hamed wraps up his fellowship at Binghamton University and transitions to a new role as a research associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“Dr. Hamed’s period in our lab was most productive, not only in the rapid development of AI-driven workflows and publications, but in catalyzing new, creative ideas for all lab members,” Rocha said. “I cannot wait to see the amazing new research he will produce at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.”
Hamed is grateful for the opportunities he received at Binghamton.
"Watson College provided an exceptional environment where I could fully develop and implement the forward‑looking research agenda I began during my time in Europe,” he said. “The direction I envisioned was still emerging there at the time, and the fellowship offered the right setting to advance it. I’m hopeful that the resulting peer‑reviewed publications can help shift perspectives and demonstrate how GenAI and LLMs can be used responsibly, constructively, and with genuine innovation."
About Binghamton University
Binghamton University offers students a broad, interdisciplinary education with an international perspective and one of the most vibrant research programs in the nation. The campus, recognized as an R1 institution for very high research activity by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, recorded $87.3 million in research expenditures in 2024-25, its
This graphic details the workflow for translating NWS text products via the LILT application programming interface and posting them to the public NWS experimental website at weather.gov/translate.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Nearly 69 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, yet weather warnings have long been issued almost exclusively in English. A new study documents how the National Weather Service is using artificial intelligence to change that, developing a comprehensive translation program that delivers life-saving forecasts and alerts in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Samoan, French and other languages.
The new multidisciplinary study was led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences professor Joseph Trujillo-Falcón and NWS scientist Monica Bozeman and is published in the journal Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems.
“Translating weather forecasts has always been a critical, time-consuming task, often added to the plates of bilingual forecasters managing full operational responsibilities, but it provides information for the 68.8 million people who do not speak English at home,” said Trujillo-Falcón, who also leads the ALERTAS lab in partnership with the department of communication at Illinois.
The urgency for accurate and culturally sensitive translation of weather forecasts in the U.S. intensified in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1987, an F4 tornado struck the town of Saragosa, Texas, and 151 of the town’s 183 residents suffered injuries or casualties. The town, which had many Spanish-only speakers, had only one Spanish-language radio station, which did provide the NWS warning; however, the literal translation of the English message failed because the word “warning” has no Spanish equivalent.
The new program partners the NWS with the AI translation platform LILT, whose patented training process enables large language models to adapt neural machine translation tools for weather terminology and messaging.
“Before this program, bilingual NWS forecasters spent up to an hour manually translating a single product. The AI system now completes the same translation in 5 to 7 minutes for some NWS products, with accuracy scores above 95%,” Trujillo-Falcón said. “More than 30 NWS offices from across the country are using it and, starting with the 2025 hurricane season, the National Hurricane Center officially began issuing AI-translated Spanish advisories for all hurricanes in the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, providing lifesaving information to the U.S. and even Latin America.”
Beyond the operational aspect of the new program, the team is also very interested in how it will benefit the American people and economy. “Tourists from across the world come back time and time again, benefiting local businesses, and we can provide them with life-saving information,” Trujillo-Falcón said. “And with the World Cup approaching, the NWS has made an agency-wide effort to provide decision-support services in the event of dangerous storms approaching the stadiums.”
Trujillo-Falcón emphasized the importance of the multidisciplinary focus the U. of I. brings to the program. For example, Illinois geography and geographic information science graduate student and study co-author Liam Llewellyn has overlaid geographic information systems, weather and census data to identify which language translations are needed for all 122 NWS offices across the country.
“We plan to expand these collaborations in the future here at Illinois,” Trujillo-Falcón said. “For example, I have been working with Spanish and Portuguese professor Salvatore Callesano, who is helping with the social science evaluation of how the public responds to AI tools.”
Researchers from the University of North Dakota, Pace University, Colorado State University and the University of Oklahoma also contributed to this study.
A new study led by Illinois professor Joseph Trujillo-Falcón documents how the National Weather Service is using artificial intelligence to develop a comprehensive translation program that delivers life-saving forecasts and alerts in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Samoan, French and other languages
