Tech

A storyline with emotionally evocative details can reduce virtual reality cybersickness for some people, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo found that storylines that provide context and details can help users feel immersed in VR experiences and can reduce feelings of nausea, disorientation and eye strain, depending on a user's gaming experience.

"We found that people who had little to no experience playing video games had reduced cybersickness if they received this enhanced narrative, but regular video gamers did not need it because they were not predisposed to feeling symptoms," said Séamas Weech, a postdoctoral fellow in Kinesiology and a member of Waterloo's Games Institute. "What that tells us is that the actual design of the VR simulation's storyline itself can reduce the negative impact some people experience with VR technology."

The researchers recruited 42 participants from the University, then 156 at a new media technology exhibition in Kitchener, Ontario, and had them experience virtual reality. Before entering the simulation, the participants listened to a story about what they were about to experience, but half were given bare-bones details, and the other half were given an enhanced narrative, which included emotionally evocative details.

All participants who heard the enhanced story reported significantly more "presence" in VR - the feeling of being there - but only the non-gamers experienced reduced cybersickness.

"People with little gaming experience are highly sensitive to conflicts between VR technology and the information they are taking in," said Michael Barnett-Cowan, a Kinesiology professor and member of the Games Institute. "Enriched narratives seem to enhance presence and reduce cybersickness due to the decreased focus on problems with the multiple inputs to their senses."

"What's really striking is that we saw the benefits of enriched narratives across a sample of people from 8 to 60 years of age. This brings us closer to an inclusive way to enhance experiences in virtual reality through game design," said Sophie Kenny, a postdoctoral researcher at the Games Institute.

Individuals who visit natural spaces weekly, and feel psychologically connected to them, report better physical and mental wellbeing, new research has shown.

Alongside the benefits to public health, those who make weekly nature visits, or feel connected to nature, are also more likely to behave in ways which promote environmental health, such as recycling and conservation activities.

The findings of the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, indicate that reconnecting with nature could be key to achieving synergistic improvements to human and planetary health.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Plymouth, Natural England, the University of Exeter and University of Derby, and is the first to investigate - within a single study - the contribution of both nature contact and connection to human health, wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviours.

The findings are based on responses to the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment (MENE) survey, commissioned by Natural England as part of DEFRA's social science research programme. The team looked at people's engagement with nature though access to greenspace, nature visits and the extent to which they felt psychologically connected to the natural world.

Lead author Leanne Martin, of the University of Plymouth, said: "In the context of increasing urbanisation, it is important to understand how engagement with our planet's natural resources relate to human health and behaviour. Our results suggest that physically and psychologically reconnecting with nature can be beneficial for human health and wellbeing, and at the same time encourages individuals to act in ways which protect the health of the planet."

Marian Spain, Chief Executive of Natural England added: "It's a top priority for Natural England to unlock the potential of the natural environment to help address the challenges we are facing as a society: poor physical health and mental wellbeing; the climate change crisis and the devastating loss of wildlife.

"These findings give vital new insights of the need to not just increase contact with nature, but about the sorts of experience that really help people build an emotional connection, which is key to unlocking health benefits as well as inspiring people to taking action to help their environment. We look forward to using the research as we work with our many partners to support more people from all walks of life to benefit from thriving nature."

It has long been the dream of infectious disease researchers around the world to create a safe, non-toxic way to kill mosquitoes.

University of New Mexico scientists may have found a way to do just that with a simple hack that uses ordinary baker's yeast and orange oil to kill mosquito larvae before they grow into the buzzing, biting scourge of humanity.

In a paper published this month in the journal Parasites & Vectors, they report their method is effective against Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit dengue, chikunguya and Zika.

Essential oils from plants like orange oil have known insecticidal properties, said Ivy Hurwitz, PhD, a research associate professor in UNM's Center for Global Health.

"Plants use it to protect themselves against predators," she says, "so we're just using it in a different way."

Simply put, Hurwitz and her collaborators have found a way to inject orange oil into yeast cells. The oil kills the yeast, but tiny droplets of oil remain contained inside the yeast's tough cell wall.

Using a proprietary method, oil residue is washed from the outside of the yeast cells, which are then be dried into a powder - and later mixed with water to create a solution that can be sprayed on the ponds and puddles where larvae hatch and grow.

It turns out mosquito larvae love to munch on yeast, Hurwitz says, but they succumb when they ingest the oil-laden fungal cells.

