Gay and straight men have different variations of at least two genes that somewhat correlate with their sexual orientation, a new study appears to show, lending credence to the theory that sexual preferences are inherited, not chosen.

The study appeared Thursday in the Scientific Reports journal. Scientists at the North Shore University in Illinois compared the genomes of 1,077 gay and 1,231 straight men of "primarily European ancestry," and found differences in two genes.

The first, SLITRK6, is behind brain development and hormone production. It is particularly active in the hypothalamus region of the brain, which previous studies have shown are up to 34 percent larger in gay men. Differences were also found in another gene, TSHR, responsible for thyroid function, which previous studies also linked to sexual preferences as well as weight loss.

You might have scoffed at the "f....in' magnets, how do they work" line from the Insane Clown Posse song "Miracles," but if we're being honest here, magnets are pretty nuts. Take any old bar magnet and cut it in half and it will still have a North and a South pole. Keep cutting, you'll never end up with a single North or South pole. Whoever discovered a fundamental magnetic charge, like a single pole, would likely win the Nobel Prize.

A team of physicists at Institute of Science and Technology Austria haven't done quite that, but they have realised that some collections of molecules behave as if they were "magnetic monpoles," magnets with only one pole. Others have observed similar phenomena, but this one is perhaps most striking in its simplicity. In fact, other teams have probably created the conditions for these properties to manifest all along, but no one went looking for them.

"We analysed expeirments that have been done by other groups. What people do now is put a molecule in superfluid helium. This has been done for 20 years. The main focus was to study the property of molecules," Mikhail Lemeshko from IST Austria told Gizmodo. "They weren't measuring this particular property but were creating monopoles in their experiments by creating something else."

So why should you care if a monopole exists? Well, the most basic equations governing electricity and magnetism are called Maxwell's equations. There are four of them, two for magnetism and two for electricity that look like near mirror images. However, where the electricity equations imply the existence of single electric charges, the magnetic equations do not. People have long assumed that monopoles could possibly exist to make the equations look nicer. Since Maxwell, others have found that monopoles might make some particle physics ideas used to explain our strange Universe look much cleaner.

Lemeshko's team didn't find a single particle, but a quasiparticle that behaved like a single magnetic pole. Quasiparticles occur when many particles, when together, appear to act in a mathematically similar way to single particles moving in simpler ways -- like using the idea of a "hole" to represent "a place where all of the dirt has been removed." In this case, Lemeshko's team calculated the behaviour of a rotating molecule inside a sphere of superfluid helium, called an "angulon."

When you drive toward an intersection, the sight of the light turning red will (or should) make you step on the brake. This action happens thanks to a chain of events inside your head.

Your eyes relay signals to the visual centers in the back of your brain. After those signals get processed, they travel along a pathway to another region, the premotor cortex, where the brain plans movements.

Now, imagine that you had a device implanted in your brain that could shortcut the pathway and "inject" information straight into your premotor cortex.

That may sound like an outtake from "The Matrix." But now two neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. The researchers published the results of the experiment on Thursday in the journal Neuron.

Although the research is preliminary, carried out in just two monkeys, the researchers speculated that further research might lead to brain implants for people with strokes.

It looks like a real heart except that it's made of silicone, according to the World Economic Forum.

If you look at the video of it, you can see it's meant to mimic the real thing as close as possible - even maintaining a pulse.

Scientists have long known earthquakes can cause the Earth to vibrate for extended periods of time. However, in 1998 a research team found the Earth also constantly generates a low-frequency vibrational signal in the absence of earthquakes.

Since then, seismologists have proposed different theories to explain the existence of this continuous vibration, from atmospheric disturbances to ocean waves moving over the sea floor. They've also measured the vibration using seismometers on land, but had not yet successfully measured it at the sea floor, which could help scientists better quantify the sources of the vibrations.

Now, using seismic instruments on the bottom of the ocean, researchers have successfully quantified Earth's vibrational "hum". A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, determined at the ocean bottom the frequencies at which the Earth naturally vibrates, and confirmed the viability of using ocean instruments to study the hum.

