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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 12:58pm

The industry is awash with AI, from cameras to software like Photoshop.

This automation is increasingly blurring boundaries between a photograph and a piece of artwork.

The nature of AI is different to previous innovations, .

because the technology can learn and bring new elements beyond those recorded by film or sensor.

This brings opportunities but also "fundamental challenges around redefining what photography is, and how 'real' a photograph is.

What professional photographers are most concerned about, though, is the rise of AI tools that generate completely new images.

Source: 2023 AFP

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-camera-ai-told.html?utm_source=...

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Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 12:56pm

Cameras never lie. Really?

Ask AI, They do! 

The camera never lied... until AI told it to

An amateur photographer who goes by the name "ibreakphotos" decided to do an experiment on his Samsung phone last month to find out how a feature called "space zoom" actually works.

The feature, first released in 2020, claims a 100x zoom rate, and Samsung used sparkling clear images of the Moon in its marketing.

Ibreakphotos took his own pictures of the Moon—blurry and without detail—and watched as his phone added craters and other details.

The phone's artificial intelligence software was using data from its "training" on many other pictures of the Moon to add detail where there was none.

"The Moon pictures from Samsung are fake," he wrote, leading many to wonder whether the shots people take are really theirs anymore—or if they can even be described as photographs.

Samsung has defended the technology, saying it does not "overlay" images, and pointed out that users can switch off the function.

The firm is not alone in the race to pack its smartphone cameras with AI—Google's Pixel devices and Apple's iPhone have been marketing such features since 2016.

The AI can do all the things photographers used to labor over—tweaking the lighting, blurring backgrounds, sharpening eyes—without the user ever knowing.

But it can also transform backgrounds or simply wipe away people from the image entirely.

And the debate over AI is not limited to hobbyists on message boards—professional bodies are raising the alarm too.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 12:37pm

Graviton to photon conversion via parametric resonance: Physicists discover that gravity can create light

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation.

The physical concept of resonance surrounds us in everyday life. When you're sitting on a swing and want to go higher, you naturally start pumping your legs back and forth. You very quickly find the exact right rhythm to make the swing go higher. If you go off rhythm then the swing stops going higher. This particular kind of phenomenon is known in physics as a parametric resonance.

Your legs act as an external pumping mechanism. When they match the resonant frequency of the system, in this case your body sitting on a swing, they are able to transfer energy to the system making the swing go higher.

These kinds of resonances happen all over the place, and a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe. 

Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.

Normally gravitational waves are exceedingly weak. We have to build detectors that are capable of measuring distances less than the width of an atomic nucleus to find gravitational waves passing through the Earth. But researchers have pointed out that in the extremely early universe these gravitational waves may have become very strong.

And they may have even created standing wave patterns where the gravitational waves weren't traveling but the waves stood still, almost frozen in place throughout the cosmos. Since gravitational waves are literally waves of gravity, the places where the waves are the strongest represent an exceptional amount of gravitational energy.

The researchers found that this could have major consequences for the electromagnetic field existing in the early universe at that time. The regions of intense gravity may have excited the electro magnetic field enough to release some of its energy in the form of radiation, creating light.

This result gives rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the production of light from gravity alone. There's no situation in the present-day universe that could allow this process to happen, but the researchers have shown that the early universe was a far stranger place than we could possibly imagine.

Graviton to photon conversion via parametric resonance

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212686423000365...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 12:06pm

13 volcanoes seen from space

Have you ever wondered what a volcano looks like from space? Today, we’re counting down our picks of the most impressive volcanoes around the world – captured by satellites.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 11:58am

Identifying cancer genes' multiple personalities

Mutations in our genes can lead to severe problems, like colon or liver cancer. But cancer is very complex. Mutations in the same genes can lead to different subtypes of tumors in different people. Currently, scientists don't have a good way to produce such tumor subtypes for study in the lab.

Now researchers have created a new method to model certain liver cancer tumour subtypes using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9.

Genes contain the information our bodies need to create proteins. Highly similar proteins produced from the same gene are called isoforms. Different isoforms generate different tumours.  This process is known as exon skipping, where multiple parts of a gene are stitched together to make a different version of a protein.

Everyone thinks that cancer is just one type. But with different isoforms, you can end up with cancer subtypes that have different characteristics. That is why cancer is so difficult to understand and treat. 

Researchers now produced two distinct tumor subtypes by targeting a single section of the mouse gene, Ctnnb1, with CRISPR. The tool is mostly used to inhibit gene function. This is the first time CRISPR has been used to generate different cancer-causing gain-of-function mutations in mice. These mutations enhance protein activity to promote tumour growth. The team sequenced each tumor subtype to figure out which isoform was associated with the differences they observed.

