Culture

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University College of Engineering researchers used a vacuum cleaner and the personalities of three of the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White to demonstrate that people can correctly infer a robot's personality solely by how it moves.

Unexpectedly, study participants also discerned intelligence from robot motion behaviors, suggesting people might trust an autonomous system more or less depending on their observations of its movements.

The findings are noteworthy because, much like the importance of personality in people's interactions, robot personality can influence engagement and trust.

The study was published by the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering's International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

Researchers in the lab of OSU assistant professor of computer science Heather Knight equipped a Neato Botvac vacuum cleaning robot with movement patterns inspired by the personalities of Happy, Sleepy and Grumpy.

Human participants rated the politeness, friendliness and intelligence of each robot motion demonstration after a series of trials that illustrated each of the motion personalities, without being informed of the robot's intended personalities.

"We implemented an expressive autonomous motion generation system that mapped each personality the robots motion features, such as path shape, acceleration and velocity characteristics, and whether they moved toward or away from the participant," Knight said. "The Happy robot sought people out with smooth motions at moderate speed. The Sleepy robot also sought people out, but with delays and slower accelerations. The Grumpy robot avoided people while using erratic motions and a range of velocities. Those simple variations told the people a lot."

True to form, study participants rated Grumpy as the least polite and least friendly, whereas Happy upheld reputation by being rated the friendliest and smartest. Happy and Sleepy were together deemed most polite, though their rating was just above neutral.

"Participants were able to distinguish the motion-based personas, which bodes well for the integration of robot personality into simple robots" Knight said. "In future work, we hope to extend this work to the other four Dwarfs and study how personality could positively impact the specific tasks a robot is taking on around people."

Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School student Paul Lavadera expected his career would put him on the front lines of dealing with medical emergencies.

But he never could have imagined he'd be graduating during the biggest global pandemic in a century when he joined forces two years ago with Tracey Shors, Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, on a study to find out whether aerobic exercise and meditation would reduce stress and improve the quality of life for medical students like him.

Now Lavadera, who begins a four-year emergency medicine residency on June 29 at a COVID-19 only hospital in Brooklyn and Shors, who thinks she may have battled a case of the coronavirus, are using the stress-reducing technique taught to RWJMS medical school students to help them each deal with the anxiety and uncertainty left in the path of the crisis.

"I am isolating alone in my apartment and keeping myself up to date on the evolving guidelines on treatments and recommendations regarding COVID19, but I'm making a conscious decision to avoid sensational and minute-by-minute news," says Lavadera who will split his time between two Brooklyn hospitals - Kings County Hospital in Flatbush and SUNY Downstate Medical Center, one of only three New York hospitals treating COVID-19 only patients. "I am working out, mediating and doing the training program that I helped to promote to medical school students. I think it keeps me afloat and helps to keep my stress level down."

The new Rutgers study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Lavadera coauthored with Shors and doctoral student Emma Millon, documents the effectiveness of the technique that helped them both through this difficult time. The researchers found that meditation combined with aerobic exercise reduces stress and rumination while enhancing the quality of life for medical students.

Over an eight-week period first and second-year medical school students participated in the intervention called MAP Train My Brain™, twice a week, which included 30 minutes of meditation followed by 30 minutes of aerobic exercise compared to a control group of student who did neither.

Shors - who developed the MAP (mental and physical) Training for those with depression, trauma and stress-related symptoms - has studied the effects of this training on different groups, including women who have been sexually assaulted and most recently women living with HIV, a study which has not yet been published.

When Shors began the study on medical school students with Lavadera she thought she understood how stressful treating patients could be for physicians. But she gained deeper insight during her recent illness.

For about six weeks from late February to early April, Shors suffered with coronavirus symptoms at home: trouble breathing, a persistent cough, and debilitating fatigue. She went to packed emergency departments twice, got a chest x-ray that showed no pneumonia and was sent home to isolate without getting a COVID-19 test because she didn't have a fever.

Shors remembers the doctors and nurses. "Behind their masks, I could see in their eyes the stress and anxiety that they are feeling, but I also experienced the professionalism and compassion that they bring to each person coming in for help," said Shors, vice chair/director of Graduate Studies in the department of psychology Center for Collaborative Neuroscience in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

The study, which researchers believe is the first to document positive outcomes with such an intervention on medical students, found that the students doing the MAP Training experienced significantly less stress and were approximately 20 percent less likely to ruminate with depressive and brooding thoughts, when compared to medical students in the control group who did not participate in the program.

Most importantly, researchers say, is that those involved in the study said the training improved their quality of life, with 84 percent of the medical school students saying that they would recommend MAP Train My BrainTM to future patients as a way to alleviate anxiety and stress and improve overall health.

Shors and Lavadera say while the aim of the study was to provide a program for medical school students that would keep them physically and mentally healthy, they also hoped that it would be a program that they would want to recommend to future patients.

As the uncertainty of what lies ahead with the global COVID-19 pandemic continues, both Shors, who at the height of what she believes was her bout with coronavirus, worried that she would have to be hooked to a ventilator, and Lavadera, who has been trying to stay away from the daily drumbeat of coronavirus news before he has to deal with it firsthand, says this meditation and aerobic exercise program allows them to do it at home, alone.

"It is always important to reduce stress but especially important and difficult to do during this traumatic time," says Shors. "We are living with the threat of illness and even death for ourselves and our loved ones. There is nothing more stressful than that."

By studying how the tiniest organisms in the Atacama Desert of Chile, one of the driest places on Earth, extract water from rocks, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Irvine, and U.C. Riverside revealed how, against all odds, life can exist in extreme environments.

A report of the findings published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show how life can flourish in places without much water - including Mars, which has an environment similar to the Atacama - and how people living in arid regions may someday be able to procure hydration from available minerals.

"Scientists have suspected for a long time that microorganisms might be able to extract water from minerals, but this is the first demonstration of it," says Jocelyne DiRuggiero, associate professor of biology at the Johns Hopkins University and the paper's co-author.

