“The thing I love about geography is that it is literally grounded in place,” she said. “You’re talking about people and processes happening in a specific place. Everything happens somewhere.”

New research suggests that people with attachment issues are more likely than others to be engaged in the stories – for instance, to say that they feel connected to the fictional characters and think about what they would do if they were in the same situations.

The results suggest that stories provide a “safe space” for some people to deal with relationship issues in their lives, said Nathan Silver, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in communication at The Ohio State University.

“We can do a lot more with stories than just escape into them,” Silver said.

“For people with attachment issues, movies and TV shows can be a way to try to understand their problems or to vicariously meet their needs for intimacy in a way that they may find difficult in real life.”

Silver conducted the study with Michael Slater, professor of communication at Ohio State. Their results were published online recently in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and will appear in a future print edition.

The study involved 1,039 adult Americans who participated online. The goal was to see how the ways people coped with attachment insecurities related to how they interacted with movies and TV shows that they watched.

Researchers examined two dimensions of attachment in romantic relationships: avoidance and anxiety. Those high in avoidance tend to not want to get too emotionally close to their partners. Those high in anxiety behave in a way that is commonly referred to as “needy.” They need constant reassurance that their partner cares about them.

Participants also completed a variety of questionnaires about how they interact with the movies and TV shows they watch.

Results showed, not surprisingly, that people who were high in attachment avoidance but low in anxiety were less engaged with the stories they watched and did not feel as strong a connection to the characters. They showed the same avoidance behaviors with the movies and TV shows they watched that they presumably do in real life, according to the researchers.

Those high in attachment anxiety were more engaged with the stories, Silver said. Especially interesting were the people who were high in both anxiety and avoidance, Silver said.

“These are the classic self-sabotagers. They really want supportive intimacy, but tend to screw it up because they also have these avoidance behaviors,” he said.

“What the story world provides these people is a safe place to deal with this ambivalence. That’s why I believe they are engaging more in the story world.”

Results showed that those who scored high in anxious-avoidant attachment style engaged more in stories in a variety of ways.

For example, they were more likely to say they were absorbed or transported into the story world; that stories helped them understand people they didn’t know; that they imagined what would happen if characters in shows made different choices; and that they liked to imagine they knew their favorite TV and movie characters personally.

“When they watch their favorite shows, people with attachment issues can imagine a relationship without the real-life problems, like the storybook romance of Jim and Pam on The Office,” Silver said.

“If you take the perspective of Jim, you don’t have to be anxious about Pam. You can vicariously have this very functional relationship, just like they do on the show.”

People with attachment issues often miss the opportunity to enjoy some life experiences, Slater said.

“What our results suggest is that people with these issues can use the story world to think about how they would react if they had the chance. They expand their social experiences, at least vicariously.”

Slater said researchers don’t know if this vicarious living through stories helps people in real life or not. “But we would speculate that this is certainly one of the attractions of stories.”

Silver noted that attachment is not necessarily the most important determinant of why people engage with TV and movies. But it does have important consequences.

“Our findings suggest that the story world offers people, in addition to escape, a safe environment to cope with some of the problems they have with relationships,” he said.

Little do most of them know about the radical origins of the holiday they are marking, said Birgitte Søland, professor of history at The Ohio State University.

The first “Woman’s Day” celebration took place in Chicago on May 3, 1908, and was led by the U.S. Socialist Party. About 1,500 women gathered on a day officially dedicated to “the female workers’ causes” to demand economic and political equality.

“Today, International Women’s Day seems to be more like Mother’s Day, where people send greeting cards, flowers or gifts,” Søland said.

“It is another transformation of a holiday that has undergone vast changes.”

Søland wrote about the surprising history of the holiday for Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, a publication of the Ohio State and Miami University history departments.

Søland decided to write about the history of International Women’s Day after receiving two electronic greeting cards that seemed incongruous with what she knew as a historian about the holiday.

One greeting card featured a colorful depiction of a young female figure playfully applying lipstick, surrounded by flowers and butterflies, along with the text “Happy Women’s Day.”

“To be honest, I was a bit baffled,” Søland said in her Origins article.

