Tech

TROY, N.Y. -- Let's say you want to purchase a camera, and you're comparing two different advertisements. In one, the font, colors, and layout make the information easy to read. The other has an obscure style that takes more time for you to understand. If you decide to purchase the second camera with the more confusing advertisement, new research out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that, over time, you'll likely be happier with your choice.

In a paper co-authored by Gaurav Jain, an assistant professor of marketing in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer, researchers found that disfluency, or the difficulty for an individual to process a message, increases people's attitudes toward that message after a time delay.

"This research has real-life impact," Jain said. "Most of the time, marketing communicators try to make their message clear. What we learned, however, is that there are certain times, especially when people need to make choices, when we should actually use disfluent stimuli so that whatever people are choosing, they will like it once time has passed."

Using primary data collection designed by Jain of about 500 diverse individuals, researchers also found that consumers misattribute the time spent in the decision-making process. Rather than recognizing that the lengthy decision came from trying to understand the information, when looking back on the process, consumers instead believe they spent the time on making the decision. This leads the consumer to believe the decision they made was informed and worthy.

These findings have implications for marketing communications in many fields.

"When people are making decisions," Jain said, "be it choosing between insurance products, retirement funds, or even when choosing an elected official, marketers and designers need to remember that if we can make an individual spend some time in that choosing process, it's more likely people will stick with the option they chose over time."

Jain posits that when consumers' attitudes about a product increase, the impact on post-purchase decisions like returns and reviews of the product will be more favorable to the brand.

NASA satellites provided a look at the rainfall potential in Hurricane Sally before and after it made landfall in southern Alabama. NASA's Aqua satellite and IMERG analysis were used to analyze the storm's flooding potential.

Sally came ashore on Wednesday, Sept. 16 around 5:45 a.m. EDT near Gulf Shores, Alabama. It was a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale with sustained winds near 105 mph (169 kph). As a slow-moving storm, Sally generated a lot of rainfall, left behind flooded streets and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

NASA's Infrared View of Sally

Cloud top temperatures provide information to forecasters about where the strongest storms are located within a tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclones do not always have uniform strength, and some sides are stronger than others. The stronger the storms, the higher they extend into the troposphere, and the colder the cloud top temperatures. NASA provides that data to forecasters at NOAA's National Hurricane Center or NHC so they can incorporate it in their forecasting.

On Sept. 16 at 3:11 p.m. EDT (1911 UTC) NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed Sally using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument. AIRS found coldest cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) around the center of circulation and to the northeast and east of the center. NASA research has shown that cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain.

At that time, the AIRS image showed those strong storms over the Florida Panhandle, much of Alabama, Georgia and extending into western South Carolina.

On Sept. 16 at 3:11 p.m. EDT (1911 UTC) NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed Sally using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument. AIRS found the coldest cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) around the center of circulation and to the northeast and east of the center. NASA research has shown that cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain. Credit: NASA JPL/Heidar ThrastarsonNASA Calculates Sally's Rainfall

NASA combined data from multiple satellites to estimate the rainfall from Hurricane Sally in near-real time at half-hourly intervals from September 11-16, 2020. Rainfall rates and rainfall accumulations are estimated using NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) algorithm. IMERG combines observations from a fleet of satellites, in near-real time, to provide near-global estimates of precipitation every 30 minutes.

Rain rates along Sally's track periodically exceeded 1 inch/hour near its core and combined with its slow speed, led to high accumulations along the Gulf Coast. By 5:00 a.m. CDT (1000 UTC) on Sep. 16, IMERG had estimated total accumulations along the southern Alabama coastline and western Florida Panhandle exceeding 16 inches in some locations. NOAA rain gauge observations were broadly consistent with the IMERG accumulations.

Sally Breaks a Pensacola Rainfall Record

The National Weather Service at the Pensacola Regional Airport in Florida reported 18.17 inches of rainfall from Sally on Sept. 16. That broke the previous record of 5.28 inches on that date in 1979.

Forecast for Excessive Rainfall Over the U.S. Southeast

NHC's key message is about the rainfall from Sally: Widespread flooding is expected from central Georgia through southeastern Virginia.  Along the central Gulf Coast, most widespread moderate to major river flooding from the historic rainfall event will crest by the weekend, but rivers will remain elevated well into next week.

NHC Rainfall totals expected as Sally moves across the Southeast U.S. through Friday:

Central Georgia: Sally will produce additional rainfall totals of 3 to 6 inches, with localized higher amounts, on top of 3 to 6 inches, which has already fallen. Widespread flash flooding and minor to moderate river flooding is likely.

Central to upstate South Carolina: 3 to 6 inches, with isolated amounts of 10 inches. Widespread flash flooding and minor to moderate river flooding is likely.