The team's patented technology solves the problem of introducing toxic chemicals into the environment that can harm humans and other creatures and tend to lose their effectiveness over time, Hurwitz says.

"It's a step away from using the larvicides that are more harmful to humans, like organophosphates," she says. "A lot of mosquitoes are starting to develop resistance to these things."

And it's a more effective than simply spraying essential oils into the environment, because the oils can be toxic in high concentrations, and they rapidly break down when exposed to sunlight. (The yeast cells protect the oil droplets from degrading in the sun, Hurwitz says.)

In addition, getting the larvae to eat oil-laden yeast means much lower concentrations of oil are required to eradicate them, she says.

Hurwitz and her team started working on the project for about four years ago, when there were worldwide concerns about the newly identified Zika virus. They knew that larvae ate yeast - and when grown in the lab they were fed fish flakes, which are mostly yeast.

"We thought, 'Why don't we put the essential oil into the yeast?'" Hurwitz says.

Now, collaborators in Brazil are testing the yeast larvicide in controlled field studies with local strains of mosquito larvae. The team has shown in the lab that the method eradicates virtually all of the larvae, but it remains to be seen whether that will be as effective in a natural setting, Hurwitz says.

Further work is being done to test the effectiveness of the method on other mosquito species, she says. Meanwhile, she hopes to see the technology, which uses simple, inexpensive ingredients, adopted in tropical regions where mosquitoes are especially prevalent.

Researchers at the University of Bath have developed a revolutionary desalination process that has the potential to be operated in mobile, solar-powered units.

The process is low cost, low energy and low maintenance, and has the potential to provide safe water to communities in remote and disaster-struck areas where fresh water is in short supply.

Developed by the university's Water Innovation and Research Centre in partnership with Indonesia's Bogor Agricultural University and the University of Johannesburg, the prototype desalination unit is a 3D-printed system with two internal chambers designed to extract and/or accumulate salt. When power is applied, salt cations (positively charged ions) and salt anions (negatively charged ions) flow between chambers through arrays of micro-holes in a thin synthetic membrane. The flow can only happen in one direction thanks to a mechanism that has parallels in mobile-phone technology. As a result of this one-way flow, salt is pumped out of seawater. This contrasts with the classical desalination process, where water rather than salt is pumped through a membrane.

Desalination, which turns seawater into fresh water, has become an essential process for providing drinking and irrigation water where freshwater is scarce. Traditionally, it has been an energy-intensive process carried out in large industrial plants.

Professor Frank Marken from the Department of Chemistry said: "There are times when it would be enormously beneficial to install small, solar-powered desalination units to service a small number of households. Large industrial water plants are essential to 21st Century living, but they are of no help when you're living in a remote location where drinking water is scarce, or where there is a coastal catastrophe that wipes out the fresh water supply."

The Bath desalination system is based on 'ionics', where a cationic diode (a negatively charged, semi-permeable membrane studded with microscopic pores) is combined with an anionic resistor (a device that only allows the flow of negative ions when power is applied).

"This amounts to a whole new process for removing salt from water," said Prof Marken. "We are the first people to use tiny micron-sized diodes in a desalination prototype."

He added: "This is a low-energy system with no moving parts. Other systems use enormous pressures to push the water through nano-pores, but we only remove the salts. Most intriguingly, the external pumps and switches can be replaced by microscopic processes inside the membrane - a little bit like biological membranes work."

Another benefit of the Bath desalination unit is that it also allows for the opposite process - the up-concentration of salt - thereby minimising waste. The separated salt can be crystallised and then used, potentially as a food supplement or a de-icer. Most other desalination processes pump salt in the form of brine back into the sea, unsettling the marine ecosystem.

All going well, Prof Marken believes his department could roll out a working mobile desalination unit within five years. First, however, the team needs to find more robust materials as well as collaborators to help refine the invention and scale it up. The proof-of-concept prototype is currently able to remove 50% of the salt from a saltwater sample, but to make seawater drinkable, the salt content needs to be reduced by 90%.

Budi Riza Putra, the Chemistry PhD student who led the project, said: "We need to find new and better porous materials capable of pumping ions. Membrane thickness, pore number and pore diameter must all be optimised. We hope to find materials experts who can help us with this."

In their quest to find new membranes, the researchers have turned their attention to biological materials. Along with Dr. Katarzyna Szot-Karpi?ska and her group at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, they believe they are the first researchers to successfully use bacteriophages (viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria) to create a film capable of separating salt from water.

