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A dataset of large-scale aerial images produced by Intelinair, a spinout from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, aims to give farmers visibility into the conditions of their fields. The dataset, called Agriculture-Vision, will enable agricultural pattern analysis of aerial images, providing farmers with actionable insights into the performance of their crops to improve decision-making and maximize yields.

Until now, there has been a dearth of high-quality agricultural image datasets, due in part to the large image size required to capture many acres of land, as well as the difficulty of recognizing patterns that do not occur consistently across large areas. Researchers from UIUC and the University of Oregon worked with Intelinair to develop new computer vision techniques that solve complex pattern recognition problems through deep learning methods.

"Next-gen farming has to be data-driven," said CSL's Naira Hovakimyan, the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Illinois and co-founder and chief scientist of Intelinair. "By automating the process of frequent high-resolution data collection and using the data in predictive modeling through deep learning algorithms, we're advancing to the stage where conditions on any farm can be forecasted in the same way as weather forecasts, for example. It is just one click away."

Not since the mid-20th century, when scientists learned how to increase yields by manipulating crop genomes and the wide use of pesticides was introduced, has a new technology shown so much promise. AI is already being used to automate farming processes and collect data on field conditions. However, ag-related visual pattern recognition has progressed slowly, in part because of a lack of large-scale and high-quality datasets.

Hovakimyan says agricultural pattern analysis poses a unique challenge because it requires recognition of patterns that do not occur consistently and are hard to distinguish - such as weeds or waterways - across large areas. For example, discerning the difference between a dog and a cat is not as complicated as distinguishing wheat from ryegrass - a weed whose color and shape are similar to those of wheat, and that looks largely the same from the air.

Professor Thomas Huang, the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Humphrey Shi, an Illinois alum in electrical and computer engineering who is now at the University of Oregon, in close collaboration with Hovakimyan, led a team of ECE student researchers to curate the dataset and proposed new solutions in semantic segmentation, which is the process of clustering parts of an image together (pixel by pixel) to the same object class. For Agriculture-Vision, agronomists determined the classes and annotated the images.

The Agriculture-Vision dataset paper was accepted by the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the highest ranked conference among all publication venues in computer science and engineering according to Google Scholar Metrics. The team is also organizing a first Agriculture-Vision workshop at CVPR at Seattle in June 2020. It has attracted a myriad of attention from both agriculture and computer vision communities.

The current Agriculture-Vision dataset includes close to a hundred thousand images from thousands of corn and soybean fields across several states in the Midwest. It includes annotations for conditions such as nutrient deficiencies, drydown, weed clusters, and more. Eventually, the researchers plan to expand the dataset to include different modalities, such as soil, topographic maps, and thermal images. They say that images captured season after season, year after year, could enable creation of deep learning models that help farmers plan not only for the next season, but also for the long-term sustainable health of their soil.

Agriculture-Vision's abilities complement the offerings of Intelinair, which provides crop intelligence via its AGMRI solution for growers, agronomists, ag retailers, and other players in the ag ecosystem. Corporate partners include Deere & Co., a Fortune 100 ag manufacturer who utilizes Intelinair's products in its Operations Center product, and the Climate Corporation, which has integrated Intelinair's products in its FieldView service.

"We are excited to lead the research front for agricultural pattern analysis by creating this dataset, but there is so much more we are exploring, by incorporating accurate labels and annotations, farm history, soil conditions, and crop dynamics and integrating these into deep learning models for next-gen farming intelligence," Hovakimyan said. "We are just at the beginning of what we can do."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Being distracted by technology during mealtimes may decrease the amount of food a person eats, nutrition scientists suggest in a new study.

When 119 young adults consumed a meal while playing a simple computer game for 15 minutes, they ate significantly less than when they ate the same meal without distractions, said lead author Carli A. Liguori.

Liguori conducted the research while earning a master's degree in food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The findings were published recently in the Journal of Nutrition.

Participants' food consumption was evaluated on two separate occasions - one day when they played the game while eating and on another day when they ate without distractions.

The game, called Rapid Visual Information Processing, tests users' visual sustained attention and working memory and has been used extensively by researchers in evaluating people for problems such as Alzheimer's disease and attention-deficit disorder.

The game randomly flashes series of digits on the computer screen at the rate of one per second. Participants in the study were instructed to hit the space bar on the keyboard whenever they saw three consecutive odd numbers appear.

"It's fairly simple but distracting enough that you have to really be watching it to make sure that you don't miss a number and are mentally keeping track," Liguori said. "That was a big question for us going into this - how do you ensure that the participant is distracted? And the RVIP was a good solution for that."

The participants, who had fasted for 10 hours before each visit, were told to consume as much as they wanted of 10 miniature quiches while they were either playing the game or eating quietly without distractions for 15 minutes.

The food was weighed and counted before and after it was given to each person.

After a 30-minute rest period, participants completed an exit survey that asked them to recall how many quiches they had been given and the number they had consumed. They also rated how much they enjoyed the meal as well as their feelings of hunger and fullness.

Liguori hypothesized that, in keeping with prior research, when people ate while using the computer game they would not only consume more food but would have poorer memory of what they ate and enjoy it less.

Instead, she found that participants ate less when they were distracted by the computer game. Moreover, participants' meal memory - their ability to recall how much they had been served and eaten - was less accurate when they were distracted than when they ate quietly without the game.

However, participants' consumption on their second visit was affected by which activity they had performed during their initial visit. The people who engaged in distracted eating on their first visit ate significantly less than their counterparts who did not experience the distracted eating condition until their second visit.