"This is an amazing survival strategy for microorganisms living at the dry limit for life, and it provides constraints to guide our search for life elsewhere."

The research team focused on Chroococcidiospsis, a species of cyanobacteria that is found in deserts around the world, and gypsum, a calcium sulfate-based mineral that contains water. The colonizing lifeforms exist beneath a thin layer of rock that gives them protection against the Atacama's extreme temperature, battering winds and blistering sun.

DiRuggiero traveled to the remote desert to collect gypsum samples, which she brought back to her lab, cut into small pieces where the microorganisms could be found and sent to David Kisailus, professor of materials science & engineering at UCI, for materials analysis.

In one of the most striking findings of the study, the researchers learned that the microorganisms change the very nature of the rock they occupy. By extracting water, they cause a phase transformation of the material - from gypsum to anhydrite, a dehydrated mineral.

According to DiRuggiero, the study's inspiration came when Wei Huang, a UCI post-doctoral scholar in materials science & engineering, spotted data showing an overlap in concentrations of anhydrite and cyanobacteria in the gypsum samples collected in the Atacama.

DiRuggiero's team then allowed the organisms to colonize half-millimeter cubes of rocks, called coupons, under two different conditions: one in the presence of water, to mimic a high-humidity environment, and the other completely dry. In the presence of moisture, the gypsum did not transform to the anhydrite phase.

"They didn't need water from the rock, they got it from their surroundings," said Kisailus. "But when they were put under stressed conditions, the microbes had no alternative but to extract water from the gypsum, inducing this phase transformation in the material."

Kisailus' team used a combination of advanced microscopy and spectroscopy to examine the interactions between the biological and geological counterparts, finding that the organisms bore into the material like tiny miners by excreting a biofilm containing organic acids, Kisailus said.

Huang used a modified electron microscope equipped with a Raman spectrometer to discover that the organisms used the acid to penetrate the rock in specific crystallographic directions - only along certain planes where they could more easily access water existing between faces of calcium and sulfate ions.

"Does it mean there is life on Mars? We cannot say, but it gives us an idea of how crafty microorganisms can be," says DiRuggiero.

The findings may also help researchers develop other practical applications for defense. "The Army has a strong interest in how microorganisms well-adapted to extreme environments can be exploited for novel applications such as material synthesis and power generation within these harsh fielded environments," adds Robert Kokoska, program manager, Army Research Office, an element of U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Office.

"This study provides valuable clues for uncovering the evolved "design strategies" used by these native desert-dwelling microbes to maintain their viability in the face of multiple environmental challenges."

Funding for this project was provided by the Army Research Office and NASA.

If warming continues unabated in the Midwest, in 50 years we can expect the best conditions for corn and soybean production to have shifted from Iowa and Illinois to Minnesota and the Dakotas, according to Penn State researchers.

Using machine learning -- a form of artificial intelligence that enables a computer system to learn from data -- the team considered more than three decades of county-level, crop-yield data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service for 18 states in the central region of the United States. That area produces the majority of these crops.

The researchers evaluated crop yields along with weather data. They considered fundamental climate variables to find yield predictors specific to each of the crop-growing phases. The study also analyzed the relationships between climate and corn, sorghum and soybean grain yield from 1980 to 2016.

"This kind of research was impossible before the era of big data we are living in now, and of course, it can be done only by using the powerful computing capacity that we can access at Penn State," said researcher Armen Kemanian, associate professor of production systems and modeling in the College of Agricultural Sciences. "This study is important because in a climate that is changing relatively quickly, these techniques allow us to foresee what may happen."

The findings, published in Environmental Research Letters, do not necessarily mean that the shift north and west in corn and soybean production will occur, said lead researcher Alexis Hoffman, who earned her doctoral degree in meteorology at Penn State in 2018. But, based on the data, researchers conclude that such a shift is in progress, and there is a strong probability it will continue.

"We are not suggesting that such a shift would be a catastrophe," Kemanian said. "It doesn't mean that Iowa will stop producing crops, but it might mean that Iowa farmers adapt to a warmer climate producing two crops in a year or a different mix of crops instead of the dominant corn-soybean rotation. The changes are likely to be gradual, and farmers and the supply chain should be able to adapt. But things will change."

The three crops in the study have distinct responses to humidity and temperature, one of the most revealing results of the study, noted Hoffman. In general, corn needs more humidity, sorghum tolerates higher temperatures and soybean is somewhere in between.

For each year during the study period, researchers estimated planting dates for every county, based on county-level temperatures to simulate farmer adaptation to cold or warm years, she said. They estimated that planting occurs once the 21-day moving average rises to a crop-specific threshold temperature. Planting temperatures for corn, sorghum and soybean were 50, 59, and 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively.

Corn exhibited a uniquely strong response of increased yield to increasing atmospheric humidity during its critical phase, from before to after flowering, as well as a strong sensitivity to exposure to extreme temperatures, Hoffman explained.

"Humidity is a factor for all crops studied, but what the data are telling us is that it is more of a factor for corn than it is for soybean or sorghum, and in a very narrow time window," she said. "And by humidity, we mean that soils might be moist, but the data is showing that moisture in the air matters, regardless. That wasn't known before."

However, soybean has a strong response to both maximum and minimum temperatures, she said. "All crops had threshold-like responses to high temperature, though we documented a comparatively greater tolerance to high temperature for sorghum at 90.5 F versus a range of 84.2 to 86 F for corn and soybean. We did not describe that response -- machine learning revealed it for us."

The research may have implications for companies selling crop insurance, Kemanian suggests.

"High-temperature swings are damaging. Learning when and by how much for both corn and soybean is critically important," he said. "Crop insurance companies have an interest in this because they need to assess the risk of a given stress happening and how much they will pay as a result."