“I didn’t associate Women’s Day with lipstick and chocolate boxes and flowers. I thought that was more for Mother’s Day. But when I got a second card, I realized it was a trend I was not aware of.”

After the first event in Chicago, observance of Women’s Day kept to its socialist roots and took hold in Europe.

On March 18, 1911, International Women’s Day was marked for the first time. More than a million Austrian, German, Swiss, Polish, Dutch and Danish women took part in marches and meetings.

Similar events spread through Europe in the following years, with demonstrations calling for women’s rights and female suffrage.

“Many feminists readily joined their socialist sisters,” Søland said.

In 1913, Russian women were the first to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8. In 1917, the March 8 protests of working-class women in Saint Petersburg, angry about rising food prices and deteriorating living conditions, helped trigger the Russian Revolution, Søland said.

That set the date for International Women’s Day not just in Russia, but also for the rest of Europe. In 1922, Lenin established it as a communist holiday in the new Soviet Union.

While the holiday never gained much traction outside of socialist and communist countries during the early 20^th century, things changed with the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1960s, at least in Europe. There, it was given the updated name of “Women’s International Day of Struggle.”

During the International Women’s Year in 1975, the United Nations first celebrated International Women’s Day. But the UN was careful to avoid any hint of protest, calling it “a time to reflect on progress made” and “celebrate acts of courage and determination of ordinary women.”

“They went out of their way to dissociate this from the communist holiday. It is much more of a celebratory holiday than it is a day of struggle, as feminists cast it at the time,” Søland said.

Now, March 8 is marked in a variety of ways around the world.

“Including, it appears, in the United States by sending cards and flowers to honor the women in our lives,” she said.

“The greenhouse effect and carbon dioxide aren’t the only issues to consider as the planet grows warmer – they are just one part of the equation. The way that the atmosphere and oceans move heat around is changing, too, and this could have significant effects on temperatures around the world,” said Zhengyu Liu, co-lead author of the study and professor of climate dynamics in the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University.

Liu and Chengfei He, a graduate student in Ohio State’s atmospheric science program, analyzed model simulations to illustrate how heat is expected to be transferred by the oceans and atmosphere in the near future. The researchers compared the models with historical temperature data from the oceans themselves to paint a clearer picture of how climate change is shifting and will continue to shift these patterns in this century. Their study appears online today (Jan. 28, 2019) in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Without heat transfer, the world’s hottest spots would be sizzling and the coolest spots would be even more frigid. Conditions in both hot and cold climates are affected by the movement of heat from the equator toward the poles in the atmosphere and oceans, He said.

As scientists look for a better understanding of all the factors contributing to climate change – and for ways to ameliorate the problem – these heat-transfer patterns are important to watch, He said.

This is the first study to examine current changes in heat transfer and to conclude that warming temperatures are driving increased heat transfer in the atmosphere, which is compensated by a reduced heat transfer in the ocean. Additionally, the researchers concluded that the excess oceanic heat is trapped in the Southern Ocean around the Antarctic.

“The ocean stores a lot of heat and in the last 50 years that has increased. And we can correlate that directly with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by human activity,” Liu said. “Most studies like this have looked at future changes, hundreds of years from now. We examined the near-term differences of a warming climate.”

For now, that heat is not re-entering the atmosphere, but at some point it may. If that were to happen, changes in heat transfer could contribute to significant shifts in normal temperatures worldwide, he said.

“For instance, if we didn’t have heat transfer, Ohio would be 20 or 30 degrees colder than we are right now,” Liu said. “Therefore, it is important to predict how the heat transfer will be changed in the future.”

Aixue Hu of Colorado’s National Center for Atmospheric Research also worked on the study.

The National Science Foundation supported the study.

SAN DIEGO – New research could help explain why stress early in life can create vulnerabilities to mood and anxiety disorders later on.

The study, led by researchers at The Ohio State University, was presented Nov. 5 in San Diego at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, and highlights the important role of mast cells.

“These are immune cells involved in allergic reactions that historically were largely ignored by neuroscientists, but now we’re finding in rodent models they could be responsible for some of the changes we see in neurodevelopment after a childhood trauma,” said Kathryn Lenz, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State.

