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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 4, 2023 at 9:04am

‘Remarkable’ AI tool designs mRNA vaccines

An artificial-intelligence (AI) software tool optimizes the gene sequences found in mRNA vaccines. The new methodology was developed by the California branch of Baidu Research, the AI-research arm of Beijing-based search-engine behemoth Baidu. It could help to create jabs that are more potent and stable than standard ones. The software borrows techniques from computational linguistics to design mRNA sequences with more-intricate shapes and structures than those used in current vaccines. Already, the tool has been used to optimize at least one authorized vaccine: a COVID-19 shot called SW-BIC-213.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06127-z?utm_source=Natur...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 3, 2023 at 9:19am

Cybersickness more likely to affect women

 Researchers in psychology and engineering found women experience cybersickness with virtual reality headsets more often than men. Their ongoing work explores why this difference exists and options to help individuals adapt.

Gender discrepancies in cybersickness may not seem that important when it's related to video games and other forms of entertainment.

But it's still a problem, and when VR gets to the point where it's a bigger part of job training or education in a classroom, it's even more important to make sure people can access this technology. If not, a lot of people are going to get left out, and there could be a backlash.

Like motion sickness, cybersickness can occur when there's a mismatch between visual motion and body motion. Symptoms, including nausea, dizziness, headaches and eye fatigue, usually resolve quickly after removing the headset. But in severe cases, they sometimes last for hours.

Women reported experiencing more motion sickness and screen-based sickness than men, and this increased susceptibility is part of the reason that women experience more cybersickness.

The  researchers will continue to investigate the causes of cybersickness and methods to help individuals have a positive experience with VR.

Jonathan W. Kelly et al, Gender differences in cybersickness: Clarifying confusion and identifying paths forward, 2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/VRW58643.2023.00067

Taylor A. Doty et al, Does interpupillary distance (IPD) relate to immediate cybersickness?, 2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/VRW58643.2023.00173

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 3, 2023 at 9:11am

When your house spreads gossip about you

More and more of the devices that we surround ourselves with on a daily basis are connected to the internet. This makes them not only smart, but also vulnerable to cyberattacks and criminal acts.

Before long, we might have smart fridges that help us keep track of what foods are about to expire and when to shop. How could this be harmful? Who would be interested in the expiry date of your milk or monitoring your food inventory?

When you think about it, everyday objects in a modern smart home process a lot of data that you probably don't wish to share with all and sundry.

Your thermostat, for example, could give clues about when you are away from home. Your fitness equipment often stores health information about you and your family.

And as an American software developer recently demonstrated—your smart speaker may have security holes that allow eavesdropping on your private conversations.

In the wrong hands, this is information can be misused for everything from burglary to identity theft and extortion. Smart devices are increasingly finding their way into large companies and government institutions, a trend that does not exactly make the situation any less serious.

 Fartein Færøy et al, Automatic Verification and Execution of Cyber Attack on IoT Devices, Sensors (2023). DOI: 10.3390/s23020733

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 3, 2023 at 9:04am

'Explainable AI' can efficiently detect AR/VR cybersickness

Exposure to an augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) environment can cause people to experience cybersickness—a special type of motion sickness with symptoms ranging from dizziness to nausea—and existing research to mitigate the severity of the symptoms often relies upon a one-size-fits-all approach.

However, a team of researchers are working to develop a personalized approach to identifying cybersickness by focusing on the root causes, which can be different for every person.

Cybersickness is not generic. For instance, one simulation could trigger cybersickness in me while the same simulation may not cause cybersickness for someone else. 

One of the problems people typically face when wearing virtual reality or augmented reality headsets is the user experience can get bad after some time, including symptoms of nausea and vomiting, especially if the user is immersed in a virtual environment where a lot of motion is involved. It can depend on many factors, including a person's gender, age and experience.

Explainable AI is a great tool to help with this because typically machine learning or deep learning algorithms  can tell you what the prediction and the decision may be, whereas explainable AI can also tell the user how and why the AI made the decision. So, instead of imposing a static mitigation technique for all users, it will be more effective if we know why a particular person is developing cybersickness and give that person the right mitigation that they need. Explainable AI can help us do that without hindering the user experience.

This research was recently presented at three conferences for AR/VR research:

• "LiteVR: Interpretable and Lightweight Cybersickness Detection using Explainable AI" was presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference on March 25-29, 2023.
• "VR-LENS: Super Learning-based Cybersickness Detection and Explainable AI-Guided Deployment in Virtual Reality" was presented at the ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces on March 27-31, 2023.
• "TruVR: Trustworthy Cybersickness Detection using Explainable Machine Learning" was presented at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) Conference on October 17-21, 2022.

 TruVR: Trustworthy Cybersickness Detection using Explainable Machin...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 3, 2023 at 8:43am

'Zero plant extinction' is possible

Like animals, many plant species are struggling to adapt to a human-dominated planet. However, plants are often overlooked in conservation efforts, even though they are cheaper and easier to protect than animals and play a pivotal role in bolstering our food, fuel and medical systems. In a review published in the journal Trends in Plant Science on May 2,  ecologists suggest an approach for preventing all future land plant extinctions across the globe which includes training more plant experts, building an online "metaherbarium," and creating "microreserves."

An estimated 21%–48% of vascular plant species—which includes flowering plants and trees—could go extinct, primarily due to changes in land use and unsustainable harvesting practices. While it's potentially possible to prevent the extinction of all 382,000 currently known plant species, no single solution works for all species.

Conservation plans can take many forms and can be carried out either in a plant's natural habitat, often in the form of a nature reserve, or in a curated environment like a botanical garden. Sometimes a combination works best. For example, a microreserve—a tiny piece of protected land designed to get around space constraints—could be coupled with a supply of frozen seeds to fall back on if necessary.