"Our bacteriophage (named M13) looks like spaghetti but is one-million times smaller," explains Mr Riza Putra. "If we make conditions a little acidic, the nano-spaghetti strands stick together, creating a thin film with tiny holes. When we tested this material as a membrane for desalination, we found it worked - it started acting as a diode, pumping ions in one direction only."

He added: "Before us, no-one thought about using viruses as membranes for water desalination."

However, while M13 shows potential as a membrane pump for water desalination, it is not perfect. "The substrate disintegrates as salt concentrations rise and at neutral pH," explains Prof Marken. "So, either we find a way to improve the semi-permeability of the bacteriophage material or we must find other, more robust ionic diode membrane alternatives."

A team of scientists from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University has gained insight into how electric fields affect the way energy from light drives molecular motion and transformation in a protein commonly used in biological imaging. A better understanding of this phenomenon, which is crucial to many processes that occur in biological systems and materials, could enable researchers to finely tune a system's properties to harness these effects, for instance using light to control neurons in the brain. Their findings were published in Science in January.

Twist and shout

Human vision, photosynthesis and other natural processes harvest light with proteins that contain molecules known as chromophores, many of which twist when light hits them. The hallmark of this twisting motion, called photoisomerization, is that part of the molecule rotates around a particular chemical bond.

"Something about the protein environment is steering this very specific and important process," says Steven Boxer, a biophysical chemist and Stanford professor who oversaw the research. "One possibility is that the distribution of atoms in the molecular space blocks or allows rotation about each chemical bond, known as the steric effect. An alternative has to do with the idea that when molecules with double bonds are excited, there is a separation of charge, and so the surrounding electric fields might favor the rotation of one bond over another. This is called the electrostatic effect."

A different tune

To find out more about this process, the researchers looked at green fluorescent protein, a protein frequently used in biological imaging whose chromophore can respond to light in a number of ways that are sensitive to its local environment within the protein, producing fluorescent light of various colors and intensities.

Stanford graduate students Matt Romei and Chi-Yun Lin, who led the study, tuned the electronic properties of the chromophore within the protein by introducing chemical groups that systematically added or subtracted electrons from the chromophore to engineer an electric field effect. Then they measured how this affected the chromophore's twisting motion.

With the help of coauthor Irimpan Mathews, a scientist at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), the researchers used an X-ray technique called macromolecular crystallography at SSRL beamlines 7-1, 12-2 and 14-1 to map the structures of these tuned proteins to show that these changes had little effect on the atomic structure of the chromophore and surrounding protein. Then, using a combination of techniques, they were able to measure how changes to the chromophore's electron distribution affected where rotation occurred when it was hit by light.

"Until now, most of the research on photoisomerization in this particular protein has been either theoretical or focused on the steric effect," Romei says. "This research is one of the first to investigate the phenomenon experimentally and show the importance of the electrostatic effect. Once we plotted the data, we saw these really nice trends that suggest that tuning the chromophore's electronic properties has a huge impact on its bond isomerization properties."

Honing tools

These results also suggest ways to design light-sensitive proteins by manipulating the environment around the chromophore. Lin adds that this same experimental approach could be used to study and control the electrostatic effect in many other systems.

"We're trying to figure out the principle that controls this process," Lin says. "Using what we learn, we hope to apply these concepts to develop better tools in fields such as optogenetics, where you can selectively manipulate nerves to lead to certain functions in the brain."

Boxer adds that the idea that the organized electric fields within proteins are important for many biological functions is an emerging concept that could be of interest to a broad audience.

"Much of the work in our lab focuses on developing methods to measure these fields and connect them with function such as enzymatic catalysis," he says, "and we now see that photoisomerization fits into this framework."

Energy harvesting, a technology to transform small quantities of naturally occurring energy (e.g. light, heat and vibration) into electricity, is gaining attention as a method to power the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This technology helps reduce environmental impacts and has a potential to power electronic devices in a stable and long-term manner, unlike batteries that need recharging or replacing.

Researchers at Nagoya University and Kyushu University focused on energy from the tiny movement of liquid and developed a device that generates over 5 volts of electricity directly from the movement of a liquid droplet. This device, made of flexible thin films, generates electricity when drops of water slide down on its upper surface. This technology is expected to be applied to self-powered devices used in liquids, including sensors monitoring the quality of wastewater from factories. Their findings have been published in the journal Nano Energy.

