Ultima, as the flyby target is affectionately called by the New Horizons team, is orbiting in the heart of our solar system’s Kuiper Belt, far beyond Neptune. The Kuiper Belt — a collection of icy bodies ranging in size from dwarf planets like Pluto to smaller planetesimals like Ultima Thule (pronounced “ultima toolee”) and even smaller bodies like comets — are believed to be the building blocks of planets.

Ultima’s nearly circular orbit indicates it originated at its current distance from the Sun. Scientists find its birthplace important for two reasons. First, because that means Ultima is an ancient sample of this distant portion of the solar system. Second, because temperatures this far from the Sun are barely above absolute zero — mummifying temperatures that preserves Kuiper Belt objects — they are essentially time capsules of the ancient past.

Marc Buie, New Horizons co-investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and members of the New Horizons science team discovered Ultima using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. The object is so far and faint in all telescopes, little is known about the world beyond its location and orbit. In 2016, researchers determined it had a red color. In 2017, a NASA campaign using ground-based telescopes traced out its size — just about 20 miles (30 kilometers) across — and irregular shape when it passed in front of a star, an event called a “stellar occultation.”

From its brightness and size, New Horizons team members have calculated Ultima’s reflectivity, which is only about 10 percent, or about as dark as garden dirt. Beyond that, nothing else is known about it — basic facts like its rotational period and whether or not it has moons are unknown.

“All that is about to dramatically change on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, also of SwRI. “New Horizons will map Ultima, map its surface composition, determine how many moons it has and find out if it has rings or even an atmosphere. It will make other studies, too, such as measuring Ultima’s temperature and perhaps even its mass. In the space of one 72-hour period, Ultima will be transformed from a pinpoint of light — a dot in the distance — to a fully explored world. It should be breathtaking!”

“New Horizons is performing observations at the frontier of planetary science,” said Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, “and the entire team looks forward to unveiling the most distant and pristine object ever explored during a spacecraft flyby.”

“From Ultima’s orbit, we know that it is the most primordial object ever explored. I’m excited to see the surface features of this small world, particularly the craters on the surface,” said Deputy Project Scientist Cathy Olkin, of SwRI. “Young craters could provide a window to see the composition of the subsurface of Ultima. Also by counting the number and impactors that have hit Ultima, we can learn about the number of small objects in the outer solar system.”

The New Horizons spacecraft is on course to fly by Ultima on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1, at 12:33 a.m. EST. For a listing of flyby programming and where to watch it online, visit the New Horizons website at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Where-to-Watch.php.

How the brain does this is a mystery. Understanding how facial recognition works has great value — perhaps particularly for those whose brains process information in ways that make eye contact challenging, including people with autism. Helping people tap into this flow of social cues could be transformational.

A new study of facial “fixation” led by Nicolas Davidenko, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, boosts our insights considerably.

“Looking at the eyes allows you to gather much more information,” said Davidenko. “It’s a real advantage.”

By contrast, the inability to make eye contact has causal effects. “It impairs your facial processing abilities and puts you at a real social disadvantage,” he said. People who are reluctant to make eye contact may also be misperceived as disinterested, distracted, or aloof, he noted.

Scientists have known for decades that when we look at a face, we tend to focus on the left side of the face we’re viewing, from the viewer’s perspective. Called the “left-gaze bias,” this phenomenon is thought to be rooted in the brain, the right hemisphere of which dominates the face-processing task.

Researchers also know that we have a terrible time “reading” a face that’s upside down. It’s as if our neural circuits become scrambled, and we are challenged to grasp the most basic information. Much less is known about the middle ground, how we take in faces that are rotated or slightly tilted¬.

“We take in faces holistically, all at once — not feature by feature,” said Davidenko. “But no one had studied where we look on rotated faces.”

Davidenko used eye-tracking technology to get the answers, and what he found surprised him: The left-gaze bias completely vanished and an “upper eye bias” emerged, even with a tilt as minor as 11 degrees off center.

“People tend to look first at whichever eye is higher,” he said. “A slight tilt kills the left-gaze bias that has been known for so long. That’s what’s so interesting. I was surprised how strong it was.”

Perhaps more importantly for people with autism, Davidenko found that the tilt leads people to look more at the eyes, perhaps because it makes them more approachable and less threatening. “Across species, direct eye contact can be threatening,” he said. “When the head is tilted, we look at the upper eye more than either or both eyes when the head is upright. I think this finding could be used therapeutically.”

Davidenko is eager to explore two aspects of these findings: whether people with autism are more comfortable engaging with images of rotated faces, and whether tilts help facilitate comprehension during conversation.

The findings may also be of value for people with amblyopia, or “lazy eye,” which can be disconcerting to others. “In conversation, they may want to tilt their head so their dominant eye is up,” he said. “That taps into our natural tendency to fix our gaze on that eye.”

The effect is strongest when the rotation is 45 degrees. The upper-eye bias is much weaker at a 90-degree rotation. “Ninety degrees is too weird,” said Davidenko. “People don’t know where to look, and it changes their behavior totally.”

Davidenko’s findings appear in the latest edition of the journal Perception, in an article titled “The Upper Eye Bias: Rotated Faces Draw Fixations to the Upper.” His coauthors are Hema Kopalle, a graduate student in the Department of Neurosciences at UC San Diego who was an undergraduate researcher on the project, and the late Bruce Bridgeman, professor emeritus of psychology at UCSC.

Antibiotic resistant superbugs could kill up to 1.3 million people in Europe by 2050, according to recent research.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) describes the problem as “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.”