Western to central North Carolina into south-central and southeast Virginia: 4 to 6 inches, isolated amounts up to 8 inches. Flash flooding and widespread minor river flooding is likely.

Sally's Status on Sept. 17

At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC), the center of Tropical Depression Sally was located near latitude 31.8 degrees north and longitude 85.7 degrees west. The center was about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Montgomery, Alabama. The depression is moving toward the northeast near 12 mph (19 kph) and a northeastward to east-northeastward motion is expected into Friday.

Maximum sustained winds have decreased to near 30 mph (45 kph) with higher gusts.

The estimated minimum central pressure based on nearby surface observations is 1000 millibars.

Senior Hurricane Specialist Stacy Stewart of NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla. noted, "Although the overall convective cloud and rain shield in satellite and radar imagery continues to erode, Tropical Depression Sally is still producing significant rainfall across east-central Alabama and west-central and central Georgia.  Surface observations and Doppler radar data indicate that Sally has weakened to a 25 knots [29 mph/46 kph] depression over southeastern Alabama."

Sally's Forecast Track

NHC says that additional weakening is forecast during the next couple of days, and Sally is expected to become a remnant low by tonight or Friday morning. On the forecast track, the center of Sally will move across southeastern Alabama this morning, over central Georgia this afternoon and evening, and move over South Carolina late tonight into Friday, Sept. 18.

AMHERST, Mass. - Artificial intelligence (AI) experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baylor College of Medicine report that they have successfully addressed what they call a "major, long-standing obstacle to increasing AI capabilities" by drawing inspiration from a human brain memory mechanism known as "replay."

First author and postdoctoral researcher Gido van de Ven and principal investigator Andreas Tolias at Baylor, with Hava Siegelmann at UMass Amherst, write in Nature Communications that they have developed a new method to protect - "surprisingly efficiently" - deep neural networks from "catastrophic forgetting" - upon learning new lessons, the networks forget what they had learned before.

Siegelmann and colleagues point out that deep neural networks are the main drivers behind recent AI advances, but progress is held back by this forgetting.

They write, "One solution would be to store previously encountered examples and revisit them when learning something new. Although such 'replay' or 'rehearsal' solves catastrophic forgetting," they add, "constantly retraining on all previously learned tasks is highly inefficient and the amount of data that would have to be stored becomes unmanageable quickly."

Unlike AI neural networks, humans are able to continuously accumulate information throughout their life, building on earlier lessons. An important mechanism in the brain believed to protect memories against forgetting is the replay of neuronal activity patterns representing those memories, they explain.

Siegelmann says the team's major insight is in "recognizing that replay in the brain does not store data." Rather, "the brain generates representations of memories at a high, more abstract level with no need to generate detailed memories." Inspired by this, she and colleagues created an artificial brain-like replay, in which no data is stored. Instead, like the brain, the network generates high-level representations of what it has seen before.

The "abstract generative brain replay" proved extremely efficient, and the team showed that replaying just a few generated representations is sufficient to remember older memories while learning new ones. Generative replay not only prevents catastrophic forgetting and provides a new, more streamlined path for system learning, it allows the system to generalize learning from one situation to another, they state.

For example, "if our network with generative replay first learns to separate cats from dogs, and then to separate bears from foxes, it will also tell cats from foxes without specifically being trained to do so. And notably, the more the system learns, the better it becomes at learning new tasks," says van de Ven.

He and colleagues write, "We propose a new, brain-inspired variant of replay in which internal or hidden representations are replayed that are generated by the network's own, context-modulated feedback connections. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging continual learning benchmarks without storing data, and it provides a novel model for abstract level replay in the brain."

Van de Ven says, "Our method makes several interesting predictions about the way replay might contribute to memory consolidation in the brain. We are already running an experiment to test some of these predictions."

NASA's Terra satellite found Vicky to be a shadow of its former self, devoid of precipitation around its low-level center. Any precipitation had been pushed far to the northeast from wind shear. Vicky looked like a wispy ring of clouds on visible satellite imagery and nearby Hurricane Teddy is not helping.

On Sept. 17 at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 UTC), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible image of Vicky in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean. The image showed a swirl of wispy clouds around the low-level center with the bulk of clouds pushed far to the east-northeast of the center.

Dan Brown, a Senior Hurricane Specialist at NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla. noted at 11 a.m. EDT on Sept. 17, "Vicky is feeling the effects of very strong upper-level winds associated with the outflow of Hurricane Teddy.  These winds have caused the remaining convection to be stripped well away from the center, and recent ASCAT (a scatterometer instrument that measures winds) data indicates that Vicky has weakened to a tropical depression."

Wind Shear Battering Vicky

Wind shear, that is, outside winds blowing at different directions at different levels in the atmosphere are battering Vicky. The NHC indicated that vertical wind shear of 40 to 50 knots is forecast to continue plaguing Vicky and the cyclone should continue to weaken and become a remnant low later today.