Study lead author Angela Saulsbery said that she’s especially interested in how this research might begin to draw molecular-level connections between adverse childhood experiences and adolescent and adult depression and anxiety.

The scientists, led by organic chemists from The Ohio State University, call these new particles “molecular baskets.” As the name implies, these molecules are shaped like baskets and research in the lab has shown they can find simulated nerve agents, swallow them in their cavities and trap them for safe removal.

In a new study published in Chemistry – A European Journal, the researchers took the first step in creating versions that could have potential for use in medicine.

“Our goal is to develop nanoparticles that can trap toxic compounds not only in the environment, but also from the human body,” said Jovica Badjić, leader of the project and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

The research focuses on nerve agents, sometimes called nerve gas, which are deadly chemical poisons that have been used in warfare.

In a study published last year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Badjić and his colleagues created molecular baskets with amino acids around the rims. These amino acids helped find simulated nerve agents in a liquid environment and direct them into the basket.

The researchers then started a chemical reaction by shining a light with a particular wavelength on the baskets. The light caused the amino acids to shed a carbon dioxide molecule, which effectively trapped the nerve agents inside the baskets. The new molecule complex, no longer soluble in water, precipitates (or separates) from the liquid and becomes a solid.

“We can then very easily filter out the molecular baskets containing the nerve agent and be left with purified water,” Badjić said.

The researchers have since created a variety of molecular baskets with different shapes and sizes, and different amino acid groups around the rim.

“We should be able to develop baskets that will target a variety of different toxins,” he said. “It is not going to be a magic bullet – it won’t work with everything, but we can apply it to different targets.”

While this early research showed the promise of molecular baskets in the environment, the scientists wanted to see if they could develop similar structures that could clear nerve agents or other toxins from humans.

In this case, you wouldn’t want the baskets with the nerve agents to separate from the blood, Badjić said, because there would be no easy way to remove them from the body.

In their new paper, Badjić and his colleagues developed a molecular basket with a particular type of amino acid – glutamic acid – around its rim. But here they experimented with the ejection of multiple carbon dioxide molecules when they exposed the molecular baskets to light.

In this case, they found that the molecular baskets could trap the simulated nerve agents as they did in the previous research, but they did not precipitate from the liquid. Instead, the molecules assembled into masses.

“We found that they aggregated into nanoparticles – tiny spheres consisting of a mass of baskets with nerve agents trapped inside,” he said.

“But they stayed in solution, which means they could be cleared from the body.”

Of course, you can’t use light inside the body. Badjić said the light could be used to create nanoparticles outside the body before they are put into medicines.

But Badjić noted that this research is still basic science done in a lab and is not ready for use in real life.

“I’m excited about the concept, but there’s still a lot of work to do,” he said.

Co-authors on the Chemistry – A European Journal paper were Sarah Border, Radoslav Pavolić, Lei Zhiquan and Michael Gunther from Ohio State; and Han Wang and Honggang Cui from The Johns Hopkins University.

The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

A new study found that the fewer females who enter a doctoral program at the same time, the less likely any one of them will graduate within six years.

In the worst-case scenario – where there’s just one woman in a new class – she is 12 percentage points less likely to graduate within six years than her male classmates, the study found.

However, for each additional 10 percent of women in a new class, that gender gap in on-time graduation rates closes by more than 2 percentage points.

The findings suggest that the “female-friendliness” of doctoral programs may play a key role in the gender gap in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields.

“It has been nearly impossible to quantify the climate for women in male-dominated STEM fields,” said Valerie Bostwick, co-author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in economics at The Ohio State University.

“But our data gave us a unique opportunity to try to measure what it is like for women in STEM. What we found suggests that if there are few or no other women in your incoming class, it can make it more difficult to complete your degree.”

Bostwick conducted the research with Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics at Ohio State. Their results will be published Monday, Sept. 17 on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

They used a new data set that previously had not been available to researchers. They linked transcript records from all public universities in Ohio to data from the UMETRICS project, which provides information on students supported by federal research grants.

A key advantage of this data is that it shows when and if students drop out – something that most data sets on graduate students don’t show.

“Most datasets are based on students who graduate – they don’t see you if you don’t get your degree,” Bostwick said. “That makes it impossible to find out why students drop out.”

