Invasive round goby fish have impacted fisheries in the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes by competing with native species and eating the eggs of some species of game fish.
But the camouflaged bottom dwellers can be difficult to find and collect—especially when they first enter a new body of water and their numbers are low and they might be easier to remove.
In a proof-of-principle study, Cornell researchers describe a new technique in which they analyzed environmental DNA—or eDNA—from water samples in Cayuga Lake to gather nuanced information about the presence of these invasive fish.
Samsung’s Bot Handy has a robotic arm that can pick up laundry, load the dishwasher, set the table, pour wine, and bring you a drink. The robot is still in development.
Watch out, George Lucas, there’s a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry.
Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
“This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes,” study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement.
Biotin is also known as vitamin H, named for the German words “Haar” and “Haut,” which mean hair and skin. This was due to the fact that even slight deficiencies cause hair thinning, skin rash or brittle fingernails. New research, just published in PNAS, now shows that some forms of severe neurodegeneration, like the frontotemporal dementia seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can directly result from lack of sufficient biotin.
The authors discovered this by looking at fruit flies with dementia. Now, before anyone chuckles, fruit flies actually make a nice model of Alzheimer’s or other diseases when they are given the right genes. Human versions of defective MAPT (tau) genes cause these flies to develop tauopathies that resemble those that occur in our own brains. To delve deeper into the neurotoxicity of tau, they looked at over 7000 fly genes in a forward genetic screen before zeroing in on one significantly modified toxicity of the tauR406W mutant. This gene, Btnd, encodes the biotinidase enzyme that extracts biotin from food sources or recycles it from used enzymes.
Over the past few years, computer scientists have developed increasingly advanced and sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which can tackle a wide variety of tasks. This includes generative adversarial networks (GANs), machine-learning models that can learn to generate new data, including text, audio files or images. Some of these models can also be tailored for creative purposes, for instance, to create unique drawings, songs or poems.
Researchers at Tongji University in Shanghai in China and the University of Delaware in the US have recently created a GAN-based model that can generate abstract artworks inspired by Chinese calligraphy. The term Chinese calligraphy refers to the artistic form in which Chinese characters were traditionally written.
“In 2019, we collaborated with a restaurant based in Shanghai to showcase some AI technologies for better customer engagement and experience,” Professor Harry Jiannan Wang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “We then had the idea to use AI technologies to generate personalized abstract art based on the dishes customers order and present the artwork to entertain customers while they wait for their meals to be served.”
Have you been sleeping worse since the pandemic came round? If so, do not despair, you are not alone, studies have found that even amongst those who previously had no problems, there were issues. Now there are many reasons why this might be so, from added stress and uncertainty, to less physical exertion during the day and much more… But, one factor that can play a huge role is your diet. I am sure you know about fast and slow carbs, and I am sure some of you try your hardest to avoid them at all costs…not me though, I am a carb fan lol. But anyway, carbs can actually help you sleep when paired with the right foods because of the way they create competition between amino acids for absorption into muscles, when stimulated by glucose, but on the negative side, quick, or beige, carbs can cause waking during the night, as the blood sugar is not as stable. If you want to find out more, in a bit more depth, along with all the studies I have brought together, then check out this video, all links are in its description. Sleep well wink
In Carbs Sleep Problems — How Nutrition Affects Your Sleep Quality, I look at just that, the importance of the reciprocal link between diet and sleep.