Vicky's Status on Sept. 17

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), the center of Tropical Depression Vicky was located near latitude 21.4 degrees north and longitude 38.2 degrees west. That is about 1,000 miles (1,610 km) west-northwest of the Cabo Verde Islands. The depression was moving toward the west near 14 mph (22 kph). Satellite wind data indicate that the maximum sustained winds have decreased to near 35 mph (55 kph) with higher gusts. The estimated minimum central pressure was 1008 millibars.

Vicky's Fatal Forecast

A turn toward the west-southwest is expected later today, and that motion should continue through Friday. Additional weakening is forecast during the next day or so, and Vicky is expected to become a remnant low later today. The cyclone is forecast to dissipate Friday night or early Saturday, Sept. 19.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new tool called the Phish Scale that could help organizations better train their employees to avoid a particularly dangerous form of cyberattack known as phishing.

By 2021, global cybercrime damages will cost $6 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to estimates from the 2020 Official Annual Cybercrime Report by Cybersecurity Ventures.

One of the more prevalent types of cybercrime is phishing, a practice where hackers send emails that appear to be from an acquaintance or trustworthy institution. A phishing email (or phish) can tempt users with a variety of scenarios, from the promise of free gift cards to urgent alerts from upper management. If users click on links in a phishing email, the links can take them to websites that could deposit dangerous malware into the organization's computers.

Many organizations have phishing training programs in which employees receive fake phishing emails generated by the employees' own organization to teach them to be vigilant and to recognize the characteristics of actual phishing emails. Chief information security officers (CISOs), who often oversee these phishing awareness programs, then look at the click rates, or how often users click on the emails, to determine if their phishing training is working. Higher click rates are generally seen as bad because it means users failed to notice the email was a phish, while low click rates are often seen as good.

However, numbers alone don't tell the whole story. "The Phish Scale is intended to help provide a deeper understanding of whether a particular phishing email is harder or easier for a particular target audience to detect," said NIST researcher Michelle Steves. The tool can help explain why click rates are high or low.

The Phish Scale uses a rating system that is based on the message content in a phishing email. This can consist of cues that should tip users off about the legitimacy of the email and the premise of the scenario for the target audience, meaning whichever tactics the email uses would be effective for that audience. These groups can vary widely, including universities, business institutions, hospitals and government agencies.

The new method uses five elements that are rated on a 5-point scale that relate to the scenario's premise. The overall score is then used by the phishing trainer to help analyze their data and rank the phishing exercise as low, medium or high difficulty.

The significance of the Phish Scale is to give CISOs a better understanding of their click-rate data instead of relying on the numbers alone. A low click rate for a particular phishing email can have several causes: The phishing training emails are too easy or do not provide relevant context to the user, or the phishing email is similar to a previous exercise. Data like this can create a false sense of security if click rates are analyzed on their own without understanding the phishing email's difficulty.

By using the Phish Scale to analyze click rates and collecting feedback from users on why they clicked on certain phishing emails, CISOs can better understand their phishing training programs, especially if they are optimized for the intended target audience.

The Phish Scale is the culmination of years of research, and the data used for it comes from an "operational" setting, very much the opposite of a laboratory experiment with controlled variables. "As soon as you put people into a laboratory setting, they know," said Steves. "They're outside of their regular context, their regular work setting, and their regular work responsibilities. That is artificial already. Our data did not come from there."

This type of operational data is both beneficial and in short supply in the research field. "We were very fortunate that we were able to publish that data and contribute to the literature in that way," said NIST researcher Kristen Greene.

As for next steps, Greene and Steves say they need even more data. All of the data used for the Phish Scale came from NIST. The next step is to expand the pool and acquire data from other organizations, including nongovernmental ones, and to make sure the Phish Scale performs as it should over time and in different operational settings. "We know that the phishing threat landscape continues to change," said Greene. "Does the Phish Scale hold up against all the new phishing attacks? How can we improve it with new data?" NIST researcher Shaneé Dawkins and her colleagues are now working to make those improvements and revisions.

In the meantime, the Phish Scale provides a new method for computer security professionals to better understand their organization's phishing click rates, and ultimately improve training so their users are better prepared against real phishing scenarios.

Information on the Phish Scale is published in a research article appearing in the current issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity. For additional background information about the development of the Phish Scale, see the team's body of research.

Artificial light accounts for approximately 20% of the total electricity consumed globally. Considering the present environmental crisis, this makes the discovery of energy-efficient light-emitting materials particularly important, especially those that produce white light. Over the last decade, technological advances in solid-state lighting, the subfield of semiconductors research concerned with light-emitting compounds, has led to the widespread use of white LEDs. However, most of these LEDs are actually a blue LED chip coated with a yellow luminescent material; the emitted yellow light combined with the remaining blue light produces the white color.