Chris Forest, professor of earth and mineral sciences, Hoffman's doctoral degree adviser was involved in the research. This research builds on earlier work done by Hoffman and the team in sub-Saharan Africa.

A study has shown how ecotourism in the Philippines has transformed people's attitudes towards marine conservation.

Researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada and Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines (LAMAVE), visited three sites where tourists pay to swim with whale sharks in the wild. They interviewed a range of locals who work for the tour operators in Oslob, Donsol and Pintuyan, including fishers and ex-whale shark hunters.

In all three locations people said their perception of whale sharks - and of the wider marine environment - had changed positively since the introduction of eco-tourism.

At Oslob, the largest of the three sites, people were more likely to speak about the resulting improvements to their quality of life and an increase in job opportunities. At the smaller, less profitable sites, responses were more likely to be about the changes in how people thought about and behaved towards the sharks.

But at all three locations, the team heard from locals that the arrival of ecotourism had led to positive changes for marine conservation.

Dr Jackie Ziegler, who led the team from the university's Marine Protected Areas Research Group, said: "Many of the people we spoke to reported they now care about and value whale sharks because of tourism activities. They also expressed the community's emotional connection to the species and the strong need to protect them.

"Prior to the introduction of tourist activities, most of the locals admitted to harming the sharks by hitting them with stones, harpoons, paddles, dynamite or riding them."

In terms of attitudes towards the wider marine environment, the majority of respondents now actively encourage others to care for the ocean and they also use more sustainable fishing practices.

The study, published in Oryx–The International Journal of Conservation, also acknowledged the potential negative effects of tourism on the marine environment, such as impacts on the health of local coral reefs and of the sharks. It concluded that further studies were needed to assess these impacts before firm conclusions could be drawn regarding the positive impact of whale shark tourism on ocean conservation.

Nevertheless, the researchers say their work suggests ecotourism can be an effective means of enhancing protection by changing local attitudes and behaviours towards target species and their respective ecosystems.

Dr Ziegler added: "It was fascinating to hear the importance so many local Filipino communities place on whale shark tourism. Bringing in the views of the local tour operators to the study was imperative in uncovering the true impact of whale shark tourism and the wider benefits to ocean conservation in the Philippines."

BOSTON - Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, striking as many as one in four women and one in eight men in their lifetime. While more than 17 million adults in the United States struggled with the disease in 2017 according to the most recent government statistics, clinicians have long recognized that depression manifests in different ways across individuals; official diagnostic criteria include weight loss or weight gain, excessive sleeping or insomnia, inability to concentrate or obsessive rumination. However, the field of psychiatry has yet to reach a consensus classification of depression subtypes based on distinct clinical features, nor have prior proposed classification schemes improved treatment outcomes.

Now, for the first time, physician-scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have identified two clusters of depressive symptoms that responded to two distinct neuroanatomical treatment targets in patients who underwent transcranial magnetic brain stimulation (TMS) for treatment of depression. The team's findings, which were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, shed new light on the brain circuitry underlying specific symptoms of depression and may facilitate personalized TMS therapy for depression and other psychiatric or neurological disorders.

"We've known for over a century that different brain regions have different functions, and now we can finally translate this into symptom-specific treatment targets," said Shan H. Siddiqi, MD, a neuropsychiatrist in the Division of Cognitive Neurology at BIDMC and an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "We hope this discovery will help to usher in a new era of personalized medicine in psychiatry."

A non-invasive procedure that affects brain activity with powerful magnetic fields, TMS was approved for the treatment of depression in adults who did not benefit from antidepressant drugs in 2008. Currently, TMS practitioners use head measurements to position the machine's magnetic coil outside the patient's scalp - resulting in some incidental variation in the brain circuitry stimulated. Despite the imprecision, the well-tolerated therapy has about a 50 to 60 percent success rate, higher than most antidepressant drugs.

Taking advantage of that variation, Siddiqi and colleagues, including senior author Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation at BIDMC and an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, analyzed outcomes for two independent cohorts of patients who underwent TMS for treatment-resistant depression. Patients' symptoms were self-reported with a validated questionnaire as well as assessed by clinicians.

Siddiqi and colleagues mapped each patient's TMS site to underlying brain circuits - a technique pioneered by Fox at BIDMC - and compared these maps to the total change in depression symptoms across subjects. The analysis identified two distinct clusters of depressive symptoms, with each responding better to a different TMS target. One cluster included symptoms such as sadness, decreased interest, and suicidality, while a smaller cluster included symptoms such as irritability, sexual disinterest and insomnia. The researchers referred to these symptom clusters as "dysphoric" and "anxiosomatic," respectively.

Next, to validate the analysis' findings, the scientists used these cluster maps to accurately predict clinical improvement in a separate set of patients. The team's findings are consistent with recent studies identifying different symptom clusters - or biotypes - in people with depression. However, Siddiqi and Fox's study takes the reverse approach.

"Rather than identify biotypes and then searching for ways to treat them, we started with therapeutic response to an anatomically targeted treatment," said Siddiqi. "Our novel approach harnesses TMS to causally link neuro-anatomy and behavior. We started with depression and anxiety, but this approach could also be used to find a treatment target for any cluster of psychiatric symptoms."

When we speak, we give little thought to how the words form in our brain before we say them. It's similar for deaf people using sign language.

Speaking and signing come naturally, except when we stumble over words, or swap one word for another when we speak or sign too quickly, are tired or preoccupied.

Fluency and the occasional disfluency both happen because of how we choose what to say or sign, when a neural mechanism takes place in our brains as we make decisions and monitor how we communicate.

It's this mechanism that fascinates San Diego State University researchers Stephanie Ries and Karen Emmorey in the School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. Their analysis could help inform rehabilitation therapy for those relearning how to speak or sign after a stroke.

Using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, they studied how hearing and deaf signers process the act of signing and found the same monitoring mechanism took place in the brains of both groups. Among deaf signers, it was more prevalent with those for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is their first language.