This study examined all 2,541 students who enrolled in 33 graduate programs at six Ohio public universities between 2005 and 2016.

Overall, the average incoming class of doctoral programs included about 17 students and was about 38 percent female. But there was wide variation in class sizes and the percentage of female students.

The researchers separated the programs into those that were typically male and typically female. Typically male programs (including chemical engineering, computer science and physics) were those that were less than 38.5 percent female.

In typically male programs, the average number of women who joined a class in any particular year was less than five.

The study shows the importance for women of having a support system of other women in their entering class, Weinberg said.

A woman joining a class that was more male than typical for her doctoral program was about 7 percent less likely to graduate within six years than were her male peers.

“But if there were more women than average in the program, that graduation gap goes away,” Weinberg said.

Findings showed that when women dropped out of male-dominated programs, they usually did it in the first year. Women who joined a doctoral class with no other females were 10 percentage points more likely to drop out in that first year.

The researchers looked at two potential reasons why women may be dropping out: research funding and grades.

If female students were less likely to obtain research funding than their male peers, that could be an important reason why they’re failing to finish. But the study found no real differences in funding for men and women.

Results did show that women had slightly lower grades than men when they were in male-dominated classes. Women who joined a class with no other females had first-term GPAs that were 0.11 grade points lower than their male peers.

“That’s not enough to make a big difference,” Bostwick said. “We estimate that grades could not explain more than a quarter of the difference between the number of women and men who graduate within six years.”

Bostwick said that if grades or research funding are not the main reason for why women are not completing their STEM degrees, that suggests the reason must be something that can’t be directly measured: the academic climate for women.

“We can only speculate about what it is in the climate that is making it more difficult for women,” Bostwick said.

“It may be hard to feel like you belong when you don’t see other women around you. There may be subtle discrimination. We don’t know. But it highlights the fact that women need support, particularly if they are the only ones entering a doctoral class. They need to know about resources that could help them, particularly in that first key year.”

The research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Ewing Marion Kauffman and Alfred P. Sloan foundations.

Zebrafish begin life as transparent embryos, with three types of pigment cells on their skin. As they develop, the pigment cells somehow manage to organize themselves almost without fail into the stripes we all know.

Now researchers have developed a mathematical model that may explain the key role that one of those pigment cells plays in making sure each stripe ends up exactly where it belongs on the fish.

“It’s amazing that you have these individual cells that can sort themselves into these reliable patterns,” said Alexandria Volkening, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University’s Mathematical Biosciences Institute.

“The cells move around on the skin to create stripes. It’s like individual birds that know how to flock together and fly in formation.”

This new model suggests that one of the pigment cell types – called iridophores – leads the process of cell organization. These cells provide redundancies in the cell interaction process that ensures that if one interaction fails, another one can take over.

The result is that zebrafish get their stripes, even when some of the cellular processes go wrong, she said.

Volkening conducted the research with Bjorn Sandstede, professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. Their study was published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Until recently, almost all research on zebrafish stripes focused on the other two pigment cells: the black cells (called melanophores) and the yellow cells (called xanthophores). It wasn’t until 2013 that biologists discovered that iridophores also played a role.

The role of iridophores is definitely vital: Some mutations of zebrafish that don’t have iridophores develop spots instead of stripes.

“In our mathematical model, we use what we know about the interactions of the other two cell types to explain what drives iridophore behavior. We found that we could predict what iridophores would do in a way that matches up well with what biologists have observed in zebrafish,” she said.

Researchers have known that iridophores change their shape in carefully orchestrated patterns on the skin of zebrafish, and the changes in shape instruct the other two types of cells on where to go in ways that result in stripes.

The model explains what drives these shape changes.

The model showed, not surprisingly, that the process is extremely complex, Volkening said. But the complexity is necessary to build redundancy into the process. The researchers found that they could reduce the complexity in the model in some ways, and the zebrafish would still develop stripes.

“We think that is because iridophores are getting their signals from multiple places. If one interaction fails, there is another that can take its place,” she said.

“Because of the redundancies, you can remove some interactions, and still get stripes. They’re not perfect stripes, but they are similar.”