Therefore, a way to reduce the energy consumption of modern white LED lights is to find better blue-emitting semiconductors. Unfortunately, no known blue-emitting compounds were simultaneously highly efficient, easily processible, durable, eco-friendly, and made from abundant materials--until now.

In a recent study, published in Advanced Materials, a team of scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, discovered a new alkali copper halide, Cs5Cu3Cl6I2, that fills all the criteria. Unlike Cs3Cu2I5, another promising blue-emitting candidate for future devices, the proposed compound has two different halides, chloride and iodide. Although mixed-halide materials have been tried before, Cs5Cu3Cl6I2 has unique properties that emerge specifically from the use of I? and Cl? ions.

It turns out that Cs5Cu3Cl6I2 forms a one-dimensional zigzag chain out of two different subunits, and the links in the chain are exclusively bridged by I? ions. The scientists also found another important feature: its valence band, which describes the energy levels of electrons in different positions of the material's crystalline structure, is almost flat (of constant energy). In turn, this characteristic makes photo-generated holes--positively charged pseudoparticles that represent the absence of a photoexcited electron--"heavier." These holes tend to become immobilized due to their strong interaction with I? ions, and they easily bond with nearby free electrons to form a small system known as an exciton.

Excitons induce distortions in the crystal structure. Much like the fact that one would have trouble moving atop a suspended large net that is considerably deformed by one's own weight, the excitons become trapped in place by their own effect. This is crucial for the highly efficient generation of blue light. Professor Junghwan Kim, who led the study, explains: "The self-trapped excitons are localized forms of optically excited energy; the eventual recombination of their constituting electron-hole pair causes photoluminescence, the emission of blue light in this case."

In addition to its efficiency, Cs5Cu3Cl6I2 has other attractive properties. It is exclusively composed of abundant materials, making it relatively inexpensive. Moreover, it is much more stable in air than Cs3Cu2I5 and other alkali copper halide compounds. The scientists found that the performance of Cs5Cu3Cl6I2 did not degrade when stored in air for three months, while similar light-emitting compounds performed worse after merely days. Finally, Cs5Cu3Cl6I2 does not require lead, a highly toxic element, making it eco-friendly overall.

Excited about the results of the study, Prof. Kim concludes: "Our findings provide a new perspective for the development of new alkali copper halide candidates and demonstrate that Cs5Cu3Cl6I2 could be a promising blue-emitting material." The light shed by this team of scientists will hopefully lead to more efficient and eco-friendly lighting technology.

Understanding the specific mutations that contribute to different forms of cancer is critical to improving diagnosis and treatment. But limitations in DNA sequencing technology make it difficult to detect some major mutations often linked to cancer, such as the loss or duplication of parts of chromosomes.

Now, methods developed by Princeton computer scientists will allow researchers to more accurately identify these mutations in cancerous tissue, yielding a clearer picture of the evolution and spread of tumors than was previously possible.

Losses or duplications in chromosomes are known to occur in most solid tumors, such as ovarian, pancreatic, breast and prostate tumors. As cells grow and divide, slip-ups in the processes of copying and separating DNA can also lead to the deletion or duplication of individual genes on chromosomes, or the duplication of a cell's entire genome -- all 23 pairs of human chromosomes. These changes can activate cancer-promoting genes or inactivate genes that suppress cancerous growth.

"They're important driver events in cancer in their own right, and they interact with other types of mutations in cancer," said Ben Raphael, a professor of computer science who co-authored the studies with Simone Zaccaria, a former postdoctoral research associate at Princeton.

Although medical science has recognized the mutations as critical parts of cancer development, identifying these losses or duplications in chromosomes is difficult with current technology. That is because DNA sequencing technologies cannot read whole chromosomes from end to end. Instead, the technologies allow researchers to sequence snippets of the chromosome, from which they assemble a picture of the entire strand. The weakness of this method is that it cannot easily identify gaps in the DNA strand or areas of duplication.

To address this problem, Raphael and Zaccaria created new mathematical tools that allow scientists to search the vast collection of DNA snippets and uncover whether there are either missing pieces or duplicates. The algorithms, dubbed HATCHet and CHISEL, are described in detail in separate publications on Sept. 2 in Nature Communications and Nature Biotechnology.

"All the cells you are sequencing come from the same evolutionary process, so you can put the sequences together in a way that leverages this shared information," said Zaccaria, who will soon begin positions as a principal research fellow at the University College London Cancer Institute and a visiting research scientist at London's Francis Crick Institute.

"The reality is that the technology for sequencing DNA in individual cells has limitations, and algorithms help researchers overcome these limitations," said Raphael. "Ideally, both the sequencing technologies and the algorithms will continue to improve in tandem."

Raphael's research group has multiple collaborations with cancer researchers who are beginning to apply the HATCHet and CHISEL algorithms to sequences from various types of patient samples and experimental models.