Moreover, when participants who engaged in the distracted eating on their first visit were served the quiches on their next visit, "they behaved as if they were encountering the food for the first time, as evidenced by a lower rate of consumption similar to that of those who began" with the non-distracted meal, according to the study.

"It really seemed to matter whether they were in that distracted eating group first," said Liguori, who is a visiting faculty member in health and physical activity at the University of Pittsburgh. "Something about being distracted on their initial visit really seemed to change the amount they consumed during the nondistracted meal. There may be a potent carryover effect between the mechanism of distraction and the novelty of the food served."

The results suggest that there may be a difference between distracted eating and mindless eating. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, Liguori hypothesized that they may be distinctly different behaviors with nuances that need to be explored.

Mindless eating may occur when we eat without intending to do so, Liguori hypothesized. For example, we grab a handful of candy from the jar at the office as we walk by or start snacking on chips because they happen to be in sitting front of us.

Conversely, distracted eating may occur when we engage in a secondary activity such as watching TV or answering emails while we are deliberately eating - for example, when we're eating dinner, she said.

Although prior research indicated that people eat more when distracted, Liguori hypothesized that the differing results in her study may have been associated with examining within-person differences - comparing individuals' consumption under the , rather than comparing individuals' behavior to that of peers.

Or, she said, her findings could have been influenced by factors such as the type of distraction that was used, the type of food served or by using college students as the study population, limiting the diversity in participants' age, race, food preferences and motivation to regulate their consumption.

DALLAS - March 6, 2020 - Could the response to cancer immunotherapy depend on bacteria that originate in the gut and travel to the tumor?

A study by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Chicago suggests exactly that, revealing that gut bacteria can penetrate tumor cells and boost the effectiveness of an experimental immunotherapy that targets the CD47 protein.

Using mouse models of malignancy, the scientists found that the intestinal microbe Bifidobacterium accumulates within tumors, transforming anti-CD47 unresponsive tumors into responsive ones.

The team's study, published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, discovered that the response to treatment depends on the type of bacteria living in the animals' guts. They then identified the mechanism, finding that the combination of antibodies against CD47 and gut bacteria works via the body's STING pathway of innate immunity - the body's first line of defense against infection.

Their experiments used mice from different resource facilities, antibiotic-fed mice, and mice raised in a germ-free environment.

In one experiment, they studied mice raised in two different facilities and that had distinct mixtures of bacteria in their intestines. One group was responsive to anti-CD47 and another was not. The second group became responsive, however, after being housed with the responders, indicating that oral transfer or contact transmission of gut bacteria occurred between groups, the researchers say.

The protein CD47 is expressed in high levels on the surface of many cancer cells, where it acts as a "don't eat me" signal to the immune system's macrophages, commonly known as white blood cells. As a result, anti-CD47, also known as CD47 blockade therapy, is currently under investigation in multiple clinical trials. However, the mouse studies that predated those trials had mixed results, with only some mice responding to the anti-CD47 therapy, explains corresponding author Yang-Xin Fu, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology, immunology, and radiation at UT Southwestern.

"We felt we needed to improve anti-CD47 therapy and understand the mechanisms," he says, leading them to wonder about the gut microbiome, the bacteria that grow in the intestines and aid with digestion. That bacterial ecosystem, sometimes called the microbiota, is also known to affect the gut's ability to resist pathogens and the host's response to cancer immunotherapy.

"But how the microbiota does that has been unclear," Fu says. "This study finds that some of the bacteria from the gut travel to the tumor and get into the cells, or microenvironment, where the bacteria facilitate CD47 blockade's ability to attack the tumor. We found it does that via the immune signaling pathway called stimulator of interferon genes (STING)."

The findings suggest that a probiotic might someday be used to improve anti-CD47 therapy, says Fu, a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute (CPRIT) Scholar and holder of the Mary Nell and Ralph B. Rogers Professorship in Immunology at UT Southwestern.

The researchers also found that tumor-bearing mice that normally respond to anti-CD47 treatment failed to respond if their gut bacteria were killed off by antibiotics. In contrast, anti-CD47 treatment became effective in mice that are usually nonresponsive when these animals were supplemented with Bifidobacteria, a type of bacteria that is often found in the gastrointestinal tract of healthy mice and humans.

They further discovered that the bacteria migrate into tumors, activating the STING immune signaling pathway. This sets off production of immune signaling molecules such as type 1 interferons and activating immune cells that appear to attack and destroy the tumor once the anti-CD47 agent nullifies the CD47's "don't eat me" tag, the researchers report. The researchers found that mice genetically unable to activate type 1 interferon failed to respond to the bacteria-immunotherapy approach. Similarly, mice unable to access the STING pathway showed no benefit from the combined bacteria-immunotherapy approach, confirming that STING signaling is essential.

"It is very possible that more than one type of gut microbiota could enhance tumor immunity in a similar way and we would like to investigate that," he adds.

Leesburg, VA, March 6, 2020--An open-access American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR) Collections article detailing how a tertiary hospital in Singapore responded to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) offers a thorough summary of ground operational considerations for radiology departments presently reacting to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic.

Although imaging is not usually viewed as a frontline clinical service, lead author Lionel Tim-Ee Cheng reveals Singapore General Hospital's markedly different experience with SARS in 2003: "Portable imaging was extensively used, directly exposing radiology staff to the pathogen. Furthermore, radiology departments are places in which different patients (inpatient, outpatient, febrile, nonfebrile), accompanying persons, visitors, and health care workers from other departments potentially mix." Therefore, Cheng et al. continue, "any breach in infection prevention and control mechanisms in the radiology department has far-reaching consequences."