Scientists produced two distinct tumor subtypes by targeting a single section of the mouse gene, Ctnnb1, with CRISPR. The tool is mostly used to inhibit gene function. This is the first time CRISPR has been used to generate different cancer-causing gain-of-function mutations in mice. These mutations enhance protein activity to promote tumour growth. The team sequenced each tumour subtype to figure out which isoform was associated with the differences they observed.

Next, to confirm that these isoforms actually caused the variances, they produced them in the mouse without using CRISPR. They found that they were indeed able to generate the two different tumor subtypes with their respective characteristics. Both of these liver tumour subtypes are also found in humans.

The mutations these researchers targeted can lead to colon and liver cancers. 

Targeting exon skipping has emerged as a potential therapeutic approach for treating cancer and other diseases.

This work gets closer to find a cure for these cancers.

Haiwei Mou et al, CRISPR ‐induced exon skipping of β‐catenin reveals tumorigenic mutants driving distinct subtypes of liver cancer, The Journal of Pathology (2023). DOI: 10.1002/path.6054

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 11:35am

Engineered plants produce sex perfume to trick pests and replace pesticides

By using precision gene engineering techniques, researchers at the Earlham Institute in Norwich have been able to turn tobacco plants into solar-powered factories for moth sex pheromones.

Critically, they've shown how the production of these molecules can be efficiently managed so as not to hamper normal plant growth.

Pheromones are complex chemicals produced and released by an organism as a means of communication. They allow members of the same species to send signals, which includes letting others know they're looking for love.

Farmers can hang pheromone dispersers among their crops to mimic the signals of female insects, trapping or distracting the males from finding a mate. Some of these molecules can be produced by chemical processes but chemical synthesis is often expensive and creates toxic byproducts.

Synthetic biology applies engineering principles to the building blocks of life, DNA. By creating genetic modules with the instructions to build new molecules, researchers  can turn a plant such as tobacco into a factory that only needs sunlight and water.

Synthetic biology can allow us to engineer plants to make a lot more of something they already produced, or we can provide the genetic instructions that allow them to build new biological molecules, such as medicines or these pheromones.

Now they have engineered the tobacco plant to produce  moth sex pheromones. 

The same plant has previously been engineered to produce ebola antibodies and even coronavirus-like particles for use in COVID vaccines.

The Group built new sequences of DNA in the lab to mimic the moth genes and introduced a few molecular switches to precisely regulate their expression, which effectively turns the manufacturing process on and off.

An important component of the new research was the ability to fine tune the production of the pheromones, as coercing plants to continuously build these molecules has its drawbacks: As researchers increase the efficiency, too much energy is diverted away from normal growth and development.

However, this new research provides a way to regulate gene expression with much more subtlety

In the lab, the team set about testing and refining the control of genes responsible for producing the mix of specific molecules that mimic the sex pheromones of moth species, including navel orange worm and cotton bollworm moths. They showed that copper sulfate could be used to finely tune the activity of the genes, allowing them to control both the timing and level of gene expression. This is particularly important as copper sulfate is a cheap and readily-available compound already approved for use in agriculture. They were even able to carefully control the production of different pheromone components, allowing them to tweak the cocktail to better suit specific moth species. The researchers  have shown they can control the levels of expression of each gene relative to the others.

Nicola Patron et al, Tunable control of insect pheromone biosynthesis in Nicotiana benthamiana, Plant Biotechnology (2023).

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 10:42am

Is there a limit to  scientists' capabilities? NO?!

Here is more evidence!

Scientists map gusty winds in a far-off neutron star system

An accretion disk is a colossal whirlpool of gas and dust that gathers around a black hole or a neutron star like cotton candy as it pulls in material from a nearby star. As the disk spins, it whips up powerful winds that push and pull on the sprawling, rotating plasma. These massive outflows can affect the surroundings of black holes by heating and blowing away the gas and dust around them.

At immense scales, "disk winds" can offer clues to how supermassive black holes shape entire galaxies. Astronomers have observed signs of disk winds in many systems, including accreting black holes and neutron stars. But to date, they've only ever glimpsed a very narrow view of this phenomenon.

Now, MIT astronomers have observed a wider swath of winds, in Hercules X-1, a system in which a neutron star is drawing material away from a sun-like star. This neutron star's accretion disk  is unique in that it wobbles, or "precesses," as it rotates. By taking advantage of this wobble, the astronomers have captured varying perspectives of the rotating disk and created a two-dimensional map of its winds, for the first time.