However, there are cases when the process breaks down so much that stripes no longer form. That occurs in some mutations of zebrafish. Volkening said the model can account for these mutations, which adds to the likelihood that the model is correct.

“The biological discovery of the role of iridophores was a real paradigm shift in how we thought zebrafish stripes were created. This led to a lot of open questions, and our mathematical model provides an explanation for how iridophores behave on the fish skin,” she said.

“We show that the complex interactions of these cells may be important for reliable stripe formation, but also key to why zebrafish have stripes but related fish have different patterns.”

Researchers gave 506 black youths in Columbus smartphones that tracked their locations for a week and asked the participants to rate how safe they felt (among other questions) five times per day.

Results showed that African American boys felt less safe even in areas that were only modestly more white than where they usually spent time, said Christopher Browning, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

“It doesn’t have to be a majority white neighborhood for African American boys to feel more threatened,” Browning said. “It just has to be more white than what they typically encounter.”

When outside their own neighborhoods, black teens in the study visited areas that were, on average, 13 percent more white.

Unlike boys, black girls did not report feeling significantly less safe in whiter areas.

Browning presented the research Aug. 13 in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

The results are consistent with the hypothesis that young black males expect increased scrutiny, surveillance and even direct targeting when they are in white areas, according to Browning.

“We’ve seen a lot of stories in the media lately about the police being called on black people going about their business in white areas,” he said.

“This may help explain why black youth felt more threatened in parts of town where they were exposed to more white people.”

Data for the study came from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study, which Browning leads. The AHDC is examining the lives of 1,405 representative youths living in 184 neighborhoods in Franklin County, Ohio. This includes Columbus and its suburbs.

This particular study involved 506 black youths aged 11 to 17 when the study was done from 2014 to 2016. They carried a smartphone with a GPS function that reported their location every 30 seconds. Five times a day they were sent a mini-survey to answer on their phones. By the end of the study, the researchers had collected 7,398 of these surveys.

In one question, participants were asked to rate on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) if the place they were currently at was a safe place to be.

Participants reported either strongly agreeing or agreeing that they were in a safe place about 91 percent of the time. That makes sense, Browning said, because the teens reported being at home about 71 percent of the time when they received the survey.

Much of the research that examines safety among black youth focuses on the neighborhood they live in. But this research suggests that the immediate neighborhood may not be the most important area to focus on, he said.

What seemed to matter was how the places they visited differed from the areas where they spent most of their time.

Black boys felt less safe when they were in neighborhoods that were significantly poorer than ones they generally frequented, as well as in neighborhoods that were whiter.

“Part of the experience for black kids is having to leave their home neighborhoods to go to places that might not be as welcoming,” Browning said.

“They are typically going to places with amenities like restaurants and movie theaters that may not be available in their neighborhoods. And these places are probably going to be whiter than the places they live.”

The findings were similar for African American boys no matter where they lived in the Columbus area.

“Even black boys who were regularly exposed to integrated neighborhoods felt less safe when they went to white-dominated areas,” he said.

Although African American girls in this study didn’t report feeling less safe in whiter areas, Browning said that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t experiencing negative effects.

It may be that there are different features of neighborhoods not picked up in this study, such as the number of men in the immediate vicinity, that may affect whether black girls felt safe in a particular location, he said.

Browning, who is a member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute and Institute for Population Research, co-authored the study with Ohio State colleagues Catherine Calder, professor of statistics; Bethany Boettner, senior research associate at the IPR; Jodi Ford, associate professor of nursing; and Lesley Schneider and Jake Tarrence, graduate students in sociology.

This research was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development, and the William T. Grant Foundation.

New research has uncovered the genetic details of microbes found in fracking wells. Not only do a wide array of bacteria and viruses thrive in these crevices created by hydraulic fracturing – they also have the power to produce methane, according to a study led by scientists at The Ohio State University and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That means it’s possible that the tiny life forms could create more energy – and from a different source – than the fracking companies are going after in the first place.

“Energy companies spend a lot of money and resources trying to get rid of life in these systems,” she said.On the other hand, the microbes found in samples from wells in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania could point to potential problems from an industry standpoint – they could prove corrosive, toxic or otherwise problematic, said the study’s lead author, Kelly Wrighton, an assistant professor of microbiology at Ohio State.