From loaning pandas to welcoming tourists to hike to sacred monuments, to regulating the sale of wild animals for meat, policies across the world seek to forge clear paths to sustainability.

A group of sustainability scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) examined those policies and discovered they sometimes have more success than intended to achieve some of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet in some cases, those paths have created roadblocks and detours to success. The example of such unintended sidesteps is starkly illustrated in wildlife trading that provides economic benefits but has resulted in outbreaks of diseases that jump to humans, such as the current novel coronavirus.

The work is published in this week's open-access journal Sustainability.

"Today's world is extremely connected, and decisions are not created in a bubble," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, MSU Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability. "Our analysis has shown how important it is not just to look at the direct relationship between an action and a specific problem. It's crucial to look far and wide to see what else has been affected. Sometimes there are more wins. Sometimes, a problem solved in one place creates another elsewhere. We are learning the hard way how an action in one part of the world can have consequences thousands of miles away."

The scientists looked at 22 cases of tourism and instances of wildlife being relocated for various reasons across six continents. They looked at these cases through the lens of metacoupling - a new framework that helps scientists examine an action from the perspective of human-nature interactions across space and time.

In this paper, they lined up these cases with the 17 SDGs, adopted by world leaders from 193 countries and identify synergies - cases where success begat more success - or trade-offs, in which gaining ground in an SDG in one place meant losing ground on another SDG elsewhere.

The scorecard: they found 33 synergies and 14 trade-offs among 10 SDGs within the systems between which tourism, trade or animal movement happened - and across spillover systems - the places between.

Tourism accounts for one in 11 jobs worldwide (in the time frame of this study, before the pandemic) and is specifically called out in SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth). They found in the 12 cases they studied that beyond SDG 8, tourism in protected areas enhanced or compromised other SDGs, including SDGs 2 (zero hunger), 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), 12 (responsible consumption and production), 14 (life below water), 15 (life on land) and 17 (partnerships) within focal systems, and 1 (no poverty).

Examples of synergy can be found in Sagarmatha National Park of Nepal and Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, where tourism not only fulfilled SDG 8, but also contributed management funds for the parks - a win for SDG 15. But things were different in Peru's Machu Picchu, where the 900,000 visitors limited access for indigenous peoples and degradation of the site - a blow to SDG 12.

Moving animals around by trade, as a method of conservation or animal management - can have great benefits or harms. When raccoons were moved from their Florida homes to West Virginia to boost the local population, an SDG 15 win, SDG 3's good health and wellbeing took a hit when the Florida coons brought rabies with them.

The current pandemic is a dramatic call to better understand how the world works, and how to scrutinize actions for possible outcomes, according to the paper's first author Zhiqiang Zhao, who was a postdoctoral associate at MSU's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS). Liu is CSIS director.

The trade of bats in China may not have seemed relevant to people in Europe or America, yet it shows us it's just one stark reminder that it both is critical to do better to pursue global sustainability and to make sure our good intentions continue to result in good," Zhao said. "We are following the flows and working to show ways to quickly see all sides of a story."

A decade-long study of the iconic fish has found male whale sharks grow quickly, before plateauing at an average adult length of about eight or nine metres.

Female whale sharks grow more slowly but eventually overtake the males, reaching an average adult length of about 14 metres.

Australian Institute of Marine Science fish biologist Dr Mark Meekan, who led the research, said whale sharks have been reported up to 18 metres long.

"That's absolutely huge--about the size of a bendy bus on a city street," he said.

"But even though they're big, they're growing very, very slowly. It's only about 20cm or 30cm a year."

In conducting the research, scientists visited Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef for 11 seasons between 2009 and 2019.

They tracked 54 whale sharks as they grew--a feat made possible by a unique 'fingerprint' of spots on each whale shark that can be used to identify individual fish.

AIMS marine scientist Dr Brett Taylor said the team recorded more than 1000 whale shark measurements using stereo-video cameras.

"It's basically two cameras set up on a frame that you push along when you're underwater," he said.

"It works the same way our eyes do--so you can calibrate the two video recordings and get a very accurate measurement of the shark."

The study also included data from whale sharks in aquaria.

Dr Meekan said it is the first evidence that males and female whale sharks grow differently.

For the females, there are huge advantages to being big, he said.

"Only one pregnant whale shark had ever been found, and she had 300 young inside her," Dr Meekan said.

"That's a remarkable number, most sharks would only have somewhere between two and a dozen.

"So these giant females are probably getting big because of the need to carry a whole lot of pups."

Whale sharks are Western Australia's marine emblem, and swimming with the iconic fish at Ningaloo Reef boosts the local economy to the tune of $24 million a year.

But they were listed as endangered in 2016.

Dr Meekan said the discovery has huge implications for conservation, with whale sharks threatened by targeted fishing and ships strikes.