As per their institution's ongoing response to the novel COVID-19 pathogen, the authors of this AJR article identify three key areas of review (e.g., People, Places and Equipment, Processes and Policies), outlining multiple considerations for diagnostic radiologists, vascular and interventional radiologists, nuclear medicine and molecular imaging specialists, as well as radiographers and nursing units.

People:

Ensure Rapid Sharing of Accurate and Useful Information

Ensure Infection Prevention and Control Knowledge and Practices Are Up to Date

Create New Hybrid Working Teams

Manage Emotions During Adversity

Places and Equipment:

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Dedicated Scanners for Isolation and High-Risk Cases

Physical Security and Access Control

Decentralized or Alternate Working Areas

Portable Imaging Capability

Processes and Policies:

Review of Policies and Procedures

Isolation or High-Risk Cases

Modified Interventional Radiology Processes

Rapid Provision of Radiologic Results

Daily Routine Instructions

According to Cheng and colleagues: "If there is sustained community transmission from individuals without symptoms, our ability to detect cases and contain the spread will be limited. If COVID-19 becomes widespread globally with mainly mild disease and low mortality, it may become another respiratory tract pathogen that we have to live with while adopting sustainable universal precautions and waiting for a vaccine."

In the 1930s, famed biologist Ernst Mayr became the first to study Pacific Robins. Based on his observations of the robins and other birds on Australia and its outlying islands, he developed foundational concepts that continue to inform the study of evolution. He took copious notes on the birds’ physical characteristics, behaviors, and habitats. Always, he described the robin populations as a single species, albeit with significant variation from island to island.

Ernst Mayr made lasting contributions to evolutionary biology—but like most scientists, he wasn’t right about everything.

Bold new claims

Anna Kearns is a former UMBC postdoctoral fellow now at the Smithsonian Institution’s Conservation Biology Institute. With her UMBC postdoc advisor Kevin Omland and other colleagues, she has conducted new investigations into the relationships among Pacific Robins on various islands using many of the same bird specimens Mayr himself used. The difference is, “He would have mainly been just using his eyes” to compare specimens, Kearns says. She and her colleagues have had the advantage of major advances in technology since Mayr’s time.

Kearns has built on Mayr’s work by using techniques like DNA sequencing and spectrophotometry, which quantitatively compares the hue, brightness, and saturation of feathers. She has come to a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between, say, a robin on Fiji and one on the Solomon Islands.

As a result of this research, Kearns and colleagues from UMBC, the Australian National Wildlife Collection, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History are making bold new claims about the relationships between these birds. In a 2015 paper in Conservation Genetics, Kearns demonstrated that robins living on Norfolk Island, directly east of mainland Australia, are a distinct species from the rest. A new paper in the Journal of Avian Biology published this month indicates two more unique species—one that inhabits the Solomon and Bougainville Islands, and another that lives on Fiji, Vanuatu, and Samoa.

Preserving biodiversity

The new work demonstrates just how much is still unknown about avian biodiversity. “Even in this well-studied group of birds, that’s been a textbook example since 1942, we did not really know what the units of biodiversity were,” says Omland, professor of biological sciences at UMBC, and senior author on the new paper.

Understanding those “units of biodiversity” is critical for conservation. When all the Pacific Robins and mainland Australia’s Scarlet Robin were considered a single species (a single unit of biodiversity), the loss of the birds on one or two islands would be unfortunate, but not necessarily very impactful. If those birds were actually the only remaining members of a unique species, however, the same loss becomes catastrophic.

“What Anna’s work is showing is that the bird populations on these islands have very distinctive traits,” Omland adds, “so just knowing what the biodiversity is that we want to conserve is super important.”

Unpredictable patterns

The team’s work indicates that all the Pacific Robins are descended from an ancestral Australian population where males were brightly-colored and females were dull-colored. But as small groups of robins colonized the outlying islands, the population on each island took its own evolutionary path. Today, some island groups still maintain the bright male and dull female pattern, but on other islands both sexes have evolved bright coloration. On other islands, both sexes have evolved dull coloration.

“When you look at the genetics, you find two distinct lineages” leading from the common ancestor to all the island populations that exist today, Kearns says. “So that means these patterns have evolved independently multiple times.”

Kearns and Omland think the changes have more to do with random forces than evolutionary adaptation. “If we flipped two coins, this is about what we’d expect,” Omland says.

For example, the pattern an island’s population ended up with could depend on the color of the individuals that happened to get blown onto that island initially. Also, in a very small population, the random way genes are redistributed from generation to generation can have a significant impact—as much of an effect or more than natural selection.

Detective work

Kearns and Omland are both excited to have the opportunity to suggest names for the new species they’ve identified. Kearns suggests “Mayr’s Robin” for the Fiji/Vanuatu/Samoa population, in honor of Ernst Mayr’s pioneering study of these birds.

But their contribution to ornithology is more than a name. “Because these birds are all on very small isolated islands, and Pacific birds are often on many, many, many isolated islands, collecting is very difficult. So there haven’t actually been that many comprehensive studies,” Kearns says. Revealing the complexity of the relationships among these robins adds much-needed information to the field. It also raises the prospect that other birds—especially those on islands—might have undergone similar, as-yet-unstudied, evolutionary processes.