Hydraulic fracturing involves forcing open fissures in rocks deep in the earth by introducing high-pressure liquid and other components, including sand and chemicals, to extract oil or gas. Chemicals, stabilizers and water injected into the wells are undoubtedly contributing to the microbial diversity within them, the researchers said.

This was the first study to look at microbes from multiple sites in a controlled environment, and presented a rare scientific opportunity, said study co-author Michael Wilkins, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State.

The findings detailed in the study will inform the fracking industry, environmentalists and others. But they also have potential implications much farther from home.“These wells are so deep and hard to sample – access to the liquid in the wells offered us a unique opportunity to understand how these microbes make a living in these briny, high-pressure, high-temperature conditions,” Wilkins said.

“Finding life in these rocky, salty, hard-to-survive conditions would not be dissimilar to finding life on another planet,” said Wrighton, who recently applied for a NASA grant relative to that pursuit.

“If we want to think about what life would be like if it could exist on Mars, this is probably a pretty good place to start.”

Previous studies of fracking wells had documented the presence of some microbes and highlighted their ability to make methane, but didn’t offer detailed information about how complex the communities are and how they interact, said study co-author Mikayla Borton, an environmental science graduate student in Wrighton’s lab.

Those answers came from taking 40 samples from five fracking wells into the lab, manipulating the environment to “draw out” microbes that wouldn’t have been identified in a basic field experiment and conducting genomic analyses.

The researchers also added a compound called glycine betaine to the samples and tracked gas release over time, confirming that, when prompted, the microbes produced methane.

“It’s really important to know what these organisms can do – to grasp their genomic potential and metabolic interactions – and figure out what impact that might have on the ecosystem,” Borton said.

“We found here that multiple wells have similar microorganisms, which are capable of producing methane. In theory, that could mean that stimulating the microbial community in some way could increase energy yields. That’s not been done in shale yet, but it’s done in other systems, including in coal mining,” she said.

Furthermore, the microbes found in the fracking mines have parallels with microbes found in other protein-rich ecosystems, including the human gut and soil, Borton said.

“What we learn about these fracking microbes could have the potential to help answer questions about human health – including how plaque forms in our arteries when we have cardiovascular disease,” she said.

The study was a collaboration between Ohio State and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory and Joint Genome Institute. Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Rebecca Daly, Susan Welch, Julie Sheets, David Morgan and David Cole.

The research was supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Conditions on Earth make it extremely difficult to detect this mysterious particle, which is why discovering it took the world’s single largest machine — the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) — and thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries.

Eager for more answers about the deep hidden structure of nature, physicists at CERN have been searching nonstop for further clues about the Higgs boson and how it interacts with other particles.

Years of data and trillions of high-energy particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) later, victory was reached once again this month with a discovery that links the Higgs boson and the top quark — an interaction that Brian Winer, professor and chair of the Department of Physics, has been searching for since before the Higgs was proven to exist.

Winer and several other Ohio State researchers played a principal role in the search for this remarkably rare event through their collaboration on the CMS experiment at the LHC, which published the new results on June 4 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“The top quark is the heaviest of all the quarks, and because the Higgs boson gives mass to other fundamental particles, the theory predicts it should interact quite strongly with the top quark,” Winer explained.

To test this connection, scientists looked for evidence of a unique case in which the Higgs boson is produced along with a top quark and an antitop quark in the same collision (called ttH production).

“Of all the Higgs bosons that are produced, only 1 percent are produced in this way,” said Tony Lefeld, a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics who was part of Winer’s CMS research group. “We have to collide things billions or trillions of times just to get a few collisions that generate this combination.”

And the rapidly decaying nature of these particles means that ttH production can’t actually be observed — it must be measured by working backward through a complicated chain reaction. On top of that, many other kinds of collisions produce similar end results.

“There are many other types of processes that can occur that might fool us into thinking that they’re ttH,” said Winer, adding that he and his team used machine learning techniques to help them sift through the colossal data sets.

Their results — supplemented by CERN’s ATLAS experiment and the work of thousands of physicists across the globe — provide enough evidence to verify the interaction between the Higgs and the top quark.