"When we are doing an action, whether it's speaking, signing, pressing buttons or typing, we see the same mechanism," Ries said. "Any time we are making a decision to do something, this neural mechanism comes into play."

Their study, published by MIT Press in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience on April 30, may advance our understanding of how deaf individuals recover their ability to sign after a traumatic brain injury or stroke, when they suffer aphasia: the inability to understand others or express themselves due to brain damage.

"When stroke victims are more aware of their speech errors and have a better functioning speech monitoring mechanism, they have a better chance of recovering than those who don't have that awareness," Ries said. "This study helped us extend that understanding to signing ability for deaf people."

Melding speech with sign language expertise

The work also represents a long-held dream to combine the skills and training of two researchers with niche expertise in complementary fields - speech monitoring and sign monitoring.

Ries is an assistant professor specializing in the neuroscience of speech and language disorders who first met Emmorey at a workshop on language production in 2007 when Ries was a Ph.D. student in Marseille. Emmorey, a distinguished professor, sign language expert and director of the Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience at SDSU, presented a study about sign monitoring which sparked an abiding interest in Ries, who wanted to work with Emmorey. When they crossed paths at another conference five years ago, Emmorey urged her to apply for the assistant professorship at SDSU, and they eventually began working together.

"I've always been interested in what inner signing would be like, and if it's similar to inner speech," said Emmorey, the study's senior author. "It's an internal process. When you speak, you can hear yourself. But if you're signing, are you seeing yourself like in a mirror, or is it a mental image of you signing, or a motor representation so you can feel how you sign?"

These were the underlying aspects of signing no one quite understood, and it has long been Emmorey's goal to tease them apart so we truly understand what sign language processing is like. Knowing this will help sign language educators figure out the best learning strategy for signers, much like the techniques used to teach hearing people foreign languages.

Since Ries was already working on speech monitoring with hearing people in France, when she joined SDSU, the two researchers combined their expertise to study sign monitoring in hearing and deaf people.

Monitoring for self-editing

They used the EEG data recorded with 21 hearing signers and 26 deaf signers in the Neurocognition Lab of Philip Holcomb and Katherine Midgley, colleagues in the psychology department. The participants were shown pictures to identify by signing, while wearing an EEG cap with 32-channel tin electrodes to monitor the mechanism behind signing.

"We wanted to study sign monitoring in-depth to understand the underlying mechanism and whether it's universal," Ries said. "Before people start to sign, you see this component rising, and we observed it happen with hearing signers as well, except it wasn't as clear."

This difference was possibly because deaf signers were more proficient in ASL than hearing signers. It's important to note that both deaf and hearing signers are bilingual in English and ASL, except ASL is more dominant for deaf signers.

"When we're speaking we catch ourselves when we are about to make an error. That's thanks to this monitoring process which is located in the medial frontal cortex of the brain," Ries said. "It peaks 40 milliseconds after you begin speaking, so it's extremely fast. We make an error because we may not have selected the right word when semantically related words are competing in your brain."

Words that share similar meanings such as 'oven' and 'fridge' or names may be switched in the brain (e.g., swapping your children's names). Other times, syllables get transposed.

Such errors can happen in signing too, when signs for different words are mixed up or an incorrect handshape is swapped for the desired handshape, which indicates signers are actually assembling phonological units during language production, similar to assembling the phonemes in a spoken word.

"Learning how sign production is represented in the brain will help us understand sign language disorders, and if a signer needs epileptic surgery we will know which part of the brain processes sign," Emmorey said.

Threat detection and prevention are essential to ensuring the safety and security of warfighters. Researchers have developed a way to speed up the processing of extremely large graphs and data, making the most efficient use of modern Army computational resources before and during Soldier deployment.

Graphs have become a preferred choice of data representation for modeling many real-world systems containing entities and relationships. Such systems and graphs are widely used in several public as well as military domains such as Facebook with millions of users connected via friendship relations, the World Wide Web, bioinformatics and even DOD security applications. The DOD uses graph analytics that include terrorist-tracking and threat-detection.

In today's data-intensive environment, these graphs grow ever larger in size, and even high-powered, high-performance computing systems, such as those possessed by the Army, cannot process them efficiently, researchers say.

There is a need to develop efficient parallel and distributed systems that can scale modern computer hardware to process such graphs, said Rajgopal Kannan, a researcher for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory's Context Aware Processing Branch working at CCDC ARL-West in Playa Vista, California.

"The Army's vast computational resources must be utilized efficiently at scale to resolve the huge demand for fast computing solutions to mission critical problems," Kannan said.

Kannan collaborated on this project with researchers from the University of Southern California. The team has been focused on developing high-speed and portable graph analytics, which is essential for DOD security analysis such as discovering terrorist communication networks, analyzing biological networks and recommending anti-terrorist actions.

Current approaches do not scale well to large graphs and/or do not have easy-to-use programming interfaces that make the job of developing new graph analytics applications easy, he said. The onus is on programmers to exploit hardware and operating system primitives, which is time consuming, limits program portability and requires code to be rewritten for new architectures and accelerators.

"Our novel parallel computing framework, called Graph Processing Over Partitions, or GPOP, is user-friendly and makes optimized programming easy," Kannan said. "Programmers can focus on developing new high-speed applications and are protected from navigating the complexities of the underlying hardware. The framework is also hardware agnostic, with the code being portable to multiple architectures."

It can be a significant component of custom graph processing systems for the DOD, such as those being developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit, or HIVE, program, Kannan said.

ACM's Transactions on Parallel Computing Special Issue featured a paper on this research, Parallel Computing Framework for Scalable Graph Analytics, on Innovations in Systems for Irregular Applications.

"Propagation of information between interconnected entities is a very fundamental operation," Kannan said. "Consider for example the famous PageRank algorithm used for webpage ranking in search engines. It starts by assigning an initial importance/weight to the webpages and then emulates the propagation of this importance/weight along the hyperlinks that create connections in web graphs."