Energy generated from the tiny flow of liquid exists in various environments, such as inside of factory pipes, and in micro-fluid devices, but this kind of energy has not been used effectively so far. It has been shown that a graphene sheet can generate electricity from the liquid movement across its surface. However, its output voltage is limited to about 0.1 volt, which is not enough to drive electronic devices.

The research group, consisting of Nagoya University's Adha Sukma Aji, Ryohei Nishi, and Yutaka Ohno and Kyushu University's Hiroki Ago, has demonstrated that using molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) instead of graphene as the active material in the generator makes it possible to generate over 5 volts of electricity from a liquid droplet.

"To use MoS2 for the generator, it was necessary to form a large-area single-layer MoS2 film on a plastic film. With conventional methods, however, it was difficult to grow MoS2 uniformly on a large-area substrate," says Professor Ohno of the Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability at Nagoya University. "In our study, we succeeded in fabricating this form of MoS2 film by means of chemical vapor deposition using a sapphire substrate with molybdenum oxide (MoO3) and sulphur powders. We also used a polystyrene film as a bearing material for the MoS2 film, so that we were able to transfer the synthesized MoS2 film to the surface of the plastic film quite easily."

The newly developed generator is flexible enough to be installed on the curved inner surface of plumbing, and is thus expected to be used to power IoT devices used in liquids, such as self-powered rain gauges and acid rain monitors, as well as water quality sensors that can generate power from industrial wastewater while monitoring it.

Professor Ohno says, "Our MoS2 nanogenerator is able to harvest energy from multiple forms of liquid motion, including droplets, spraying, and sea waves. From a broader perspective, this device could also be used in applications involving hydrodynamics, such as generating electricity from rainwater and waterfalls."

A pilot study undertaken by researchers from the University of South Australia at Adelaide Zoo, has developed a new way to undertake basic health checks of exotic wildlife using a digital camera, saving them the stress of an anaesthetic.

Filming animals using a high-resolution digital camera installed on a tripod could offer another way for veterinarians to take an animal's pulse or check its breathing rate.

In the UniSA study, nine species of Adelaide Zoo's animals were filmed for three minutes, up to 40 metres away, picking up tiny movements in the chest cavity that indicate heart and breathing rates.

The animals filmed included a giant panda, African lion, Sumatran tiger, orangutan, Hamadryas baboon, koala, red kangaroo, alpaca and a little blue penguin.

UniSA Professor Javaan Chahl, a remote sensing engineer and one of the study leads, says the experiment recorded heart and breathing signal from all the animals.

"The study was done without any physical contact with the animals and without disrupting their daily routine," Prof Chahl says.

"Until now, monitoring vital signs of wild animals has used specialised equipment and usually required disturbing them or their environment."

"We showed through this experiment that digital cameras can successfully extract cardiopulmonary signals from the animals in a zoo setting. The technique needs refining and more validation, but it demonstrates that wild animals can be remotely monitored for signs of poor health, allowing for earlier detection of illness and fewer unconscious trips to the vet," Prof Chahl says.

Adelaide Zoo's veterinarian, Dr Ian Smith, congratulated the researchers. "The study so far looks very promising as a useful tool for monitoring animals both in a zoo setting but also in open range and wild settings."

"We look forward to hearing how the researchers get on with validating and refining their technique," Dr Smith says.

Osaka, Japan - Proteins are essential parts of organisms; thus, they are widely used in medicine, biology and chemistry. Enhancing their inherent properties by adding functional molecules to their structures is a common and important step in many fields. For example, adding fluorescent molecules allows proteins to be traced and quantified. Many different modification strategies with various advantages have been described. Osaka University researchers now report a simple N terminus-specific modification carried out under mild conditions using new reagents prepared in one step. Their findings were published online in ChemBioChem.

The N terminus is defined as the beginning of the protein chain where the amino group of the first amino acid building block is available to react. Specifically targeting the N terminus is useful as it is rarely involved in the protein folding, making it easily accessible while having minimal impact on the protein function. It is known to be a unique and ever-present site within each protein.

Inspired by previous works, the researchers screened a series of cyclic nitrogen-containing compounds and found that 1H-1,2,3-triazole-4-carbaldehyde (TA4C) derivatives can be conjugated to the N-terminus in a single step with relatively high conversions, up to 92%.

"Simplifying protein modification is a valuable development for a variety of fields," corresponding author Akira Onoda explains. "Our approach results in highly efficient site-specific labeling under mild conditions, which is important when working with sensitive biological molecules. As long as the molecule to be added contains an amino group, a reaction can be carried out to create the TA4C group in one step, which is then reactive towards the protein N terminus."