The work is a unique blend of past and present. “You really wouldn’t be able to do this study without using these old collections,” Kearns says. At the same time, discovering the new species also wouldn’t have been possible without modern techniques.

“It’s kind of like detective work in a way,” Kearns says. “I feel like there’s just so much more we need to know about it. But we feel like we have made a big step forward.”

Journal

Journal of Avian Biology

DOI

10.1111/jav.02404

A new method of bioprinting uses aspiration of tiny biologics such as spheroids, cells and tissue strands, to precisely place them in 3D patterns either on scaffolding or without to create artificial tissues with natural properties, according to Penn State researchers.

"Tissue spheroids have been increasingly used as building blocks for fabrication of tissues, but their precise bioprinting has been a major limitation," said Ibrahim T. Ozbolat, Hartz Family Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics. "In addition, these spheroids have been primarily bioprinted in a scaffold-free manner and could not be applied for fabrication with a scaffold."

Using scaffolding is necessary for many applications in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and also in fabrication of microphysiological systems for disease modeling or drug screening.

Ozbolat and his team used aspiration-assisted bioprinting along with conventional micro-valve printing to create homogeneous tissues and tissues containing a variety of cells.

Aspiration-assisted bioprinting uses the power of suction to move tiny microscopic spheroids. Just as one could pick up a pea by placing a drinking straw on it and sucking through the straw, aspiration-assisted bioprinting picks up the tissue spheroid, holds the suction on the spheroid until it is placed in exactly the proper location and then releases it. The researchers report on their tissue engineering work today in Science Advances.

"Of course, we have to gently aspirate the spheroids according to their viscoelastic properties so no damage occurs in transferring the spheroids to the gel substrate," said Ozbolat. "The spheroids need to be structurally intact and biologically viable."

By controlling the exact placement and type of spheroid, the researchers have been able to create samples of heterocellular tissues, those containing different types of cells.

"We demonstrated for the first time that by controlling the location and distance between spheroids we can mediate collective capillary sprouting," said Ozbolat.

The researchers were able to create a matrix of spheroids with capillary sprouting in the desired directions. Capillaries are necessary for creation of tissues that can grow and continue to live. They are a means of delivering oxygen and nutrients to the cells, without which, cells will die. Without capillaries, only the outermost cells will receive oxygen and nutrients.

Precise placement of spheroids also allows creation of heterocellular tissues like bone. By beginning with human mesenchymal stem cells, the researchers found that the cells differentiated and self assembled bone tissue.

The ability to produce artificial living tissues is valuable in areas outside of regenerative medicine. Frequently, tissue samples are necessary to test drugs or screen other chemical products. Producing specific tissues for each purpose could help in these endeavors.

The researchers suggest that this method can be cost effective because the equipment required costs under $1,000 and is easy to use. They report that the system "can be useful in a wide variety of applications, including but not limited to organ-on-a-chip devices, drug testing devices, microfluidic, in vitro human disease models, organoid engineering, biofabrication and tissue engineering, biocomputing and biophysics."

They do note that the system still needs improvement to print spheroids in high-throughput to create larger tissues in a shorter time.

There may also be other, out-of-the-box uses for this system. Ozbolat suggests that bioprinting of electric eel electrocytes that produce an electric current might lead to living batteries in the future.

Helper T cells play an important role in the immune response against pathogens. The role of a particular subset of these immune cells was previously unclear. It's now been shown that T follicular helper cells live much longer than previously thought and contribute to long-term immunity. Researchers at the University of Basel's Department of Biomedicine reported these findings in Science Immunology.

Most vaccines induce specific antibodies that provide life-long defense against infection by pathogens. There are still many infections, however, for which no vaccines are available, including malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. In the ongoing fight against infectious disease, researchers are therefore exploring new vaccination strategies that focus on T cells, which can also provide protection against pathogens.

Immunological memory

T cell targeted vaccination generates long-lived memory cells that remember the pathogen. Following infection, these memory cells are able to multiply quickly and support pathogen clearance. Researchers at the University of Basel focused their studies on a specialized type of T cell: T follicular helper cells (Tfh). These cells interact with other immune cells, providing essential support for antibody production.

Tfh cells are difficult to study in humans as they don't reside in blood, but mainly in lymph nodes and the spleen, which cannot be sampled routinely. Earlier studies also indicated that Tfh cells fail to make memory in mice, disappearing shortly after an infection subsides.

Surprisingly long-lived Tfh cells

The research group, headed by Professor Carolyn King, has now demonstrated that the disappearance of Tfh cells is largely caused by their susceptibility to death during isolation from the tissue. By treating mice with a small molecule to prevent this, Tfh cells were found to be surprisingly long-lived, persisting for at least 400 days after infection. Unexpectedly, central memory T cells - which have long been considered to be a good target for vaccination - were absent at this time point.

Further investigation showed that the Tfh cells possess stem cell characteristics and continue to support antibody production even at very late time points when the immune response has supposedly died down.

Potential for improved vaccination strategies

This better understanding of Tfh cells opens up new prospects for creating long-term acquired immunity: "We hope that these findings regarding the long-term value of Tfh cells will contribute to the development of improved vaccination strategies," says Carolyn King, from the University of Basel's Department of Biomedicine, of the results.