The new map reveals the wind's vertical shape and structure, as well as its velocity—around hundreds of kilometers per second, or about a million miles per hour, which is on the milder end of what accretion disks can spin up.

If astronomers can spot more wobbling systems in the future, the team's mapping technique could help determine how disk winds influence the formation and evolution of stellar systems, and even entire galaxies.

Peter Kosec, Vertical wind structure in an X-ray binary revealed by a precessing accretion disk, Nature Astronomy (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-01929-7. www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01929-7

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 11, 2023 at 9:09am

A unique behaviour of elephants discovered: Elephants can self-teach some things - like peeling bananas - by observing their care-takers!

Elephants like to eat bananas, but they don't usually peel them first in the way humans do. A new report published in the journal Current Biology on April 10, however, shows that one very special Asian elephant named Pang Pha picked up banana peeling all on her own while living at the Berlin Zoo. She reserves it for yellow-brown bananas, first breaking the banana before shaking out and collecting the pulp, leaving the thick peel behind.

This was discovered by researchers  after learning from Pha's caretakers about her unusual banana-peeling talent. At first, they were confused. They brought Pha nice yellow and green bananas, and she never peeled them.

It was only when they understood that she peels only yellow-brown bananas that their project took off.

When yellow-brown bananas are offered to a group of elephants, Pha changes her behavior, they report. She eats as many bananas as she can whole and then saves the last one to peel later.

Banana-peeling appears to be rare in elephants as far as anyone knows, and none of the other Berlin elephants engage in peeling. It's not clear why Pha peels them. The researchers note, however, that she was hand raised by human caretakers in the Berlin Zoo. They never taught her to peel bananas, but they did feed her peeled bananas.

Based on this, the researchers suggest she acquired peeling through observational learning from humans. Earlier reports on African elephants suggest elephants can interpret human pointing gestures and classify people into ethnic groups, but complex human-derived manipulation behaviours, like banana-peeling, appear rather unique, according to the researchers. The findings in Pha nevertheless suggest that elephants overall have surprising cognitive abilities and impressive manipulative skill.

Elephants have truly remarkable trunk skills and that their behavior is shaped by experience.

The researchers find it surprising that Pha alone picked up on banana peeling. It leads them to wonder if such habits are normally passed on through elephant families. They're now looking into other sophisticated trunk behaviors, such as tool use.

Wataru Brecht, Elephant Banana Peeling, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.076. www.cell.com/current-biology/f … 0960-9822(23)00266-X

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 9, 2023 at 12:32pm

For the first two decades after its discovery, most of the research has been centered on the core oscillator. it 's now found that the kinases, previously thought to be just output components, are actually part of the whole clock.

The core oscillator is often thought of as the 'gears' of the circadian clock and the kinases as the 'hands', with both required to tell the right time. What this study shows is how they're both needed – and how closely linked the inputs and outputs of the clock are.

If you don't have both hands they don't set time correctly because one of them is a stabilizer and one a perturber to the resetting signal, and you need both."

To put it another way, in retrieving information from the clock, the kinases also interfere with it. It was also shown that two kinases are needed to properly respond to a 'reset' signal, as might happen when we move through time zones.

Now that this method of real-time monitoring has been established, it can be used to better understand how our own internal circadian rhythms work, and how their timekeeping has an effect on the rest of our bodies.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221453120

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 9, 2023 at 12:29pm

Researchers Studied a Circadian Clock in Real Time in a First For Science

We all have a built-in clock telling us when it's time to eat, time to sleep, and time to get up and do something with the day. Many organisms do, in fact, which is why it's such an important area of research for scientists.

Now the circadian clock and its responses to environmental cues has been studied in a way that has never been done before. Scientists were able to track the clock and its functions in real time, using a tiny aquatic organism called a cyanobacterium (Synechococcus elongatus). Given its clock works in a similar way to ours, it can tell us a thing or two about our own daily rhythms.

The team looked at the cyanobacterium's core oscillator – a nanomachine powered by three proteins that acts as a time regulator – studying the ways its output acts as a signal for timekeeping. The core 'oscillates' in response to different signal molecules binding to it throughout the day, resulting in the rhythmic expression of hundreds of genes within the cyanobacteria.

The new study analyzes how these interactions change when the cyanobacterium's clock 'resets' at the molecular level, something that could be compared to jet lag or daylight saving time adjustments for humans.

The research builds on an in vitro clock some members of the team had previously developed, one that could operate inside a test tube. Through new advancements in the way the clock is monitored and run, the team was able to get real-time readings as the timing settings were adjusted and responded to.

This revealed several new insights, including the fact enzymes known as kinases that mediate genetic expression are more closely related to the clock function than previously thought.

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