To determine how strong the interaction is — and if it fits into the overarching theory of fundamental particles called the Standard Model — “we have to measure a lot more of these and get a better idea of how frequently they happen,” Lefeld said.

“If we make a detailed measurement and it doesn’t come out quite right, that could be an indication of some new particle that’s coming into play that we didn’t anticipate,” Winer said.

Both the CMS and ATLAS experiments will continue collecting data until the end of the year, when they shut down for upgrades. Regardless of whether new findings are made in that time, this latest advance is a great step forward in decoding the behavior of the elusive Higgs boson.

“There are a lot of questions that the Standard Model can’t answer, like dark matter and dark energy,” Lefeld said. “There is new physics out there just waiting to be discovered.”

Ohio State professors Stan Durkin, Chris Hill and Richard Hughes; postdocs Wuming Luo and Darren Puigh; and graduate students Sean Flowers and Geoff Smith also contributed to this research and the CMS experiment. Ohio State’s Antonio Boveia; K.K. Gan; and Harris Kagan contributed to the ATLAS experiment. 

Detecting patterns is an important part of how humans learn and make decisions. Now, researchers have seen what is happening in people’s brains as they first find patterns in information they are presented.

Findings showed that the brain processes pattern learning in a different way from another common way that people learn, called probabilistic learning.

Researchers showed study participants 50 series of 12 images that included various combinations of three photos – a hand, a face and a landscape – sometimes in a pattern and sometimes in a random order. Participants were in an MRI machine that showed what parts of their brain were active as they chose what photo they thought was coming up next.

“We could see what parts of the brain were activated when participants figured out that there was a pattern – or realized that there was no pattern,” said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University.

Humans try to detect patterns in their environment all the time, Konovalov said, because it makes learning easier. For example, if you are given driving directions in an unfamiliar city, you can try to memorize each turn. But if you see a pattern – for example, turn left, then right, then left, then right – it will be easier to remember.Krajbich conducted the research with Arkady Konovalov, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich who received his PhD at Ohio State. The study appears in the journal Neuron.

“We realized that not much was known about how humans figure out these rules,” Konovalov said.

The study involved 26 adults. Each photo they were shown began as a scrambled image that was revealed over a period of three seconds.

They hit a button as soon as they thought they knew which one of the three images was being presented. The object was to select which image was being shown as quickly as possible. Participants earned money for their correct answers and the faster they responded, the more they earned.

“If they don’t know what image is coming next, they have to wait a while and that is costing them money,” Krajbich said. “But once they figured out a pattern, they responded more quickly and we could see how that was reflected in their brains.”

Scientists had long studied a different kind of learning model, which they call probabilistic.

In the probabilistic model, people learn by determining the probability of an event happening after some other event. For example, you might learn that your favorite sports team usually wins two out of three of its games after a loss.

But that model doesn’t explain pattern learning, Krajbich said. With patterns, you know that a particular event is going to happen at a specific point in time.

“People in our study aren’t just predicting the odds of which photo will show up next. They are learning patterns and developing rules that guide their decision and make them faster and more accurate,” Konovalov said.

Probabilistic and pattern learning differ in how they engage the brain, Krajbich said.

In this study, the researchers found different parts of the brain were active depending on two kinds of uncertainty that the participants faced.

One kind of uncertainty was the question of which image was coming next. Findings showed, not surprisingly, that the same parts of the brain were involved for this task that earlier studies had found were involved in probabilistic learning, Krajbich said.

The other kind of uncertainty concerned whether there was a pattern in the images presented. As the participants worked out this question, a different part of the brain – the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – was activated.

This part of the brain has been shown in other research to be associated with reward.

“One interpretation is that people may be getting a sense of reward for figuring out whether there is a pattern or not. We don’t know that for sure yet, but it is plausible,” Krajbich said.

The hippocampus was another part of the brain that was particularly active when participants were figuring out patterns. “We found that people who had more hippocampal activity were faster learners,” Krajbich said.

Overall, the study showed that pattern learning is treated differently in the brain from probabilistic learning.

“The brain is keeping track of more things than we previously thought,” Krajbich said. “It isn’t just about predicting what is coming next. It is looking for rules to help predict better and faster.”