URBANA, Ill. - Dried distiller's grains with solubles (DDGS), a co-product from corn ethanol processing, is commonly used as feed for cattle, swine and poultry. However, DDGS contains more phosphorus than the animals need. The excess ends up in manure and drains into the watershed, promoting algae production and eventually contributing to large dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Removing excess phosphorus from DDGS before it becomes feedstuff could alleviate the problem. A new study from University of Illinois examines the best way to recover phosphorus as a co-product, which can then potentially be used as fertilizer for corn and soybean production.

"A lot of phosphorus is in the corn itself. When corn is processed, you get different products. Some of it is fed in animal diets, which already contain plenty of phosphorus. So the additional phosphorus comes out in the manure and leaches into the groundwater," says Vijay Singh, the study's co-author. Singh is professor of agricultural and biological engineering and director of the Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory (IBRL) at U of I.

"We asked, can we do something in the process itself to recover this phosphorus, and put it back on the land as fertilizer? It's like a circular economy," he adds.

The research is part of a multi-pronged project spanning several departments in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at U of I. The project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant under the Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) umbrella.

Ankita Juneja, postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, is the study's lead author. She explains researchers first looked at how phosphorus flows through the production facility.

"We started with a model and estimated the flow of phosphorous in the entire diagrammed plant. Then we determined where the maximum concentration of phosphorus occurs, which will help us recover it economically," she says.

The researchers were able to recover 80% to 90% of the phosphorus through a simple process of increasing the alkalinity of thin stillage and adding calcium chloride, followed by stirring the product for five minutes in a continuous stir reactor.

Juneja explains that the goal was not to remove all phosphorus because some is needed as nutrients in the feedstuff.

"The animal food requirement of phosphorus in DDGS is 3 to 4 milligrams per gram of DDGS. Previously, the DDGS had about 9 to 10 milligrams per gram. So the rest was all excess, which would get into the manure. We were able to reduce it down to 3.25 milligrams per gram, which is in the range of what the animals actually need."

Removing phosphorus also drains protein from the DDGS, but Juneja says the study's recovery process was optimized to ensure that the amounts of protein and phosphorus left in the DDGS were calibrated to meet-but not exceed-requirements for animal feed.

The product that is recovered through this procedure is in the form of a solid precipitate or paste, which contains about 60 to 70% water. It can be dried and eventually used as fertilizer, though the study does not address that process. Singh says that is currently being tested by scientists in the U of I Department of Crop Sciences.

"We have clearly shown that you can recover this phosphorus from a processing plant so that it doesn't go in different co-products such as animal feed," he notes.

The researchers evaluated both the technical and economic aspects of the recovery process. While processors do have to invest in new equipment to perform the separation, there is the potential for selling the recovered co-product as P fertilizer for corn and soybeans.

"We did the economic analysis of how much it would cost to add the recovery section in an existing dry grind plant: how much it would cost in terms of fixed cost; how much it would cost in terms of operating costs every year; and how much extra revenue could be generated by producing this extra co-product, which can be used as fertilizer or other applications," Juneja explains.

"We found that the additional investment was $5.7 million in an existing dry grind plant that produces 40 million gallons of ethanol a year. The amount of added revenue is a little less than a million dollars each year," she adds.

Plants are not currently implementing these practices, but processors are very interested in learning about the study's findings, Singh notes.

"They want to know how to do it. Even just providing them with information on how phosphorus flows in their plant is a lot of value. And then giving them strategies to recover it; that is also of value to them," he adds.

Singh says this is the second of three studies he and Juneja are conducting on phosphorus recovery as part of the INFEWS project.

"We are looking at three different refineries within the Upper Sangamon Watershed," he says. "In this watershed, there are many different processing plants because Illinois has lot of bean and corn processing."

The first study looked at corn wet milling plants, where corn is converted to starch for making high fructose corn syrup, and the third study will focus on soybean processing plants.

Irvine, Calif. - March 6, 2020 - New discovery in breast cancer could lead to better strategies for preventing the spread of cancer cells to other organs in the body, effectively reducing mortality in breast cancer patients.

According to a study, published today in Nature Cell Biology, breast cancer cells shift their metabolic strategy in order to metastasize. Instead of cycling sugar (glucose) for energy, they preferentially use mitochondrial metabolism.

"This has important potential clinical implications because it suggests that drugs targeting mitochondrial metabolism may have efficacy for preventing metastatic spread in patients," said Devon A. Lawson, PhD, assistant professor in the UCI Department of Physiology and Biophysics and a member of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the UCI School of Medicine. "Historically, tumors were thought to contain dysfunctional mitochondria and be principally sustained by anaerobic glycolysis, or Warburg metabolism. Our work challenges that dogma and shows that breast cancer cells use mitochondrial metabolism during metastatic spread."

Despite major advances in the detection and treatment of early stage disease, metastasis - when cancer cells in the breast spread to other organs in the body - accounts for approximately 40,000 deaths among women in the U.S. each year. It is the number one cause of nearly all mortality associated with breast cancer.

Previous work suggests that metastasis is seeded by rare primary tumor cells with unique biological properties that enable them to spread, causing the cancer to take hold in other locations in the body. While properties promoting cell motility and migration are well studied, mechanisms governing the seeding and establishment of small collections of cancer cells in distal tissues are not. This is in part because metastatic seeding cannot be studied in humans, and because it is technically challenging to detect and analyze rare cells at this transient stage in animal models.