"If you're a very slow-growing animal and it takes you 30 years or more to get to maturity, the chances of disaster striking before you get a chance to breed is probably quite high," he said.

"And that's a real worry for whale sharks."

Dr Meekan said the finding also explains why gatherings of whale sharks in tropical regions are made up almost entirely of young males.

"They gather to exploit an abundance of food so they can maintain their fast growth rates," he said.

Dr Taylor said learning that whale sharks plateau in their growth goes against everything scientists previously thought.

"This paper has really re-written what we know about whale shark growth," he said.

Farmers around the world are keen to protect their most important asset: their soil. The soil supports and enriches their crops. But the relatively thin layer of topsoil can readily wash away into streams, carrying unwanted nutrients with it.

Enter cover crops. Cover crops are inedible plants grown during the off-season. Their roots help keep soil in place, preventing erosion. Cover crops can even absorb excess nutrients like nitrogen to keep them from polluting streams. Farmers are increasingly interested in using cover crops to help their farms. But with a dizzying array of plants to choose from and complex crop rotations, making the right choice is no easy feat.

"I believe cover crops are a very important tool for both retaining soil and keeping nutrients on the farm," says María Villamil, a researcher at the University of Illinois and a member of the American Society of Agronomy. "In the Midwest, we are very lucky to have high fertility soils, making us big providers of food worldwide. The protection of our soils is critical."

To help farmers in Illinois choose the right cover crop, Villamil and her team decided to test several potential cover crops. They planted different cover crops between the common Midwestern rotation of corn and soybeans. The researchers worked closely with farmers to choose which cover crops to test.

"They wanted to test different cover crops, especially ones that don't generate extra work in the spring and others that will not compete with the corn for resources," says Villamil.

Farmers preferred growing cereal rye as a cover crop before soybeans were planted. The rye captured the nitrogen remaining in the soil after the previous year's corn crop season. But, when farmers were planning to grow corn, they preferred using a vetch cover crop. Vetch is a legume crop, which means it can provide nitrogen for the corn to use later in the season. Vetch also uses less water than cereal rye, which means the corn crop will not need to work as hard to compete for limited water resources.

Villamil's team set up experimental plots at six locations around the state. Toward the end of the growing season for corn or soybeans, researchers walked through the crop fields to spread cover crop seeds among the plants. This mimics seeding by airplane. Aerial seeding has been a popular idea to plant cover crops in a timely manner over existing crops in fields. The cover crops they tested included spring oats, red clover, annual ryegrass and radishes, among others.

Then the researchers tracked how well the cover crops grew, how soil properties changed over time, and the yield of future food crops.

Surprisingly, the cover crops didn't have a big effect on the soil. "There was not much improvement of the soil properties with using a cover crop, except for maybe the rotation using the annual ryegrass," says Villamil.

The biggest reason most of the cover crops didn't affect the soil very much is that most of them died over the winter. That's largely because of the weather. Midwestern states like Illinois are subject to potentially harsh winters, especially in the northern part of the state. The broadcast seeding the researchers did also meant that the seeds simply sat on top of the soil. That meant the cover crops had a harder time germinating than if the seeds had been buried in the ground.

But cover crops that die over winter can be a good thing. Dead cover crops mean farmers will have less work killing them in the spring. But they're also less effective at protecting the soil or absorbing nutrients.

Annual ryegrass and cereal rye, both grasses, largely survived the winter, as did hairy vetch, a legume like soybeans. The grasses slightly reduced future corn yields. That's probably because they compete with corn for water in the spring.

"The yields of soybeans were not affected at all. Soybeans grow very well with cover crops, so we need to take advantage of that," says Villamil.

The team also tested how tilling the fields affected the soil and yields, but saw only modest effects.

"The lesson is that wringing benefits from cover crops requires a bigger commitment to using them to protect the soil," says Villamil. "That means choosing cover crops that can survive the winter, grow a lot in the spring, and hold onto soil that whole time. Some cover crops might slightly decrease future crop yields, but in the long-term, protecting our soil is worth it."

"If we want to see benefits from cover crops, we need to focus on managing our cropping systems for cover crops, giving them room to grow, and using them strategically following corn crops, or silage corn or even wheat, if we are lucky to have this crop in the rotation" she says. "Our main goal when using cover crops should be protecting the soil and leaving the soil nutrients in place."

Farmers around the world are keen to protect their most important asset: their soil. The soil supports and enriches their crops. But the relatively thin layer of topsoil can readily wash away into streams, carrying unwanted nutrients with it.

Enter cover crops. Cover crops are inedible plants grown during the off-season. Their roots help keep soil in place, preventing erosion. Cover crops can even absorb excess nutrients like nitrogen to keep them from polluting streams. Farmers are increasingly interested in using cover crops to help their farms. But with a dizzying array of plants to choose from and complex crop rotations, making the right choice is no easy feat.