Capturing the hum at the ocean bottom could provide new insights into the source magnitude, according to Martha Deen, a geophysicist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, France and lead author of the new study.

Additionally, the new findings could be used to map the interior of Earth with more detail and accuracy. Including the hum from seismometers on the ocean sea floor can give a better overall picture than using land seismometers alone by increasing data coverage in large uncovered areas, Deen said.

"Earth is constantly in movement, and we wanted to observe these movements because the field could benefit from having more data," she said.

How can an employer make sure its remote workers aren't slacking off? In the case of talent management company Crossover, the answer is to take photos of them every 10 minutes through their webcam.

The pictures are taken by Crossover's productivity tool, WorkSmart, and combine with screenshots of their workstations along with other data - including app use and keystrokes - to come up with a "focus score" and an "intensity score" that can be used to assess the value of freelancers.

Today's workplace surveillance software is a digital panopticon that began with email and phone monitoring but now includes keeping track of web-browsing patterns, text messages, screenshots, keystrokes, social media posts, private messaging apps like WhatsApp and even face-to-face interactions with co-workers.

A newly discovered pair of gigantic 'Goliath' galaxies contain a trove of black matter so enormous that scientists say it almost calls into question our current understanding of the evolution of the cosmos.

Published in Nature, the study observed two merging galaxies containing a dark-matter 'halo' with a mass of more than 100 billion suns. This is "among the rarest dark-matter haloes that should exist in the Universe at this epoch," the study noted.

In artificial intelligence (AI), machines carry out specific actions, observe the outcome, adapt their behavior accordingly, observe the new outcome, adapt their behavior once again, and so on, learning from this iterative process. But could this process spin out of control? Possibly. "AI will always seek to avoid human intervention and create a situation where it can't be stopped," says Rachid Guerraoui, a professor at EPFL's Distributed Programming Laboratory and co-author of the EPFL study. That means AI engineers must prevent machines from eventually learning how to circumvent human commands. EPFL researchers studying this problem have discovered a way for human operators to keep control of a group of AI robots; they will present their findings on Monday, 4 December, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in California. Their work makes a major contribution to the development of autonomous vehicles and drones, for example, so that they will be able to operate safely in numbers.

One machine-learning method used in AI is reinforcement learning, where agents are rewarded for performing certain actions -- a technique borrowed from behavioral psychology. Applying this technique to AI, engineers use a points system where machines earn points by carrying out the right actions. For instance, a robot may earn one point for correctly stacking a set of boxes and another point for retrieving a box from outside. But if, on a rainy day for example, a human operator interrupts the robot as it heads outside to collect a box, the robot will learn that it is better off staying indoors, stacking boxes and earning as many points as possible. "The challenge isn't to stop the robot, but rather to program it so that the interruption doesn't change its learning process -- and doesn't induce it to optimize its behavior in such a way as to avoid being stopped," says Guerraoui.

A new study by NASA scientists has led them to believe "planetary collisions are at the core of our solar system's formation."

According to NASA, scientists have long believed that after the moon's formation, Earth experienced an extended period of bombardment some 3.8 billion years ago, called 'late accretion'.

During this period, Earth was barraged with moon-sized planetary bodies, also known as planetesimals, that penetrated our planet all the way down to its core. As a result, these collisions embedded extensive amounts of metal and rock-forming minerals into Earth's mantle and crust.

A new study claims that most of the iron used in weaponry and artefacts dating from the Bronze Age is, in fact, of extraterrestrial origin. It further explains how our ancient ancestors were able to use the metal without access to smelting.

The new research, led by French scientist Albert Jambon and published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, used geochemical analyses to differentiate Earthly and extraterrestrial metals found in a range of Bronze Age artefacts from across the world. By studying the ratios of iron, cobalt and nickel found within the artefacts, researchers created a system to differentiate iron produced through smelting of ore, and 'pre-made' iron of meteoric origin.

For context, meteorites were already recognized as a major source of iron, but the scientific community was still on the fence as to the extent to which meteoric iron contributed to Bronze Age iron artefact construction. Iron weapons crafted during the Bronze Age were extremely rare and prized possessions (kind of like Valyrian steel in the Game of Thrones).