"Through our research, we established a robust new method for identifying global transcriptomic changes in rare metastatic cells during seeding using single-cell RNA-sequencing and patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of breast cancer," said Ryan Davis, first author on the study and a doctoral student in the Lawson laboratory. "We found that metastatic cells harbor distinct RNA molecules that are highly predictive of poor survival in patients and alter metabolism in a way that can be targeted therapeutically."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A relatively new theory that identifies universal concerns underlying human judgment could be key to helping people with opposing views on an issue coax each other to a different way of thinking, new research suggests.

The study tested the effectiveness of pro-environment messages guided by moral foundations theory, which suggests that at least five foundational principles influence our decisions about right and wrong.

Researchers wrote two experimental messages that were designed to urge readers to support a move away from fossil fuels as a primary energy source in the United States. The framing of one message appealed to conservative moral foundations (by noting that reliance on foreign resources is a national security concern) and the other drew on moral principles most meaningful to liberals (by citing the need to protect vulnerable citizens from a toxic environment).

The overarching finding: The conservative moral message framing was more effective than liberal framing at increasing conservatives' support for transitioning away from fossil fuels, especially when research participants were told the message came from a conservative source.

A January 2020 Pew Research Center survey notes the persistent partisan gap in this policy area: 85% of Democrats say protecting the environment should be a top priority for the president and Congress. Fewer than half as many Republicans (39%) rate environmental protection as a major priority.

Previous research has shown, in the context of moral foundations theory, that communication of traditionally conservative ideas to liberals and traditionally liberal ideas to conservatives does not routinely change minds, said Kristin Hurst, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate in behavior and sustainability in The Ohio State University School of Environment and Natural Resources.

"It's not always the case that the issues are fundamentally incompatible with the other side's values," Hurst said. "It's more that people on both sides of the political spectrum tend to frame their own issues using the language and arguments that align with the moral convictions of their own group.

"We can have a hard time recognizing the legitimacy of each other's moral convictions and, because of that, find it difficult to craft arguments that resonate with people who prioritize a different set of values - those on the other side of the political spectrum."

Hurst conducted the work with co-author Marc Stern of Virginia Tech while she was a graduate student there. The study is published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

The first journal article about moral foundations theory was published in 2004, and the 2012 book The Righteous Mind, by leading moral foundations theorist Jonathan Haidt, captured the attention of scholars and the public alike.

According to the theory, liberals tend to base their judgments on two moral foundations emphasizing the care of and fairness for people as individuals. Conservatives are more likely to rely on five principles - care and fairness plus those that increase group cohesiveness through loyalty and authority - as guides for their decisions. The fifth principle important to conservatives is sanctity, or purity, which refers to protecting the sacredness of valued objects, people, places and beliefs.

The researchers ran a pilot study asking students to identify their political leanings and seeking their agreement or disagreement with five statements about various environmental concerns, including global warming and endangered wildlife protection. The statement with the least support was an assertion that the United States should transition away from fossil fuels - so the researchers used that subject for their primary studies.

Using the online survey platform Prolific, Hurst and Stern recruited a total of 924 self-identified liberals and conservatives to participate in the studies. The researchers wrote two messages designed to urge readers to support a move away from fossil fuels as a primary energy source - one appealing to conservative readers and the other targeted to liberals. The researchers told participants the source of the message was either a liberal, neutral or conservative nonprofit organization.

The conservative appeal cited the need for the United States to reduce dependence on energy resources from countries linked to terrorism by being more competitive in the renewable energy marketplace. The liberal appeal emphasized that corporations favor fossil fuels because of profit potential and termed the transition to renewable energy a "compassionate and equitable choice."

Both messages touched on such concerns as pollution, the economy, jobs and worker safety.

The researchers conducted two surveys - one with both liberal and conservative participants and a second with only conservatives. Hurst and Stern found, as in previous research, that the moral framing doesn't tend to matter when a group - liberals, in this case - already agrees with the issue.

To gauge a change in support for the issue, the questionnaire asked people if they were more likely to support the transition away from fossil fuels now than they were before they read the message assigned to them. Conservatives reported more concern about and support for a reduction in U.S. fossil fuel use when they read the conservative message from a conservative source compared to those who read the liberal message from the liberal source.

"We found, sort of surprisingly, that the moral frame alone wasn't effective," Hurst said. "We found that this combination of the conservative moral frame with the conservative message source was key to resonating more with conservatives. That drove home the importance of the source."

The sources were not well-known media outlets or organizations. Because they were described as generic unnamed nonprofits that supported traditional conservative or liberal causes, Hurst said there might be a lesson in that: "Maybe a communicator or practitioner can seek out trusted nonprofit organizations or local leaders that are trusted more by conservative communities if they're willing to help you get your message across."

Hurst also noted that the purpose of framing messages according to moral foundations theory is about recognizing each other's deeply held moral convictions rather than dismissing them.

"This is not about getting conservatives to think like liberals," she said, "but rather changing how we communicate about environmental issues to highlight that caring about the environment is not just a liberal issue - it is also compatible with deeply help conservative values."

What The Study Did: This report describes the kinds of vaping products used by and the clinical characteristics of patients hospitalized in California last year with e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury.

Authors: Jason A. Wilken, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Christina Armatas, M.D., M.P.H., of the California Department of Public Health, Richmond, California, are the corresponding authors.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ 

(doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.0664)

Editor's Note: Please see the articles for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflicts of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

All dog breeds have unwanted behaviour, such as noise sensitivity, aggressiveness and separation anxiety, but differences in frequency between breeds are great. Various unwanted behaviour traits often occur simultaneously, as indicated by a study recently completed by Professor Hannes Lohi's research group from the University of Helsinki.