The TA4C reagents are prepared in a single step from a functional molecule with an amino group via a reaction known as the Dimroth rearrangement. A variety of amine-containing molecules were successfully used, including polyethylene glycol, biotin, and fluorescein, demonstrating the wide range of possible functionalities.

"We believe our approach will contribute as an immensely practical option to the protein modification toolbox and accelerate development in many areas which rely on protein conjugation," corresponding author Takashi Hayashi explains. "In addition, combining our approach with techniques that target other protein sites will allow multiple functions to be introduced, providing great flexibility. This will prove beneficial in a wide variety of fields including bioengineering, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics."

An artificial neural network can reveal patterns in huge amounts of gene expression data, and discover groups of disease-related genes. This has been shown by a new study led by researchers at Linköping University, published in Nature Communications. The scientists hope that the method can eventually be applied within precision medicine and individualised treatment.

It's common when using social media that the platform suggests people whom you may want to add as friends. The suggestion is based on you and the other person having common contacts, which indicates that you may know each other. In a similar manner, scientists are creating maps of biological networks based on how different proteins or genes interact with each other. The researchers behind a new study have used artificial intelligence, AI, to investigate whether it is possible to discover biological networks using deep learning, in which entities known as "artificial neural networks" are trained by experimental data. Since artificial neural networks are excellent at learning how to find patterns in enormous amounts of complex data, they are used in applications such as image recognition. However, this machine learning method has until now seldom been used in biological research.

"We have for the first time used deep learning to find disease-related genes. This is a very powerful method in the analysis of huge amounts of biological information, or 'big data'", says Sanjiv Dwivedi, postdoc in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University.

The scientists used a large database with information about the expression patterns of 20,000 genes in a large number of people. The information was "unsorted", in the sense that the researchers did not give the artificial neural network information about which gene expression patterns were from people with diseases, and which were from healthy people. The AI model was then trained to find patterns of gene expression.

One of the challenges of machine learning is that it is not possible to see exactly how an artificial neural network solves a task. AI is sometimes described as a "black box" - we see only the information that we put into the box and the result that it produces. We cannot see the steps between. Artificial neural networks consist of several layers in which information is mathematically processed. The network comprises an input layer and an output layer that delivers the result of the information processing carried out by the system. Between these two layers are several hidden layers in which calculations are carried out. When the scientists had trained the artificial neural network, they wondered whether it was possible to, in a manner of speaking, lift the lid of the black box and understand how it works. Are the designs of the neural network and the familiar biological networks similar?

"When we analysed our neural network, it turned out that the first hidden layer represented to a large extent interactions between various proteins. Deeper in the model, in contrast, on the third level, we found groups of different cell types. It's extremely interesting that this type of biologically relevant grouping is automatically produced, given that our network has started from unclassified gene expression data", says Mika Gustafsson, senior lecturer at IFM and leader of the study.

The scientists then investigated whether their model of gene expression could be used to determine which gene expression patterns are associated with disease and which is normal. They confirmed that the model finds relevant patterns that agree well with biological mechanisms in the body. Since the model has been trained using unclassified data, it is possible that the artificial neural network has found totally new patterns. The researchers plan now to investigate whether such, previously unknown patterns, are relevant from a biological perspective.

"We believe that the key to progress in the field is to understand the neural network. This can teach us new things about biological contexts, such as diseases in which many factors interact. And we believe that our method gives models that are easier to generalise and that can be used for many different types of biological information", says Mika Gustafsson.

Mika Gustafsson hopes that close collaboration with medical researchers will enable him to apply the method developed in the study in precision medicine. It may be possible, for example, to determine which groups of patients should receive a certain type of medicine, or identify the patients who are most severely affected.

Electric solid propellants are being explored as a safer option for pyrotechnics, mining, and in-space propulsion because they only ignite with an electric current. But because all of these applications require high heat, it's important to understand how the high temperatures change the propellants' chemistry. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and NASA used a computer model that simulates the thermochemical properties of high temperature materials to predict the thermochemistry of a new high-performance electric solid propellant.

"In ablation pulsed plasma thrusters, there is a high-temperature plasma next to the surface of the electric solid propellant. The heat causes small amounts of the propellant to be removed from or ablate from the surface and become vaporized. This ablated material is then accelerated to high speeds to propel the rocket. However, the high temperature also changes the chemical composition of the material. We didn't have that chemical composition information until now," said Joshua Rovey, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering at the U of I.