Conservation of self-sustaining wild populations in protected areas is the ideal. This allows continued evolution in response to ongoing environmental change (such as climate change, and new pests and diseases) and the continued support of mutualists, herbivores, and pathogens, some of which may face extinction without their only plant hosts.

 Richard T. Corlett, Achieving zero extinction for land plants, Trends in Plant Science (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2023.03.019

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 2, 2023 at 1:39pm

However, they found that sometimes the machinery translating the CDC20 RNA into protein skips the normal starting point, and begins following the instructions from one of two unofficial starting points farther down the RNA sequence, which causes it to create alternative short versions of the molecule. These short versions vary from the full-length protein in one crucial way: they are not inhibited by the SAC. This means that the cell cannot stop them from activating the APC/C, even in the presence of errors that should arrest cell division.

This difference between versions of CDC20 enables cells to set a timer for arrest. Early in cell division, the APC/C is most likely to be bound by full-length CDC20, because cells produce more of the full-length protein than the alternatives. This keeps the cells responsive to the signal to enter arrest.

As cells spend more time in arrest, they continue to produce all versions of CDC20, but they break down full-length CDC20 faster than the shorter versions. The ratio of full-length to short CDC20 shifts in favor of the short versions. Eventually, the ratio shifts enough that the APC/C is most likely to be bound by short CDC20, which means that the SAC can no longer inhibit it. At this point, the timer runs out: the cells activate the APC/C and escape arrest.

A cell's arrest timer is therefore determined by factors that affect its starting levels of full-length and short CDC20 and the speed at which it makes and breaks them down, such as what machinery the cell has active for translating RNA. These factors vary from cell type to cell type, so different cell types have different length timers.

Understanding how cells set their timers helps to explain why some cancer cells are better at resisting certain cancer drugs.

Tsang, MJ., Cheeseman, I.M. Alternative CDC20 translational isoforms tune mitotic arrest duration. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05943-7

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 2, 2023 at 1:37pm

A protein hidden in plain sight helps cells time their escape

When a cell is getting ready to divide, it needs to duplicate its DNA, which is divided among its chromosomes, and arrange the chromosomes so that each new cell gets one complete set. If the chromosomes get sorted incorrectly, the resulting cells with the wrong number or set can become dysfunctional, or even cancerous.

Because the risks are so severe, cells have evolved strong controls to ensure that upon division, each of the daughter cells has the correct chromosomes. If a cell's machinery detects errors while the cell is preparing to divide, division is paused until those errors are corrected.

However, if division gets paused for too long, a state called being in arrest, the cell will eventually die. To escape this fate, every type of cell has a different timer for how long it will stay in arrest before escaping. When the timer runs out, cells exit the process of cell division without completing it, and resume life with double the normal number of chromosomes.

Researchers have wondered what mechanisms determine how long a cell will remain in arrest and how they manage to escape it. The question is particularly important in the context of cancer cells, which can use early escapes from arrest to evolve—changing their sets of chromosomes—and resist common cancer drugs.

New research identifies a way in which cells set their timers for arrest. The key player is a previously undiscovered variant of a known protein, CDC20.

What they discovered, as published in Nature on April 26, is that cells produce both full-length and shortened, alternative versions of CDC20, and that the shifting ratio of these versions determines when cells will escape arrest.

Alternative proteins like these are very hard to find, because cells don't make them in the way that researchers and common analytic tools typically look for, but researchers are coming to appreciate their prevalence and importance to biology.

CDC20—the full-length protein, that is—has a well-known role in cell division. If no issues are detected at the checkpoint before chromosomes are pulled apart, then CDC20 binds to and activates a molecular complex called the anaphase-promoting complex (APC/C), which in turn initiates the end stages of cell division. If an issue is detected, then a mechanism called the spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC) inhibits CDC20, arresting cell division.

The researchers discovered that CDC20 plays another important role at this checkpoint, thanks to its previously undetected alternatives. As a protein, CDC20 is assembled according to a genetic sequence contained in messenger RNA. 

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 2, 2023 at 12:12pm

Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people's minds

A new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity—while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story—into a continuous stream of text. The system developed by researchers might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.

The work relies in part on a transformer model, similar to the ones that power Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

Unlike other language decoding systems in development, this system does not require subjects to have surgical implants, making the process noninvasive. Participants also do not need to use only words from a prescribed list. Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining telling a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone.

The result is not a word-for-word transcript. Instead, researchers designed it to capture the gist of what is being said or thought, albeit imperfectly. About half the time, when the decoder has been trained to monitor a participant's brain activity, the machine produces text that closely (and sometimes precisely) matches the intended meanings of the original words.

 Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings, Nature Neuroscience (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-023-01304-9

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 1, 2023 at 12:00pm

Even Clouds Are Carrying Drug-Resistant Bacteria

For  researchers dark clouds on the horizon are potentially ominous not because they signal an approaching storm – but because they were found in a recent study to carry drug-resistant bacteria over long distances.

These bacteria usually live on the surface of vegetation like leaves, or in soil. It was found now that they are carried by the wind into the atmosphere and can travel long distances – around the world – at high altitudes in clouds.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004896972208...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 1, 2023 at 11:51am

cUSP - Conformable Ultrasound Sonophoresis Patch

Using bubbles, instead of needles to penetrate skin

Untangling Worm Blobs
Tiny California blackworms tangle themselves by the thousands to form ball-shaped blobs that allow them to execute a wide range of biological functions. But, while the worms tangle over a period of several minutes, they can untangle in milliseconds, escaping at the first sign of a threat from a predator.

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