Unwanted behaviour occurs in many Finnish pet dogs.

"In the dataset of nearly 14,000 dogs that we have compiled, one of the largest in the world, unwanted behaviour occurred in 73% of the dogs. One such behaviour trait is noise sensitivity, found in one-third of the dogs," Professor Hannes Lohi says.

Lohi's research group investigated the prevalence of seven unwanted behaviour traits: noise sensitivity, including thunder, fireworks and shots; fearfulness of humans, other dogs and unfamiliar locations; fear of surfaces and heights; inattention and impulsivity; compulsive behaviour; aggressiveness; and separation anxiety. In addition to noise sensitivity, fearfulness and fear of surfaces and heights were very common traits.

As in dogs, so in humans

The study also looked into the link between individual traits. As observed in prior studies, fearfulness and aggressive behaviour are often comorbid. Some of the findings were new and surprising.

"We discovered an interesting connection between impulsivity, compulsive behaviour and separation anxiety. In humans, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often occurs together with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but this is the first time the same has been seen in dogs," says doctoral candidate Milla Salonen.

The behaviour research carried out by the group has another goal: to understand what underlies human mental health problems. Physiologically and behaviourally, dogs are similar to human beings. Furthermore, unwanted behaviour is natural in dogs who also share the same complex social environment with humans.

"With the help of this project and data, we will continue investigating how good a model species the dog is in research focused on human mental health problems. Our previous genetic research pointed to the same genomic areas in fearfulness and noise sensitivity," Professor Lohi says.

Breed-specific and significant differences in behaviour

The prevalence of unwanted behaviour traits was compared between the 15 breeds with the most responses received in the related survey, with significant differences identified between breeds.

"The problems appear to be quite breed-specific. For example, in Border Collies we observed more compulsive staring and light/shadow chasing, behaviours that occurred more rarely in all other breeds," Lohi says.

Differences in the prevalence of behaviour traits between individual breeds were manyfold.

"One of the biggest differences among the breeds was identified in fearfulness of unfamiliar people, in which there was an 18-fold difference between the most timid breed and the bravest breed, the Spanish Water Dog and the Staffordshire Bull Terrier," Salonen explains.

Behavioural research aims to increase canine welfare. Many unwanted behaviour traits, such as fearfulness and noise sensitivity, can cause intense stress in dogs. Behavioural problems may result in the owner giving up the dog.

"Our findings indicate that unwanted behaviour seems to be inherited, which means that, through careful breeding that relies on suitable behaviour indicators, the prevalence of such behaviour traits could be decreased. This would improve the quality of life of not only the dogs, but their owners too," Professor Lohi states.

There may be a better way for autonomous vehicles to learn how to drive themselves: by watching humans. With the help of an improved sight-correcting system, self-driving cars could learn just by observing human operators complete the same task.

Researchers from Deakin University in Australia published their results in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, a joint publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Chinese Association of Automation.

The team implemented imitation learning, also called learning from demonstration. A human operator drives a vehicle outfitted with three cameras, observing the environment from the front and each side of the car. The data is then processed through a neural network -- a computer system based on how the brain's neurons interact to process information -- that allows the vehicles to make decisions based on what it learned from watching the human make similar decisions.

"The expectation of this process is to generate a model solely from the images taken by the cameras," said paper author Saeid Nahavandi, Alfred Deakin Professor, pro vice-chancellor, chair of engineering and director for the Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation at Deakin University. "The generated model is then expected to drive the car autonomously."

The processing system is specifically a convolutional neural network, which is mirrored on the brain's visual cortex. The network has an input layer, an output layer and any number of processing layers between them. The input translates visual information into dots, which are then continuously compared as more visual information comes in. By reducing the visual information, the network can quickly process changes in the environment: a shift of dots appearing ahead could indicate an obstacle in the road. This, combined with the knowledge gained from observing the human operator, means that the algorithm knows that a sudden obstacle in the road should trigger the vehicle to fully stop to avoid an accident.

"Having a reliable and robust vision is a mandatory requirement in autonomous vehicles, and convolutional neural networks are one of the most successful deep neural networks for image processing applications," Nahavandi said.

He noted a couple of drawbacks, however. One is that imitation learning speeds up the training process while reducing the amount of training data required to produce a good model. In contrast, convolutional neural networks require a significant amount of training data to find an optimal configuration of layers and filters, which can help organize data, produces a properly generated model capable of driving an autonomous vehicle.

"For example, we found that increasing the number of filters does not necessarily result in a better performance," Nahavandi said. "The optimal selection of parameters of the network and training procedure is still an open question that researchers are actively investigating worldwide."
Next, the researchers plan to study more intelligent and efficient techniques, including genetic and evolutionary algorithms to obtain the optimum set of parameters to better produce a self-learning, self-driving vehicle.

One drone, four microphones and a loudspeaker: nothing more is needed to determine the position of walls and other flat surfaces within a room. This has been mathematically proved by Prof. Gregor Kemper of the Technical University of Munich and Prof. Mireille Boutin of Purdue University in Indiana, USA.

Can walls and flat surfaces be recognized using sound waves? Mathematicians have been studying this question from a theoretical standpoint for quite some time.

"The basic scenario is a room with flat walls, and maybe a ceiling and a floor," explains Prof. Gregor Kemper of the Chair of Algorithmic Algebra at TUM. The room is not assumed to be rectangular. It is also possible to measure the slope of the walls. Several microphones and a loudspeaker are contained in the room.