"I believe cover crops are a very important tool for both retaining soil and keeping nutrients on the farm," says María Villamil, a researcher at the University of Illinois and a member of the American Society of Agronomy. "In the Midwest, we are very lucky to have high fertility soils, making us big providers of food worldwide. The protection of our soils is critical."

To help farmers in Illinois choose the right cover crop, Villamil and her team decided to test several potential cover crops. They planted different cover crops between the common Midwestern rotation of corn and soybeans. The researchers worked closely with farmers to choose which cover crops to test.

"They wanted to test different cover crops, especially ones that don't generate extra work in the spring and others that will not compete with the corn for resources," says Villamil.

Farmers preferred growing cereal rye as a cover crop before soybeans were planted. The rye captured the nitrogen remaining in the soil after the previous year's corn crop season. But, when farmers were planning to grow corn, they preferred using a vetch cover crop. Vetch is a legume crop, which means it can provide nitrogen for the corn to use later in the season. Vetch also uses less water than cereal rye, which means the corn crop will not need to work as hard to compete for limited water resources.

Villamil's team set up experimental plots at six locations around the state. Toward the end of the growing season for corn or soybeans, researchers walked through the crop fields to spread cover crop seeds among the plants. This mimics seeding by airplane. Aerial seeding has been a popular idea to plant cover crops in a timely manner over existing crops in fields. The cover crops they tested included spring oats, red clover, annual ryegrass and radishes, among others.

Then the researchers tracked how well the cover crops grew, how soil properties changed over time, and the yield of future food crops.

Surprisingly, the cover crops didn't have a big effect on the soil. "There was not much improvement of the soil properties with using a cover crop, except for maybe the rotation using the annual ryegrass," says Villamil.

The biggest reason most of the cover crops didn't affect the soil very much is that most of them died over the winter. That's largely because of the weather. Midwestern states like Illinois are subject to potentially harsh winters, especially in the northern part of the state. The broadcast seeding the researchers did also meant that the seeds simply sat on top of the soil. That meant the cover crops had a harder time germinating than if the seeds had been buried in the ground.

But cover crops that die over winter can be a good thing. Dead cover crops mean farmers will have less work killing them in the spring. But they're also less effective at protecting the soil or absorbing nutrients.

Annual ryegrass and cereal rye, both grasses, largely survived the winter, as did hairy vetch, a legume like soybeans. The grasses slightly reduced future corn yields. That's probably because they compete with corn for water in the spring.

"The yields of soybeans were not affected at all. Soybeans grow very well with cover crops, so we need to take advantage of that," says Villamil.

The team also tested how tilling the fields affected the soil and yields, but saw only modest effects.

"The lesson is that wringing benefits from cover crops requires a bigger commitment to using them to protect the soil," says Villamil. "That means choosing cover crops that can survive the winter, grow a lot in the spring, and hold onto soil that whole time. Some cover crops might slightly decrease future crop yields, but in the long-term, protecting our soil is worth it."

"If we want to see benefits from cover crops, we need to focus on managing our cropping systems for cover crops, giving them room to grow, and using them strategically following corn crops, or silage corn or even wheat, if we are lucky to have this crop in the rotation" she says. "Our main goal when using cover crops should be protecting the soil and leaving the soil nutrients in place."

BINGHAMTON, NY -- BINGHAMTON, NY -- Biosensors that are wearable on human skin or safely used inside the body are increasingly prevalent for both medical applications and everyday health monitoring. Finding the right materials to bind the sensors together and adhere them to surfaces is also an important part of making this technology better. A recent study from Binghamton University, State University of New York offers one possible solution, especially for skin applications.

Matthew S. Brown, a fourth-year PhD student with Assistant Professor Ahyeon Koh's lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, served as the lead author for "Electronic?ECM: A Permeable Microporous Elastomer for an Advanced Bio-Integrated Continuous Sensing Platform," published in the journal Advanced Materials Technology.

The study utilizes polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicone material popular for use in biosensors because of its biocompatibility and soft mechanics. It's generally utilized as a solid film, nonporous material, which can lead to problems in sensor breathability and sweat evaporation.

"In athletic monitoring, if you have a device on your skin, sweat can build up under that device," Brown said. "That can cause inflammation and also inaccuracies in continuous monitoring applications.

"For instance, one experiment with electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis showed that the porous PDMS allowed for the evaporation of sweat during exercise, capable of maintaining a high-resolution signal. The nonporous PDMS did not provide the ability for the sweat to readily evaporate, leading to a lower signal resolution after exercise.

The team created a porous PDMS material through electrospinning, a production method that makes nanofibers through the use of electric force.

During mechanical testing, the researchers found that this new material acted like the collagen and elastic fibers of the human epidermis. The material was also capable of acting as a dry adhesive for the electronics to strongly laminate on the skin, for adhesive-free monitoring. Biocompatibility and viability testing also showed better results after seven days of use, compared to the nonporous PDMS film.

