Nathan Worcester

Senior Editor, Mind & Behavior and Technology

Nathan Worcester, based in Chicago, is the senior editor for Mind & Behavior and Technology for The Academic Times. Prior to that, Nathan wrote for various publications in Chicago. He has also worked as a technical writer for multiple law firms and served as managing editor of the New Art Examiner. He studied philosophy, history and English at the University of Chicago.

Brain scans show we interpret words in a sentence differently from the words themselves. (Unsplash/Brett Jordan)
Brain scans show we interpret words in a sentence differently from the words themselves. (Unsplash/Brett Jordan)Scientists from multiple universities and Facebook AI have used a deep artificial neural network to predict brain activation in people reading sentences, discovering that the activation patterns diverged from those associated with the words themselves.

There's a complex relationship between childhood abuse and adult eating disorders. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
There's a complex relationship between childhood abuse and adult eating disorders. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)Analyzing data from a large, longitudinal study, researchers have found that childhood maltreatment raises the risk of disordered eating among adult men and women — but the kind of disordered eating that maltreatment elicits may differ based on gender.

Scientists at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have created multiple new methods and systems for sleep monitoring, overcoming some limitations of previous approaches for tracking sleep disruptions with smartwatches or other wearables.

Many children at risk of mental health issues have little or no access to treatment. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Many children at risk of mental health issues have little or no access to treatment. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)In an analysis of nearly 12,000 American children, researchers found that about half of those children with mental health-related distress or at elevated risk of emotional and behavioral problems had no active clinical contact with behavioral health services — and young Black children were especially underserved.

New technology could defeat attempts to spoof facial recognition. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
New technology could defeat attempts to spoof facial recognition. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)Some of our most advanced facial-recognition systems can be thwarted by tactics out of a dystopian sci-fi movie: people using two-dimensional printouts of faces or realistic masks can trick those systems into thinking they've authenticated the right person. A Chinese and British team has tackled these so-called spoofing attacks, introducing a new two-stage framework for detecting them that fuses multiple types of data to identify fake faces.

South Korean researchers have created a novel framework for detecting deepfakes — images or videos that deceptively substitute one person's face for another's — as well as an accompanying dataset of fake images, generated by experts using Adobe Photoshop.

Researchers have used minuscule flakes of graphene oxide to disrupt a harmful form of plasticity in the amygdala region of the brain, overcoming post-traumatic stress disorder in an animal model of the mental health condition.

New discoveries point to a very different evolution pattern for the human brain. (CNRS Marc Jeannerod Institute of Cognitive Science, Lyon, France via AP)
New discoveries point to a very different evolution pattern for the human brain. (CNRS Marc Jeannerod Institute of Cognitive Science, Lyon, France via AP)Australian researchers have applied a new analytical method for brain imaging to the study of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, offering better insight into how their brains diverge from those without the disorder.

Researchers are using a simulation to learn more about how mammals use their whiskers. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Researchers are using a simulation to learn more about how mammals use their whiskers. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)An interdisciplinary team from Northwestern University has created a new model for studying how mammalian whiskers bend, offering insights that could help us better understand the sense of touch in both animals and humans.

Hearing aid technology is poised to take a leap forward. (Unsplash/Mark Paton)
Hearing aid technology is poised to take a leap forward. (Unsplash/Mark Paton)It's called the "cocktail party problem": In a crowded environment with many overlapping conversations, people with hearing aids often find it hard to pick out a single speaker. Scientists at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have proposed a solution, creating a new system to separate two simultaneous speakers while suppressing other noise that may aid tomorrow's cognitively controlled hearing aids.

A key autism screening guideline may have been misinterpreted for years. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
A key autism screening guideline may have been misinterpreted for years. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)"6+" or "Above six"? A simple error, apparently unnoticed for years, may have compromised a key autism screening guideline from the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

A cannabis derivative shows new promise in fighting tremors. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
A cannabis derivative shows new promise in fighting tremors. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)French and Danish researchers have taken us closer to understanding why specific compounds in cannabis might alleviate tremor disorders in some patients.