Speaker and microphones are placed on a drone

Previous studies have already mathematically proven that four microphones and a loudspeaker are sufficient to pinpoint the walls and also calculate their inclination. To prepare for this, the microphones have to be brought into the room at random positions, which will take quite some time and in some situations will be altogether impossible.

That is why Kemper and Boutin took the idea one step further. In their theoretical approach, they mounted the loudspeaker and four microphones on a drone - making measurement much more practical, because the equipment does not have to be installed in the room.

The algorithm can match echoes to a wall

The basic principle remains unchanged in the current approach: When the loudspeaker sends out a sound impulse, the waves bounce back from the walls. These direct reflections of the impulse are referred to as first order echoes. The biggest problem arising in the mathematical feasibility study: "Every microphone detects a large number of echoes. We need to be able to decide with certainty which echoes are coming from which wall," says Kemper.

The transit time - the time delay between emitting the sound pulse and receiving its echo - can be determined very precisely using the microphones. All transit times from a given wall have a specific relationship with one another. Kemper and Boutin developed a new algorithm that uses this relationship to assign individual echoes to a particular wall.

Once the echoes have been assigned to the right walls, the position and inclination of the walls are calculated using a geometric approach similar to that used by GPS when determining location data.

Ghost walls can be created by chance

The calculation can go wrong, however. That is because some echoes might satisfy the conditions of the mathematical relationship by chance. This leads to the identification of walls that are actually not there, so-called ghost walls.

"Naively, the probability of ghost walls would be expected to be higher when the microphones are mounted on a drone," explains Kemper. "This is because, in contrast to microphones mounted freely in space, they have less freedom of movement due to their rigid mounting on the drone. Instead of twelve, they have only six degrees of freedom."

Drone in ideal position for measurements

The question of how likely it is for such ghost walls to arise in the measurement process leads to the core statement of the paper: Kemper and Boutin have proved that the drone's freedom of motion is sufficient for the probability of placing it in a "good" position - meaning a position where no ghost walls are detected - to be equal to 1. In other words, such a placement is a near certainty.

"The six degrees of freedom of the drone are sufficient for the microphones to be almost certainly in an optimal position for the measurement," says Kemper. The only prerequisite is that the microphones are not arranged in a common plane on the drone.

A first step towards practical applications

In a next step, the researchers' scenario will become more realistic: They hope to find a mathematical solution for when errors or inaccuracies occur during measurement. They also intend to study configurations with the loudspeaker and microphones mounted on ground-based vehicles.

Animation on YouTube

Mental fatigue is a psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity which results in slower reaction times and attention deficits. It affects the ability to focus and impacts the capacity to make optimal decisions during a given task. Mental fatigue is often responsible for accidents in traffic or the workplace and can lead to poor study efficiency. We know that mindfulness has been shown to have a positive effect on stress-coping and cognitive performance. There is also cumulating evidence suggesting that listening to binaural beats may increase sustained attention. Binaural beats is an auditory illusion which has been framed as a class of cognitive and neural entrainment (Kirk et al., 2019). Even though there are different tones of different frequency (165Hz in the left and 179 Hz in the right) presented in each ear the participant will hear one tone, which is the amalgamated difference between the two tones (beta range of 14 Hz).

In a new study, Johanne L. Axelsen (SDU), Ulrich Kirk (SDU) and Walter Staiano (University of Valencia) tests the efficacy of binaural beats compared to mindfulness as a cognitive recovery strategy to counteract the negative effect of mental fatigue on sustained attention. The study also tests whether the mindfulness interventions will show an effect for the on-the-spot novice group or for the experienced mindfulness group, who have practiced mindfulness for 4 weeks in an online-based mindfulness program through the app Headspace.

There were five phases of the study, in the initial phase the participants' mood were assessed (BRUMS) and they completed a sustained attention task to measure their mind wandering (SART). The second phase consisted of the mental fatigue treatment for 90 minutes (AX-CPT). Immediately afterwards, the participants' mood was assessed again, and the two on-the-spot interventions followed: either listening to a guided mindfulness meditation track for 12 min. or an audio track (with binaural beats) for 12 min. The control group was asked to relax for 12 min. After this the effects of the interventions were tested using the sustained attention task.

The results showed that there was indeed an effect of on-the-spot binaural beats on sustained attention while in a state of experimentally induced mental fatigue. Interestingly, the experienced mindfulness group performed significantly better than the rest of the groups on the sustained attention task already before the mental fatigue was induced. Furthermore, the group's performance was better than that of the novice mindfulness group and the control group after the mental fatigue was induced.

The results, and results from previous work by Kirk et al. (2019), indicate that binaural beats may help suppress mind-wandering and sharpening of attentional focus, which in turn reduces the negative effect of mental fatigue. The individual might feel more relaxed and less affected by mental fatigue after listening to the music.

The same goes for the experienced mindfulness group, their mindfulness training already showed on the first task where they performed better than the rest of the groups. This could indicate that practicing mindfulness helps you focus on the task at hand and is effective in offering strategies to handling stressful situations and economizing of mental energy.

Therefore, the study demonstrates that just 12 minutes of binaural beats and 4 weeks of mindfulness training were effective recovery strategies to counteract the negative effects of mental fatigue on sustained attention.

The researchers are currently investigating whether listening to binaural beats for a longer period or practicing mindfulness will improve stressed individuals' heart rate variability (HRV) and if this has an effect on performance in specific cognitive tasks.