The new strain of bacteria was discovered by a team based in Swansea University Medical School, made up of researchers from Wales, Brazil, Iraq and Northern Ireland.

They have named the new strain Streptomyces sp. myrophorea.

The soil they analysed originated from an area of Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, which is known as the Boho Highlands. It is an area of alkaline grassland and the soil is reputed to have healing properties.

The search for replacement antibiotics to combat multi-resistance has prompted researchers to explore new sources, including folk medicines: a field of study known as ethnopharmacology. They are also focusing on environments where well-known antibiotic producers like Streptomyces can be found.

One of the research team, Dr Gerry Quinn, a previous resident of Boho, County Fermanagh, had been aware of the healing traditions of the area for many years.

Traditionally a small amount of soil was wrapped up in cotton cloth and used to heal many ailments including toothache, throat and neck infections. Interestingly, this area was previously occupied by the Druids, around 1500 years ago, and Neolithic people 4000 years ago.

The main findings of the research were that the newly-identified strain of Streptomyces:

• Inhibited the growth of four of the top six multi-resistant pathogens identified by the WHO as being responsible for healthcare-associated infections: Vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Klebsiella pneumonia, and Carbenepenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumanii

• Inhibited both gram positive and gram negative bacteria, which differ in the structure of their cell wall; usually gram negative bacteria are more resistant to antibiotics

  It is not yet clear which component of the new strain prevents the growth of the pathogens, but the team are already investigating this.

  Professor Paul Dyson of Swansea University Medical School said:

  “This new strain of bacteria is effective against 4 of the top 6 pathogens that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA. Our discovery is an important step forward in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

  Our results show that folklore and traditional medicines are worth investigating in the search for new antibiotics. Scientists, historians and archaeologists can all have something to contribute to this task. It seems that part of the answer to this very modern problem might lie in the wisdom of the past.”

  Dr Gerry Quinn from the research team said:

  “The discovery of antimicrobial substances from Streptomyces sp.myrophorea will help in our search for new drugs to treat multi-resistant bacteria, the cause of many dangerous and lethal infections.

  We will now concentrate on the purification and identification of these antibiotics. We have also discovered additional antibacterial organisms from the same soil cure which may cover a broader spectrum of multi-resistant pathogens.”

  The research was published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

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Materials provided by Swansea University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Our brains are continuously bombarded with information from the senses, yet our level of vigilance to such input varies, allowing us to selectively focus on one conversation and not another.

Professor Stephen Williams of the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ explains, “If we want to give our full concentration, something happens in the brain to enable us to focus and filter out distractions.”

“There must be a mechanism that signals the thing we want to focus on.”

However, this mechanism is not well understood, he says.

Research has shown that the electrical activity of the neocortex of the brain changes, when we focus our attention. Neurons stop signalling in sync with one another and start firing out of sync.

This is helpful, says Williams, because it allows individual neurons to respond to sensory information in different ways. Thus, you can focus on a car speeding down the road or on what a friend is saying in a crowded room.

It’s known that the cholinergic system in the brain plays an important role in triggering this desynchronization.

The cholinergic system consists of clusters of special neurons that synthesise and release a signalling molecule called acetylcholine, he explains, and these clusters make far reaching connections throughout the brain.

Not only does this cholinergic system act like a master switch, but mounting evidence suggests it also enables the brain to identify which sensory input is the most salient — i.e. worthy of attention — at any given moment and then shine a spotlight on that input.

“The cholinergic system broadcasts to the brain, ‘this thing is really important to be vigilant to’,” says Williams.

He adds that the cholinergic system has been proposed to have a far-reaching impact on our cognitive abilities.

“Destruction of the cholinergic system in animals profoundly degrades cognition, and the formation of memory,” he says.

“Importantly, in humans a progressive degeneration of the cholinergic system occurs in devastating diseases that blunt cognition and memory, such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

But precisely which neurons in the cortex are being targeted by this master switch and how it’s able to influence their function was unknown.

Williams and QBI researcher Lee Fletcher wondered if layer 5 B-pyramidal neurons, the ‘output’ neurons of the neocortex, might be involved, because they are intimately involved in how we perceive the world.

“The output neurons of the neocortex perform computations that are thought to underlie our perception of the world,” says Williams.

Williams and Fletcher wanted to know if the cholinergic system is able to influence the activity of these output neurons.

Using a technique called optogenetics, they modified neurons in the cholinergic system in the brains of mice so that they could be activated with a flash of blue light, triggering a sudden release of acetylcholine.

This allowed the researchers to closely monitor the interaction between the cholinergic system and the output neurons. They discovered that if the output neurons were not currently active, not much happened.

But when those neurons received excitatory input to their dendrites, the cholinergic system was able to massively increase their activity.

“It’s as if the cholinergic system has given a ‘go’ signal,” says Fletcher, enabling the output neurons of the neocortex to powerfully respond.

Importantly, this change was selective, and only apparent when excitatory input was being processed in the dendrites of the ‘output’ neurons.

“We have known for some time that the dendrites of the output neurons of the neocortex only become active when animals are actively performing a behaviour, and that this activity is correlated with perception and task performance,” says Williams.

This new work demonstrates that the cholinergic system is critical to this transition in mice and rats, allowing the output neurons to perform computations in a state-dependent manner.

“We suggest that this switch also occurs in the human neocortex, allowing us to rapidly switch our state of vigilance and attention,” says Williams.

“Our work therefore provides important insight into how the progressive degeneration of the cholinergic system in disease blunts human cognition.”