How hot are we talking about? By way of an example, 12,000 degrees Kelvin is the temperature of the surface of a star. The model simulated temperatures from 500 to 40,000 degrees Kelvin.

At these high temperatures, the chemistry of the solid propellant changes. The conventional Teflon material is made up of two carbons and four fluorines that are bonded to each other. As it ablates, it comes off so hot that the molecules dissociate. The carbons and fluorines detach from each other.

"It's so hot that electrons come off those atoms," Rovey said. "Now you have negatively charged electrons moving around and positively charged ions that remain as a fluid. The hot gas is ejected from the thruster at high speeds that generate thrust and propel spacecraft. This work is a numerical model to predict the thermodynamics and equilibrium of this propellant when it vaporizes and is at these high temperatures."

The research began with a previously developed numerical model for the Teflon material and data to provide a benchmark. After confirming that they simulated the Teflon correctly, the researchers used the same model, but using input conditions of the high-performance electric propellant to predict its conductivity and ionization at the same temperatures as the Teflon.

One primary takeaway from the study is that the high-performance electric propellant has a higher enthalpy--energy stored in the gas--at these extreme temperatures.

"We may have more of what's called frozen flow losses associated with this material than with the Teflon," Rovey said. "The high-performance electric propellant stores more energy internally in the gas. For propulsion, we want that energy to go toward accelerating the gas. We don't want to put a lot of energy into these internal modes. Yes, it makes really hot gas, but we want high-speed gas.

"That's one of the downsides to using it--storing more energy in these internal modes reduces efficiency. What this research showed is that the reason is fundamentally due to the thermochemistry of the material--the composition of the atoms and molecules in high-performance electric propellant and how they respond to intense heat and high temperatures."

Rovey said the information from this work can be applied to other solid propellant applications, such as pyrotechnics or in laser ablation.

"Whether it is an ablation-fed pulsed plasma thruster, a laser ablating a surface, or another energy deposition technique, we are simply studying how this material behaves at different temperatures--how its chemical composition changes."

NASA satellite imagery revealed that vertical wind shear appears to be affecting Tropical Cyclone Uesi in the Southern Pacific Ocean.

On Feb. 13 at 0315 UTC (Feb. 12 at 10:15 p.m. EST), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Uesi being adversely affected by vertical wind shear. The image showed that the bulk of clouds were being pushed to the southeast of the center of circulation.

In general, wind shear is a measure of how the speed and direction of winds change with altitude. Tropical cyclones are like rotating cylinders of winds. Each level needs to be stacked on top each other vertically in order for the storm to maintain strength or intensify. Wind shear occurs when winds at different levels of the atmosphere push against the rotating cylinder of winds, weakening the rotation by pushing it apart at different levels. Northwesterly wind shear was affecting Uesi and pushing the bulk of clouds to the southeast of the center.

At 0300 UTC on Feb. 13 (10 p.m. EST on Feb. 12), the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) issued the final bulletin on Tropical cyclone Uesi. At that time, Uesi was located near latitude 27.7 degrees south and longitude 161.1 degrees east, about 332 nautical miles southwest of Noumea, New Caledonia. Uesi had maximum sustained winds near 55 knots (63 mph/102 kph). The storm was moving to the south-southwest.

On Feb. 13 at 11:59 pm AEDT (Australia Eastern Time) or 7:59 a.m. EST, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) noted "Ex-tropical cyclone Uesi is moving rapidly southwards and will produce destructive wind gusts at Lord Howe Island over the next few hours."  ABM said that the system is expected to maintain an intensity equivalent to a category 2 tropical cyclone as it passes the island. For updates from ABM, visit: http://www.bom.gov.au/.

NASA's Aqua satellite is one in a fleet of NASA satellites that provide data for hurricane research.

WASHINGTON, February 11, 2020 -- The field of photonic integration -- the area of photonics in which waveguides and devices are fabricated as an integrated system onto a flat wafer -- is relatively young compared to electronics. Photonic integration has focused on communications applications traditionally fabricated on silicon chips, because these are less expensive and more easily manufactured.

Researchers are exploring promising new waveguide platforms that provide these same benefits for applications that operate in the ultraviolet to the infrared spectrum. These platforms enable a much broader range of applications, such as spectroscopy for chemical sensing, precision metrology and computation.

A paper in APL Photonics, from AIP Publishing, provides a perspective of the field of ultra-wideband photonic waveguide platforms based on wide bandgap semiconductors. These waveguides and integrated circuits can realize power-efficient, compact solutions, and move key portions of ultra-high-performance systems to the chip scale instead of large tabletop instruments in a lab.