Emulating such propagation for very large graphs puts a lot of stress on the memory system of current computers, Kannan said.

For this purpose, the researchers designed new models of computation that can maximally utilize the power of random access memory and caches available on off-the-shelf servers. Their models are encapsulated in a framework that hides all the gory details and provides a simple interface to make the life of programmers easy.

Another example is shortest distance computations used in analysis of biological networks or online fact-checking that demand extremely fast response.

"Our framework utilizes the power of cluster computing to quickly extract metadata from large graphs and answer shortest distance queries in microseconds," Kannan said. "Our approach has shown that by carefully designing the software systems, the efficiency of underlying hardware can be significantly improved."

The research team's key idea is the hierarchical decomposition of programs: A high level user front end makes for ease of programming coupled with low level hardware primitives that lead to high performance.

Their framework cut down the execution time of several algorithms by up to 80% and is up to 19 times, 9.3 times and 3.6 times faster than current well-known frameworks such as Ligra, GraphMat and Galois, respectively.

"Our work on metadata extraction for shortest distance computations has extended the capability of this approach significantly," Kannan said. "Compared to the existing methods, we are able to process 10 times larger graphs with 50 times more speed. On a cluster with 64 servers, we could process the entire road network of the United States in less than one and a half minutes."

In addition to the DOD, this research has dual-use applications.

"It is also useful for big data companies, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., that employ graph analysis in the services they offer such as web search, product recommendation or spam detection," Kannan said. "Efficient graph processing can also unravel new insights in biological research such as genomic analysis, protein sequencing or epidemic transmission such as with COVID-19. Our research will unlock the potential of custom graph processing architectures being developed by the Department of Defense."

The next step for the team is to harness the power of distributed processing systems and distributed memory to scale graph analytics applications to even larger future graphs as part of building a generalized parallel and distributed processing framework.

Throughout this research and all that is to come, collaboration has been and will continue to be a key element of success, Kannan said.

"Collaboration is the lifeblood of research, and this collaborative research was conducted under the aegis of CCDC ARL's open campus initiative, which has been instrumental in enabling the technology transfer of ideas originating from basic academic research," Kannan said.

Kannan and his collaborators from Professor Viktor Prasanna's Graph Analytics and Machine Learning research group at the University of Southern California were able to bridge the gap between academic theory and technological practice to develop technology products that will prove beneficial to key Army Modernization Priorities including the Network and Soldier Lethality.

The dissemination of these results in top publication venues like ACM TOPC and the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, more commonly known as VLDB, further highlights the importance of ARL-university partnerships and increases the visibility in the warfighter technology space, he said.

This research, funded by DARPA and supported by an ARL-USC Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, recently received recognition from the Department of Commerce as one of the lab's high-impact joint work statements.

Whether there is life elsewhere in the universe is a question people have pondered for millennia; and within the last few decades, great strides have been made in our search for signs of life outside of our solar system.

NASA missions like the space telescope Kepler have helped us document thousands of exoplanets - planets that orbit around other stars. And current NASA missions like Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) are expected to vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. It is expected that dozens will be Earth-sized rocky planets orbiting in their stars' habitable zones, at distances where water could exist as a liquid on their surfaces. These are promising places to look for life.

This will be accomplished by missions like the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, which will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope by observing at infrared wavelengths. It is expected to launch in 2021, and will allow scientists to determine if rocky exoplanets have oxygen in their atmospheres. Oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is due to photosynthesis by microbes and plants. To the extent that exoplanets resemble Earth, oxygen in their atmospheres may also be a sign of life.

Not all exoplanets will be Earth-like, though. Some will be, but others will differ from Earth enough that oxygen doesn't necessarily come from life. So with all of these current and future exoplanets to study, how do scientists narrow down the field to those for which oxygen is most indicative of life?

To answer this question, an interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by Arizona State University (ASU), has provided a framework, called a "detectability index" which may help prioritize exoplanets that require additional study. The details of this index have recently been published in the Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society.

"The goal of the index is to provide scientists with a tool to select the very best targets for observation and to maximize the chances of detecting life," says lead author Donald Glaser of ASU's School of Molecular Sciences.

The oxygen detectability index for a planet like Earth is high, meaning that oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is definitely due to life and nothing else. Seeing oxygen means life. A surprising finding by the team is that the detectability index plummets for exoplanets not-too-different from Earth.

Although Earth's surface is largely covered in water, Earth's oceans are only a small percentage (0.025%) of Earth's mass. By comparison, moons in the outer solar system are typically close to 50% water ice.

"It's easy to imagine that in another solar system like ours, an Earth-like planet could be just 0.2% water," says co-author Steven Desch of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. "And that would be enough to change the detectability index. Oxygen would not be indicative of life on such planets, even if it were observed. That's because an Earth-like planet that was 0.2% water--about eight times what Earth has--would have no exposed continents or land."

Without land, rain would not weather rock and release important nutrients like phosphorus. Photosynthetic life could not produce oxygen at rates comparable to other non-biological sources.

"The detectability index tells us it's not enough to observe oxygen in an exoplanet's atmosphere. We must also observe oceans and land," says Desch. "That changes how we approach the search for life on exoplanets. It helps us interpret observations we've made of exoplanets. It helps us pick the best target exoplanets to look for life on. And it helps us design the next generation of space telescopes so that we get all the information we need to make a positive identification of life."

Scientists from diverse fields were brought together to create this index. The formation of the team was facilitated by NASA's Nexus for Exoplanetary System Science (NExSS) program, which funds interdisciplinary research to develop strategies for looking for life on exoplanets. Their disciplines include theoretical and observational astrophysics, geophysics, geochemistry, astrobiology, oceanography, and ecology.

"This kind of research needs diverse teams, we can't do it as individual scientists" says co-author Hilairy Hartnett who holds joint appointments at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and School of Molecular Sciences.

