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Psychologists call it the dark triad: an intersection of three of the most malevolent tendencies of human nature – psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.

But the truth goes deeper, and darker. There’s also egoism, sadism, spitefulness, and more. And behind this rogues gallery of all our worst inclinations on the surface, a central, common core of human darkness lies, researchers say.

In a 2018 study, psychologists from Germany and Denmark mapped this driving force behind all our darkest impulses and gave it a name. Meet D, the newly identified Dark Factor of Personality.

Precisely controlling sparks allows for their use in a wide variety of applications.


For the first time, scientists have found that electric sparks can be guided using ultrasonic waves. A recent study by researchers from Spain, Finland, and Canada uncovered the way in which ultrasonic waves transport electricity through air.

Researchers revealed that this guidance occurs because the sparks heat up the air, which expands and lowers its density.

The hot air is then guided by ultrasonic waves into regions where the sound intensity is higher, and the next sparks follow these regions of lighter air because of its lower breakdown voltage, according to researchers.

The enzyme PKMzeta is crucial for the maintenance of long-term memories, but a closely related enzyme provides a back-up should PKMzeta fail, thus explaining the controversy over why deleting the gene for PKMzeta may not appear to impair memory.

GitHub has announced a slew of updates for Copilot, while also giving a glimpse into a more agentic future for its AI-powered pair programmer.

Among the notable updates includes a feature called Vision for Copilot, which allows users to attach a screenshot, photo, or diagram to a chat, with Copilot generating the interface, code, and alt text to bring it to life.

So for example, someone on a marketing team could take a screenshot of a web page and illustrate some changes they want made to that page. Rather than requesting such changes via text prompts, it’s now possible to upload an image and just ask Copilot to implement the changes as indicated in the file.

We review the rapid recent progress in single-photon sources based on multiplexing multiple probabilistic photon-creation events. Such multiplexing allows higher single-photon probabilities and lower contamination from higher-order photon states. We study the requirements for multiplexed sources and compare various approaches to multiplexing using different degrees of freedom.