Until now, key components and subsystems for applications, such as atomic clocks, quantum communications and high-resolution spectroscopy, are constructed in racks and on tabletops. This has been necessary because they operate at wavelengths not accessible to silicon waveguides due to its lower bandgap and other absorption properties in the UV to near-IR that reduce the optical power handling capabilities, among other factors.

Daniel J. Blumenthal and his team in Santa Barbara, California, have researched photonic integration platforms based on waveguides fabricated with wide bandgap semiconductors that have ultralow propagation losses.

"Now that the silicon market has been addressed for telecommunications and LIDAR applications, we are exploring new materials that support an exciting variety of new applications at wavelengths not accessible to silicon waveguides," said Blumenthal. "We found the most promising waveguide platforms to be silicon nitride, tantala (tantalum pentoxide), aluminum nitride and alumina (aluminum oxide)."

Each platform has the potential to address different applications such as silicon nitride for visible to near-IR atomic transitions, tantalum pentoxide for raman spectroscopy or aluminum oxide for UV interactions with atoms for quantum computing.

Applications, such as atomic clocks in satellites and next-generation high-capacity data center interconnects, can also benefit from putting functions such as ultralow linewidth lasers onto lightweight, low-power chips. This is an area of increased focus as exploding data center capacity pushes traditional fiber interconnects to their power and space limitations.

Blumenthal said next-generation photonic integration will require ultra-wideband photonic circuit platforms that scale from the UV to the IR and also offer a rich set of linear and nonlinear circuit functions as well as ultralow loss and high-power handling capabilities.

ITHACA, N.Y. - The consequences of workplace automation will likely impact just about every aspect of our lives, and scholars and policymakers need to start thinking about it far more broadly if they want to have a say in what the future looks like, according to a new paper co-authored by a Cornell University researcher.

"Mostly, people in our field wait until technology is implemented in a workplace to study it. And then we go in and say, 'How is work different?'" said Diane Bailey, the Geri Gay Professor of Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "But faced with a technology that has the potential to disrupt the landscape of work in such a universal way, immediately and simultaneously, we felt like we have to get in the barn before the horse leaves."

The paper, "Beyond Design and Use: How Scholars Should Study Intelligent Design Technologies," was published in December in Information and Organization. Bailey co-authored the study with Stephen Barley, the Christian A. Felipe Professor of Technology Management in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

According to the paper, past examples of new technology suggest it will take longer than companies predict for workplaces to become fully transformed by AI, and some jobs might not be as easily replaceable as economists believe. This means researchers have more time to gain a deeper understanding of how workplace automation will affect society, in order to have more say in how it unfolds.

Fully understanding workplace automation, the researchers said, requires an interdisciplinary approach that considers everything from the power dynamics within tech companies to the design of our societal institutions. At Cornell, Bailey and Martin Wells, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Sciences and chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science, are heading a core team of nine other researchers from eight departments to follow this cross-disciplinary roadmap. The group is currently seeking funding to plan the creation of an institute to study AI and work.

In the paper, Bailey and Barley identified four factors scholars should study in order to assess AI's future impact: variation; power; ideology; and institutions.

"Maybe the reasons our neighborhoods work well is that so many of us are away from them during the day. We might have to rethink all of these things - and that's what the paper argues we should do."

Considering variety among jobs is important, Bailey said, because not all jobs - even in the same fields - are identical. Researchers generally use U.S. Department of Labor databases to predict how automation might affect certain job categories, but most studies don't consider differences in implementation, skills, tasks and work practices across organizations or locations.

Because designers and engineers don't function independently, power is another crucial factor, the paper said. Which AI technologies are pursued and how aggressively they're implemented depends on the dynamics within companies, as well as the priorities of the government entities that might fund or regulate those companies.

The ideology of design can provide insight into how technologists create new systems, Bailey said. According to the paper, the AI community often approaches design with its own culture, potentially emphasizing technical over social aspects. This could mean that some systems that are predicted to replace humans might still require them, though possibly in different roles.

"We have to understand how all of these market mechanisms operate if we're going to be savvy enough to work in that world and say, 'No, we want technology that looks like this' [or] 'Design something that operates this way,'" Bailey said. "We need to work backwards from some desired future that we want, to get the technologies that will help us get there."