In addition to lead author Glaser and co-authors Harnett and Desch, the team includes co-authors Cayman Unterborn, Ariel Anbar, Steffen Buessecker, Theresa Fisher, Steven Glaser, Susanne Neuer, Camerian Millsaps, Joseph O'Rourke, Sara Imari Walker, and Mikhail Zolotov who collectively represent ASU's School of Molecular Sciences, School of Earth and Space Exploration, and School of Life Sciences. Additional scientists on the team include researchers from the University of California Riverside, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Porto (Portugal).

It is the hope of this team that this detectability index framework will be employed in the search for life. "The detection of life on a planet outside our solar system would change our entire understanding of our place in the universe," says Glaser. "NASA is deeply invested in searching for life, and it is our hope that this work will be used to maximize the chance of detecting life when we look for it."

Most newly discharged patients who recently recovered from COVID-19 produce virus-specific antibodies and T cells, suggests a study published on May 3rd in the journal Immunity, but the responses of different patients are not all the same. While the 14 patients examined in the study showed wide-ranging immune responses, results from the 6 of them that were assessed at two weeks after discharge suggest that antibodies were maintained for at least that long. Additional results from the study indicate which parts of the virus are most effective at triggering these immune responses and should therefore be targeted by potential vaccines.

It is not clear why immune responses varied widely across the patients. The authors say this variability may be related to the initial quantities of virus that the patients encountered, their physical states, or their microbiota. Other open questions include whether these immune responses protect against COVID-19 upon re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2, as well as which types of T cells are activated by infection with the virus. It is also important to note that the laboratory tests that are used to detect antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in humans still need further validation to determine their accuracy and reliability.

"These findings suggest both B and T cells participate in immune-mediated protection against the viral infection," says co-senior study author Chen Dong of Tsinghua University. "Our work has provided a basis for further analysis of protective immunity and for understanding the mechanism underlying the development of COVID-19, especially in severe cases. It also has implications for designing an effective vaccine to protect against infection."

Relatively little is known about the protective immune responses induced by the disease-causing virus, SARS-CoV-2, and addressing this gap in knowledge may accelerate the development of an effective vaccine, adds co-senior study author Cheng-Feng Qin of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing, China.

With this goal in mind, the researchers compared the immune responses of 14 COVID-19 patients who had recently become virus-free to those of six healthy donors. Eight of the patients were newly discharged, and the remaining six were follow-up patients who were discharged two weeks prior to the analyses. Specifically, the researchers collected blood samples and assessed the levels of immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibodies, which are the first to appear in response to an infection, as well as immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies, which are the most common type found in blood circulation.

Compared to healthy controls, both newly discharged and follow-up patients showed higher levels of IgM and IgG antibodies that bind to the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein, which encapsulates the viral genomic RNA, as well as the S protein's receptor-binding domain (S-RBD), which binds to receptors on host cells during the process of viral entry. Taken together, these findings show that COVID-19 patients can mount antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 proteins and suggest that these antibodies are maintained for at least two weeks after discharge.

In addition, five newly discharged patients had high concentrations of neutralizing antibodies that bind to a pseudovirus expressing the SARS-CoV-2 S protein. Neutralizing antibodies prevent infectious particles from interacting with host cells. In addition, all except one follow-up patient had detectable neutralizing antibodies against the pseudovirus.

Compared to healthy controls, five newly discharged patients had higher concentrations of T cells that secrete interferon gamma (IFNγ) - a signaling molecule that plays a critical role in immunity - in response to the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein. These are the same patients who had high concentrations of neutralizing antibodies. In addition, three newly discharged patients showed detectable levels of IFNγ-secreting T cells specific to the SARS-CoV-2 main protease - a protein that plays a critical role in viral replication. Meanwhile, seven newly discharged patients showed detectable levels of IFNγ-secreting T cells specific to the S-RBD of SARS-CoV-2. By contrast, only one follow-up patient had a high concentration of IFNγ-secreting T cells responsive to the nucleocapsid protein, the main protease, and S-RBD.

One finding with potential clinical relevance is that the amount of neutralizing antibodies was positively associated with IgG antibodies against S-RBD, but not with those that bind to the nucleocapsid protein. Moreover, S-RBD induced both antibody and T cell responses. "Our results suggest that S-RBD is a promising target for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines," says co-senior study author Fang Chen of Chui Yang Liu Hospital affiliated to Tsinghua University. "But our findings need further confirmation in a large cohort of COVID-19 patients."

ITHACA, N.Y. - A new device that attaches to e-cigarettes can unobtrusively monitor inhalations - yielding important information for research about when and where people vape, how deeply they inhale and how much nicotine they consume.

The first-of-its-kind device, which can be easily attached to all types of e-cigarettes and other nicotine-delivery kits, can help fill gaps in knowledge about vaping that might help users curtail it, said Cornell Tech researchers who developed the tool.

"We wanted to figure out a way to map how people use e-cigarettes to determine what the triggers are," said Alexander Adams, doctoral student in information science at Cornell Tech and first author of "PuffPacket: A Platform for Unobtrusively Tracking the Fine-Grained Consumption Patterns of E-Cigarette Users." The senior author is Tanzeem Choudhury, professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

The popularity of e-cigarettes - touted as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes - has skyrocketed in recent years, particularly among young people. Estimated annual sales of e-cigarettes jumped from $1.5 billion in 2014 to $3.6 billion in 2018, according to the paper. From 2017 to 2018, usage increased by 78% among high school students and 48% among middle-schoolers.

Using PuffPacket could help vapers monitor their own nicotine consumption - harder to track than for traditional cigarette smokers, who can easily tell how much they've smoked by watching a cigarette burn or seeing how many remain in a pack. The device could help researchers better understand the many forces impacting drug cravings and addictive behavior, as well as to create interventions to help people quit.

