Tag "IQ"

COVID-19 came as an unexpected challenge for humanity. Countries adopted different, sometimes diametrically opposed approaches to minimising the pandemic's impact: from hard lockdowns to no restrictions at all, as in Sweden. It was only last week that China began to relax its zero-tolerance policy. Researchers of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences have identified a few factors which tend to have the greatest impact on the spread of COVID-19—in Russia, such factors include ambient humidity and temperatures, population mobility, the share of internal migrants in the local population, and household incomes. The study findings are published in Population and Economics.

Researchers from HSE University and the Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry have developed a machine learning model that can predict the word about to be uttered by a subject based on their neural activity recorded with a small set of minimally invasive electrodes. The paper 'Speech decoding from a small set of spatially segregated minimally invasive intracranial EEG electrodes with a compact and interpretable neural network' has been published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. The research was financed by a grant from the Russian Government as part of the 'Science and Universities' National Project.

A study by the HSE Centre for Language and Brain has confirmed the role of the corpus callosum in language lateralisation, ie the distribution of language processing functions between the brain's hemispheres. The authors came up with an innovative language task for their study subjects and applied advanced neuroimaging methods to the data collected. A paper on their findings has been published in PLoS ONE.  The research was financed by a grant from the Russian government as part of the 'Science and Universities' National Project.

Russian researchers from HSE University and the Russian Academy of Sciences Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds have come up with a new method of enhancing the chemical reaction involved in producing gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) analogues used in sedative drugs. Adding fluoride to the catalyst more than doubled the yield of the pure product and increased the total reaction yield by 2.5 times. This approach is expected to make the production of certain drug components more efficient and less costly. The study has been published in the Journal of Organic Chemistry.

According to researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, processing a word which is markedly different in style from the rest of the sentence uses the same brain mechanisms as making sense of a semantically incongruent word. These mechanisms reflect the brain’s efforts to process an unexpected term. The study findings have been published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. The research was financed by a grant from the Russian Government as part of the 'Science and Universities' National Project.

Researchers from HSE University and the Russian Technological University (RTU MIREA) have developed an intelligent system to automate software testing on a variety of platforms. Its computer vision feature is capable of recognising elements in a graphical user interface even after a redesign. The details are published in the Journal of the Siberian Federal University.

About a third of Russians with higher education do not work in the field that they studied, with this indicator being highest in agriculture and service. Researchers from the HSE Laboratory for Labour Market Studies, together with their colleagues from Portugal, have found out that this job-education mismatch results in a salary reduction of between 7 and 14%. The study was published in the Journal of Education and Work.

Having studied the 20th century revolutionary processes, Andrey Korotayev (HSE), Leonid Grinin (HSE) and Anton Grinin (MSU) have put together an extensive evidence base, proposed a new typology of revolutions and revolutionary waves, and introduced the concept of 'analogues of revolutions'. Their study '20th Century Revolutions: Characteristics, Types, and Waves' is the follow-up to an earlier paper published in Russian. The new findings are presented in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.

A team of Russian scientists including HSE MIEM researchers have used superconcentrated salt solutions to produce effective water-based electrolytes that demonstrate high conductivity and electrochemical stability and require lower amounts of non-toxic salts, making the batteries safer and less expensive than classical non-aqueous ones. The study is published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

Researchers at the HSE Graduate School of Business have created a model for calculating the indicator of subjective well-being, based on the analysis of 7.2 million posts on the Odnoklassniki social network. They found that the lowest level of observed subjective well-being can be registered in the morning, and the highest can be found in the late evening. The results of the study were published in the Mathematics journal.