Modern-day society relies intrinsically on automated systems and artificial intelligence. It is embedded into our daily routines and shows no signs of slowing, in fact use of robotic and automated assistance is ever-increasing.  Such pervasive use of AI presents technologists and developers with two ethical dilemmas – how do we build robots that behave in line with our values and how to we stop them going rogue?  One author suggests that one option which is not explored enough is to code more humanity into robots, gifting robots with traits such as empathy and compassion. Is ...

Glasgow, UK: Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) is a rare and devastating genetic disorder characterised by an inability to repair skin damage caused by ultraviolet (UV) light.  As a result, patients with XP develop skin cancers, usually in childhood. Once diagnosed, they can be protected by avoiding sunlight (hence sometimes being called ‘children of the night’), wearing special clothing and sunglasses, and using sunscreen. But some will also develop neurodegenerative conditions such as hearing loss, loss of intellectual function, poor co-ordination and seizures. Finding out why this is, and which ...

Glasgow, UK: Rates of colorectal cancer are high despite widespread adoption of screening programmes in many high-income European countries. Such programmes tend to use a one-size-fits-all approach where most people are screened starting from the same age, and no individual factors are considered in organised population screening. Now, based on one of the largest genomics studies on the topic to date, researchers from Finland have outlined how common genetic factors could be used to identify individuals at high risk of developing the disease and hence improve current colorectal screening strategies. Max Tamlander, MD at the Institute ...

Glasgow, UK: Genetic counselling is essential when dealing with individuals who are affected by, or at risk of, inherited disease. Although it is known to be useful in helping patients cope with test results and deal with uncertainty, there have been very few randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of its effectiveness. Dr Andrada Ciuca, a post-doctoral researcher at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, will tell the annual conference today (Sunday 11 June) that the results of the first RCT of genetic counselling in familial colorectal cancer (fCRC) show that it provided significant ...

Glasgow, UK: Being to identify people at high risk of chronic disease means that they can be targeted with prevention measures before they become sick. Polygenic risk scores, where genomic information alone is used to assess the risk of developing diseases, have been receiving a lot of attention recently, but research to be presented at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Saturday 10 June) suggests that combining blood biomarkers with genomic information gives more accurate, cost-effective results. Dr Jeffrey Barrett, Chief Scientific Officer, Nightingale Health, Helsinki, ...

Glasgow, UK: Inherited retinal diseases (IRDs), single-gene disorders affecting the retina, are very difficult to diagnose since they are uncommon and involve changes in one of many candidate genes. Outside specialist centres, there are few experts who have adequate knowledge of these diseases, and this makes it difficult for patients to access proper testing and diagnosis. But now, researchers from the UK and Germany have used artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a system that they believe will enable more widespread provision of testing, together with improved efficiency. Dr ...

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is partnering with other Southeastern universities in a coalition exploring methods for driving U.S. economic competitiveness. The initiative is supported by a two-year, Type 1 Development Award worth $1 million, funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Regional Innovation Engines. The team was one of only 44 out of 497 Type-1 applications the NSF funded, marking the first time the NSF has distributed Regional Innovation Engines grants. Thomas Goldsby, Dee and Jimmy Haslam Chair in Logistics at UT’s Haslam College of Business Department of Supply Chain Management, ...

A study by a team of University of Oklahoma researchers has been featured in Cell Reports Physical Science, an open-access journal highlighting cutting-edge research in the physical sciences.  The study,  “Cooperative roles of water and metal-support interfaces in the selective hydrogenation of cinnamaldehyde over cobalt boride catalysts,” explores the role of water in the selective hydrogenation of carbonyl over alkene bonds. Utilizing cobalt and cobalt boride catalysts, OU researchers analyzed the hydrogenation ...

Researchers from Northumbria University and King’s College London have published findings outlining the extent that textile fibres transfer during controlled assault scenarios. Their work, recently published in the academic journal Science & Justice, is the first time the number of fibres transferred between garments during physical assaults has been assessed by simulating the act with real people through Northumbria University’s Jiu Jitsu club. Dr Kelly Sheridan, Assistant Professor of Forensic Science in Northumbria’s Department of Applied Sciences, believes the findings will ...

Vladimir Drinfeld, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, is one of two recipients of the prestigious Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for 2023. He shares this year’s honor jointly with Shing-Tung Yau of Tsinghua University for their “contributions related to mathematical physics, to arithmetic geometry, to differential geometry and to Kähler geometry.” The Shaw Prize honors individuals who have recently achieved distinguished and significant advances in the fields of astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences. Each category carries a monetary award of ...

Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome are debilitating conditions with similar symptoms. Neither condition has diagnostic tests or treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and each cost the United States billions of dollars each year in direct medical expenses and lost productivity. Doctors and researchers have wondered what are the underlying biological abnormalities that may cause symptoms, and whether these abnormalities are similar in the two illnesses. A review article authored by senior investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and the Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos ...

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a $98,500 grant to an interdisciplinary team led by Virginia Tech to create an augmented reality program prototype that brings Civil War history to park visitors’ fingertips. Experts from Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, Pamplin Historical Park, and its National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Petersburg, Virginia, are involved in the project.  From multimedia-guided interpretations of documents to videos of historians sharing ...