The researchers developed three versions of PuffPacket with a range of attributes, such as ease of attachment and long battery life. The device makes use of the e-cigarettes' own signals, as well as Bluetooth technology, to track the intensity, duration and frequency of inhalations. The data is then transmitted to a smartphone, which captures location, time and activity - such as walking, standing or driving - to help identify what circumstances might be triggering people to vape.

"Getting these correlations between time of day, place and activity is important for understanding addiction," Adams said. "Research has shown that if you can keep people away from the paths of their normal habits, it can disrupt them. It creates opportunities for moments of intervention."

For example, if someone skips or delays the first vape of the morning - shown in cigarette use to be critical in determining whether they'll smoke less over the course of the day - an app might send an encouraging message.

The researchers sought to make PuffPacket as inexpensive and easy to use as possible. Affixing it directly to vaping devices and syncing it with cell phones is expected to yield more accurate results than methods requiring people to record their vaping habits manually. When activated by an inhale, the e-cigarettes' electrical signal "wakes" PuffPacket, allowing it to save battery when not in use.

The researchers released open-source designs for the device, in order to make it easier for anyone studying vaping to adapt PuffPacket for their own experiments.

DALLAS, May 4, 2020 -- The American Heart Association, together with 14 cardiovascular societies in North America, today issued joint guidance, "Safe Reintroduction of Cardiovascular Services during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Guidance from North American Society Leadership," to outline a systematic, phased approach to safely reintroducing cardiovascular procedures for diagnosis and treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We acted quickly to protect patients and health care professionals when COVID-19 arrived in the United States, and for many patients, essential diagnostic, interventional or surgical cardiovascular procedures performed at hospitals were postponed. As many states have begun to re-open or introduce progressive re-openings since the national COVID-19 lockdown, this guidance provides a critical framework for prioritizing and resuming cardiovascular care as safely and as appropriately as possible," stated Robert Harrington, M.D. FAHA, president of the American Heart Association, Arthur L. Bloomfield Professor of Medicine and chair of the department of medicine at Stanford University. "We must continue to strike the delicate balance of ensuring optimal and timely cardiovascular care that can reduce morbidity and mortality, weighed against the risk of COVID-19 exposure. A tailored and collaborative approach that adapts based on the number of COVID cases and the mortality rate within each community, in tandem with local health and government leaders, is ideal. The safety of our patients and their families from both cardiovascular disease and COVID-19 is our priority."

As significant delays in diagnosis and/or treatment can lead to serious consequences for cardiovascular patients, it is appropriate that these patients are prioritized as health care systems return to normal capacity. The challenge this presents for health care delivery systems and providers is how to reintroduce cardiovascular services while ensuring the safety of patients, providers and their families.

The framework balances the risk of COVID-19 exposure with the need for prompt diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. It highlights the importance of adequate supplies of personal protective equipment and COVID-19 testing for patients and staff, while at the same time protecting the pre-pandemic gains made in reducing morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular disease.

TAMPA, Fla (May 4, 2020) --- Black men and women have higher incidences than whites of developing advanced heart failure following a heart attack. Despite racial disparities in heart attacks (a leading contributor to heart failure), and rehospitalizations and deaths caused by heart disease, the underlying physiology accounting for worse cardiovascular outcomes among blacks is poorly understood.

A new study published May 4 in ESC Heart Failure profiles bioactive lipids in blood samples from hospitalized black and white patients soon after a severe heart attack. The preliminary research was conducted by a team at the University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The researchers wanted to delineate potential differences in the immune-responsive processes needed to safely clear (resolve) acute inflammation after heart attack-induced tissue injury, with the aim of finding more individualized therapies for heart failure.

"Metabolic and leukocyte-responsive signaling control the acute inflammation needed for timely cardiac repair after a heart attack. But inflammation that is not cleared and remains long-term plays a key role in the pathology leading to heart failure," said lead author Ganesh Halade, PhD, associate professor of cardiovascular sciences at the Morsani College of Medicine and a member of the USF Health Heart Institute.

"Understanding race and sex-based differences in inflammation and its resolution will help us develop more personalized diagnoses and treatments to delay or prevent heart failure."

A mouse model study published by Dr. Halade earlier this month discovered that heart repair occurs faster in female mice than males after a heart attack, which improves survival and delays cardiac failure.

In this human study, the researchers collected blood plasma from 53 patients, grouped by race and sex, within 24 to 48 hours after a heart attack. Baseline acute injury caused by the heart attack was similar in all the patients, and so were their ages and body mass indexes. No significant sex-or race-specific differences were detected in total cholesterol, HDL, LDL or triglyceride levels - all indicators (biomarkers) currently used by clinicians to help predict risk and manage cardiovascular disease. Measures of various subtypes of leukocytes (cells that regulate immune fitness) were similar across all patients.

Looking for distinct bioactive lipid "signatures," or inflammatory biomarkers, that might predict poorer cardiovascular outcomes after heart attack, the researchers measured three major polyunsaturated fatty acids: arachidonic acid (AA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). These omega fatty acids circulate in blood and depend upon what people eat. Also analyzed were dozens of specific proresolving mediator (SPM) indicators and a few other signaling molecules that form when these fatty acids metabolize in response to immune activation.

Overall, black patients showed higher concentrations of the three activated fatty acids after a heart attack than white patients, the researchers found. The comparative analyses of SPMs showed that resolvin E1, a potent proresolving mediator of inflammation derived from the fatty acid EPA, was significantly lower in black men and women than in whites. An earlier major clinical trial linked EPA with reduced ischemic events such as heart attack and stroke in patients with high risk for, or existing, cardiac disease, and another showed that high levels of EPA significantly decreased the risk of heart failure.

The researchers conclude that bioactive lipids are key for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac repair after heart attack to delay heart failure.