Researchers also need to consider the potential impacts of automation - and the widespread unemployment it will likely bring - on our institutions, the paper said. For example, Bailey said, being home together all day - without the demands and concrete rewards of a paid job - could strain marriages and families. Roads, highways and transit systems that were designed to move people from home to work will need to be reconsidered.

"Maybe the reasons our neighborhoods work well is that so many of us are away from them during the day," Bailey said. "We might have to rethink all of these things - and that's what the paper argues we should do."

Researchers and policymakers also need to weigh the societal benefits of work, in order to make informed decisions about which jobs are worth saving.

"We have to think about what aspects of work have meaning and value to us," Bailey said. "We might decide, 'Maybe AI can do this better than a person, but we don't care, because we get some value out of it.'"

Chronic and non-healing wounds--one of the most devastating complications of diabetes and the leading cause of limb amputation--affects millions of Americans each year. Due to the complex nature of these wounds, proper clinical treatment has been limited.

For the first time, faculty in the biomedical engineering department--a shared department with the UConn School of Dental Medicine, School of Medicine, and School of Engineering-- designed a wirelessly-controlled, or "smart," bandage and corresponding smartphone-sized platform that can precisely deliver different medications to the wound with independent dosing.

This bandage, developed by Dr. Ali Tamayol, associate professor, and researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Harvard Medical School, is equipped with miniature needles that can be controlled wirelessly--allowing the drugs to be programmed by care providers without even visiting the patient.

"This is an important step in engineering advanced bandages that can facilitate the healing of hard to treat wounds. The bandage does not need to be changed continuously," says Tamayol.

Given the range of processes necessary of wound healing, different medications are needed at different stages of tissue regeneration. The bandage--a wearable device--can deliver medicine with minimal invasiveness.

With the platform, the provider can wirelessly control the release of multiple drugs delivered through the miniature needles. These needles are able to penetrate into deeper layers of the wound bed with minimal pain and inflammation. This method proved to be more effective for wound closure and hair growth as compared to the topical administration of drugs, and is also minimally invasive.

The research, recently published in the Advanced Functional Materials journal, was first conducted on cells and later on diabetic mice with full thickness skin injury. With this technology, the mice showed signs of complete healing and lack of scar formation--showing the bandages' ability to significantly improve the rate and quality of wound healing in diabetic animals.

These findings can potentially replace existing wound care systems and significantly reduce the morbidity of chronic wounds--which will change the way diabetic wounds are treated.

Tamayol recently applied for a patent for this technology.

For years now, 10,000 steps a day has become the gold standard for people trying to improve their health -- and recent research shows some benefits can come from even just 7,500 steps. But if you're trying to prevent weight gain, a new Brigham Young University study suggests no number of steps alone will do the trick.

Researchers from BYU's Exercise Science Department, along with colleagues from the Nutrition, Dietetics & Food Science Department, studied 120 freshmen over their first six months of college as they participated in a step-counting experiment. Participants walked either 10,000, 12,500 or 15,000 steps a day, six days a week for 24 weeks, while researchers tracked their caloric intake and weight.

The goal of the study was to evaluate if progressively exceeding the recommended step count of 10,000 steps per day (in 25% increments) would minimize weight and fat gain in college freshmen students. In the end, it didn't matter if the students walked more than even 15,000 steps; they still gained weight. Students in the study gained on average about 1.5 kg (roughly 3.5 lbs.) over the study period; a 1 to 4 kg average weight gain is commonly observed during the first academic year of college, according to previous studies.

"Exercise alone is not always the most effective way to lose weight," said lead author Bruce Bailey, professor of exercise science at BYU. "If you track steps, it might have a benefit in increasing physical activity, but our study showed it won't translate into maintaining weight or preventing weight gain."

Study subjects wore pedometers 24 hours a day for the six-week study window. On average, students walked approximately 9,600 steps per day prior to the study. By the end of the study, the participants in the 10,000-step group averaged 11,066 steps, those in the 12,500-step group averaged 13,638 steps and those in the 15,000-step group averaged 14,557 steps a day.

Although weight was not affected by the increased steps, there was a positive impact on physical activity patterns, which "may have other emotional and health benefits," study authors said. One positive, if not unsurprising, outcome of the study was that sedentary time was drastically reduced in both the 12,500- and 15,000-step groups. In the 15,000-step group, sedentary time decreased by as much as 77 minutes a day.

"The biggest benefit of step recommendations is getting people out of a sedentary lifestyle," Bailey. "Even though it won't prevent weight gain on its own, more steps is always better for you."