-  Of the 14 participants enrolled and treated with lenzilumab plus azacitidine, ten are evaluable with three to eighteen months of follow-up and all ten have had a rapid clinical response -  Building upon previously reported positive clinical responses, these additional data demonstrate statistically significant and clinically relevant improvements in hematologic outcomes, along with improvements in inflammatory markers, that occur in the early months after treatment initiation and appear durable -  CMML is a rare, aggressive cancer; approximately 20% of patients survive three years from diagnosis -  No ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Aviation’s huge carbon footprint could shrink significantly with electrification. To date, however, only small all-electric planes have gotten off the ground. Their electric motors generate hundreds of kilowatts of power. To electrify larger, heavier jets, such as commercial airliners, megawatt-scale motors are required. These would be propelled by hybrid or turbo-electric propulsion systems where an electrical machine is coupled with a gas turbine aero-engine.   To meet this need, a team ...

Ling Li, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded $1.05 million over three years to lead a team studying the visual abilities of a unique underwater creature with thousands of eyes. The project reunites Li with a former collaborator, University of South Carolina Associate Professor Daniel Speiser. They also enlisted the expertise of an internationally recognized applied mathematician who specializes in image processing, Daniel Baum of the Zuse Institute in Berlin. What stony eyes see and what it means The team’s research will focus on the stony eyes of chitons. These marine creatures have pill-shaped, hard outer ...

Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties (VTIP) with LINK + LICENSE + LAUNCH’s Proof-of-Concept Program has provided the springboard for faculty to bring their research to market. Over the past four years, the program has funded 24 Virginia Tech research projects.  “We are excited to be able to support a larger group of proof-of-concept projects in this award cycle,” said Mark Mondry who leads LAUNCH. “Several of the Virginia Tech faculty-led projects in this round include collaborations with students, industry partners, and other academic institutions, bringing diverse perspectives to the project ...

The rundown facade of the Thomas Deen building in St. Paul, Virginia, belied the once-impressive department store's better days. The four-story brick building opened its doors to customers in the early 1920s, but over time, the structure was as forgotten as the discarded tires it housed some 100 years later. As Elizabeth Gilboy, the director of the Community Design Assistance Center, an outreach center in Virginia Tech's College of Architecture, Arts, and Design, and the center's team explored the site in fall 2020, they recognized their unique place at the intersection of the building's history and future. Since ...

Milan, 9 June 2023 - The World Health Organisation presented in Baku (Azerbaijan) the new design recommendations for new hospitals to be built in the European Region, the result of a research partnership with the Politecnico di Milano.  The document was prepared by the Design & Health Lab in the Department of Architecture, Construction Engineering and the Built Environment at the Politecnico under the coordination of Professor Stefano Capolongo. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of preparedness for natural and man-made disasters, emergencies and other social crises. The ability to provide continuous ...

Scientists from the NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre (a collaboration between GOSH and UCL), London, and University of Padova, Italy, have shown for the first time how 3D printing can be achieved inside ‘mini-organs’ growing in hydrogels -- controlling their shape, activity, and even forcing tissue to grow into 'moulds.' This can help teams study cells and organs more accurately, create realistic models of organs and disease, and even better understand how cancer spreads through different tissues. A particularly promising area of research at the Zayed Centre for Research ...

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory made an intriguing discovery while conducting experiments to characterize magnetism in a material known as a dilute magnetic topological insulator where magnetic defects are introduced. Despite this material’s ferromagnetism, the team discovered strong antiferromagnetic interactions between some pairs of magnetic defects that play a key role in several families of magnetic topological insulators. Topological insulators (TIs) as their name indicates, ...

When we communicate with others over wireless networks, information is sent to data centers where it is collected, stored, processed, and distributed. As computational energy usage continues to grow, it is on pace to potentially become the leading source of energy consumption in this century. Memory and logic are physically separated in most modern computers, and therefore the interaction between these two components is very energy intensive in accessing, manipulating, and re-storing data. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State University is exploring materials that could possibly lead to the ...

An international research team has succeeded for the first time in measuring the electron spin in matter - i.e., the curvature of space in which electrons live and move - within "kagome materials", a new class of quantum materials. The results obtained - published in Nature Physics - could revolutionise the way quantum materials are studied in the future, opening the door to new developments in quantum technologies, with possible applications in a variety of technological fields, from renewable energy to biomedicine, from electronics to quantum computers. Success was ...

A research team led by Prof. ZHANG Haijiang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. HOU Zengqian from Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, revealed the seismically imaged lithospheric delamination and its controls on the Mesozoic Magmatic Province in South China by using a new joint seismic inversion algorithm. The study was published in Nature Communications.  Based on the latest developed seismic joint inversion algorithm, the researchers made use of the seismic body wave travel time, surface wave dispersion ...

Alexandra Hanlon, director of the Virginia Tech Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science, was recently awarded a $1.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a summer program aimed at promoting and diversifying the field of collaborative biostatistics. The Collaborative Undergraduate Biostatistics Experience (CUBE), an eight-week summer program geared toward underrepresented undergraduate students, will receive $250,000 per year over the next five years through the NIH Research Education Program. This R25 award, which is funded in a joint effort ...

In a study published online in Nano Letters, the team led by Prof. LI Chuanfeng and Dr. XU Jinshi from the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made progress in enhancing the fluorescence of single silicon carbide spin defects. The researchers leveraged surface plasmons to markedly boost the fluorescence brightness of single silicon carbide double vacancy PL6 color centers, leading to an improvement in the efficiency of spin control using the properties of co-planar waveguides. This low-cost method neither calls for complex micro-nano processing ...