Randomized controlled clinical trials will be needed to definitively determine whether distinct SPM signatures can be used to predict, diagnose, treat or prevent heart failure following a heart attack, Dr. Halade said. "If we can stratify risk among larger patient groups to determine who is deficient in SPMs critical for cardiac repair, we may be able to restore those targeted SPMs to improve outcomes."

HAMILTON, ON, May 4, 2020 - The massive international effort to map the entire human genome, completed in 2003, opened a new field we now know as personalized medicine.

The breakthrough, which identified the location and function of every human gene, offered the promise of medical care tailored specifically to individual patients, based on their personal genetic makeup.

When researchers identified a gene associated with a 44 per cent risk of breast cancer in women, for example, it seemed that protecting them might be as simple as deactivating that gene.

But the promise of such personalized medicine has not fully materialized, say two McMaster researchers, because the full sophistication of the genetic blueprint has a more complex and far-reaching influence on human health than scientists had first realized.

In the hope of integrating genetics more closely with medical practice,
McMaster evolutionary biologists Rama Singh and Bhagwati Gupta have carried out an exhaustive and critical review of decades of research in their field. They lay out their conclusions in an article published today in the Nature Partner Journal Genomic Medicine.

The biochemical pathway that shapes evolution is dense with inherited redundancies, they explain. Genetic information from our ancestors trails along forever in an incremental physical record that interacts significantly with our own most recently evolved and internally complex genetic network, which in turn interacts with the environment, creating almost infinite combinations and potential health outcomes.

Individual genes do not determine sickness or health on their own, the authors say, but act in concert with groups of other genes ¬¬- all in various stages of mutation - in ways that are just beginning to be understood.

"The idea has long been that individual genetic mutations could be classified as good, bad or neutral," Singh says "Genes, though, do not work alone, and so no single gene can be considered to be good, bad or neutral in all contexts."

The research paper explains that "unnecessary" complexity in the evolutionary pathway needs to be fully unpacked - down to the genomic variations between individual cells in the same person - before personalized medicine can be used effectively for improving human health.

"Our bodies have an immense ability to change and to cope with issues that arise. Context matters in our genome," Gupta says. "Even a simple single mutation can have a profound effect on the body, when acting in combination with others."

The scientists conclude that precision medicine is still crtical to the future of medicine, but that the same technology that idenitied the "necessary" complexity of the genome also needs to be applied to the entire blueprint - including the "unnecessary" elements - creating a longer, more complicated road to the same destination.

"Any disease we see is a result of the interactions between necessary and unnecessary complexity," says Gupta. "Nature does not go back in time. It goes forward, and as it encounters challenges, it comes up with solutions. Our genes carry the history of all the changes that have occurred over many generations. It may not be necessary to our function today, but it is embedded in our genes."

"Complexity is not a curse. It's a reflection of our evolutionary history, and it needs to be recognized as an important part of the body that medicine is trying to treat," Singh says. "Beyond personalized medicine, complexity bears on the evolution of life itself."

DALLAS, May 4, 2020 -- The COVID-19 pandemic has unmasked longstanding racial and ethnic health-related disparities, according to a new article published today in the American Heart Association's flagship journal Circulation.

The perspective essay, "At the Heart of the Matter: Unmasking and Addressing COVID-19's Toll on Diverse Populations," notes higher rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations, deaths or positive cases among blacks, Hispanic/LatinX and Native Americans are being reported at local and national levels. The essay discusses the alarming nature of the problem and is a follow-up to a webinar by the Association of Black Cardiologists entitled, "At the Heart of the Matter: Unmasking the Invisibility of COVID-19 in Diverse Populations."

According to the article's authors, the health disparities exposed by the current public health crisis did not materialize in a vacuum but are largely driven by socio-economic and environmental factors. The emerging differences in COVID-19 complications by race/ethnicity are disturbing and might be in part driven by a higher prevalence of one or more pre-existing chronic health conditions such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes and kidney disease at an earlier age among U.S. minorities, and as such, is not surprising, they said.

Among the potential solutions, the writers note:

Health care entities must collect and present COVID-19 data according to socio-demographic characteristics.

COVID-19 testing must be easily available in all communities, and contact tracing must be relentless.

Housing availability should be expanded. Facilities such as hotels and dorms should be used to quarantine symptomatic individuals to avoid spread to family members and neighbors. Suspension of foreclosures and evictions should occur.

Incentives to provide free or discounted food delivery to low-income neighborhoods and the elderly are necessary. Food banks will benefit from additional funding to reduce food insecurity.

Due to the increased reliance on telemedicine and distance learning, policymakers should support broad access to computers and free internet for vulnerable communities.

Employers should provide paid sick and quarantine leave to help reduce the risk of unwitting spread.

"Ultimately, lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic must be taken as an opportunity to address longstanding social and racial/ethnic disparities," wrote Michelle A. Albert, M.D. M.P.H., president of the Association of Black Cardiologists, professor of medicine and director of the CeNter for the StUdy of AdveRsiTy and CardiovascUlaR DiseasE (NURTURE Center) at the University of California, San Francisco. "Our vulnerable interconnectedness highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic should ignite meaningful solution-focused collaborations among community leaders, scholars and policymakers to orchestrate sustainable change aimed at addressing pervasive health care disparities."

Albert was recently awarded one of 12 fast-tracked research grants from the American Heart Association to study the effects of COVID-19 on the body's cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems. Albert's research will focus on how COVID-19 infection impacts the cardiovascular health of African American women.

The American Heart Association's recently launched the COVID-19 CVD Registry, powered by the Association's existing Get With The Guidelines program. The registry is designed to capture multiple key data points including race/ethnicity, biomarkers, pre-existing conditions, medications, in-hospital complications, and COVID-19 treatments and outcomes. The registry will yield meaningful insights into how COVID-19 impacts cardiovascular complications and outcomes in patients with COVID-19. To-date, 58 U.S. hospitals have joined the Association's COVID-19 CVD Registry and are actively submitting data.