"You can use this in a wide variety of applications where you need fluids to passively transfer through the material -- such as sweat -- to readily evaporate through the device," Brown said.

Because the material's permeable structure is capable of biofluid, small-molecule and gas diffusion, it can be integrated with soft biological tissue such as skin, neural and cardiac tissue with reduced inflammation at the application site.

Among the applications that Brown sees are electronics for healing long-term, chronic wounds; breathable electronics for oxygen and carbon dioxide respiratory monitoring; devices that integrate human cells within implantable electronic devices; and real-time, in-vitro chemical and biological monitoring.

Koh -- whose recent projects include sweat-assisted battery power and biomonitoring -- described the porous PDMS study as "a cornerstone of my research."

"My lab is very interested in developing a biointegrated sensing system beyond wearable electronics," she said. "At the moment, technologies have advanced to develop durable and flexible devices over the past 10 years. But we always want to go even further, to create sensors that can be used in more nonvisible systems that aren't just on the skin.

"Koh also sees the possibilities for this porous PDMS material in another line of research she is pursuing with Associate Professor Seokheun Choi from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She and Choi are combining their strengths to create stretchable papers for soft bioelectronics, enabling us to monitor physiological statuses.

(LOS ANGELES) - Patients with chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease have to go to a dialysis center for hours at a time, several times a week for the rest of their lives. Patients on dialysis have strict dietary restrictions, and have difficulty maintaining a job or school with all of the hours that are spent at the dialysis center each week. Often, dialysis is the main treatment doctors tell patients about, so patients go along with it. However, a living donor kidney transplant is the most effective treatment for end-stage renal disease. Past research has shown that doctors typically spend about a half an hour giving patients large quantities of information all at once about transplantation, which causes patients to become overwhelmed with the decision.

The challenges of deciding how to manage kidney disease are even greater for low socioeconomic-status patients, or patients who speak a primary language other than English. To help overcome these challenges, and to help patients feel confident about making an informed choice in their kidney disease care, Dr. Waterman, Deputy Director at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, and colleagues developed a computerized program called "Your Path to Transplant" for patients. This program tailors education using an online quiz at four different time points to gauge patient knowledge and readiness to pursue transplant. The four time points were a few weeks before transplant evaluation, during transplant evaluation, and four and eight months after baseline. After the quiz at each time point, the program delivers the right education module to match patient knowledge and motivation at that point. The modules contain video and print kidney transplant education, feedback reports, access to community resources that help patients overcome socioeconomic barriers, and telephonic coaching. Breaking the education up into appropriate amounts of information in the modules at the right times in the patient journey can help to overcome the information overload and overwhelm that many patients feel when learning about their treatment options for managing their kidney disease.

In their recent publication titled "Your Path to Transplant: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Tailored Expert System Intervention to Increase Knowledge, Attitudes and Pursuit of Kidney Transplant" in the American Journal of Transplantation, Dr. Waterman and colleagues tested their new program. The authors conducted a study at the University of California, Los Angeles Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program on over 800 patients with end-stage kidney disease.

Results showed that patients who received the "Your Path to Transplant" education were significantly more prepared to pursue kidney transplant at four and eight months after the intervention compared to those who received standard of care. They also had a significantly greater increase in transplant knowledge compared to those who received standard of care. Those who received "Your Path to Transplant" took more small steps toward transplant, including sharing their need for a living donor, sharing educational materials about living donation, and asking potential donors to get tested for their ability to donate. Overall, 18 months later, more people who received the "Your Path to Transplant" education program received a living donor transplant, compared to those who received standard of care.

The authors state that this was "one of the longest and most comprehensive educational interventions ever to occur within a transplant center." The findings suggest that tailored education is successful in increasing knowledge and readiness to pursue transplant and should be embedded within centers to meet patients' educational needs as they navigate the challenging Path to Transplant.

Researchers from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) in collaboration with colleagues from the Pavlov University, ITMO University, and the University of Hamburg compared their developed carriers for delivery of genome editing (GE) tools with other available analogues. The research of current studies were published in the in the journal Biomaterials.

The international scientific group considers the delivery of genome editing tools to organs and tissues and compared their work with the existing analogs. Genome editing tools allow to edit or modify DNA (in particular, the CRISPR/Cas9 technology uses the principle of "molecular scissors": the complex binds to the required area of the genome, where the Cas9 protein cuts the DNA. The cell tries to close the gap. If we provide the required genetic material at that moment, the cell will turn it into your DNA).

"These scissors should be properly delivered to the cells responsible for disease development. Our research team developed a polymeric carrier with a number of properties, which can be loaded with several types of genetic material. It is very important for genome editing. The carrier delivers the genetic material to organs where cell modifications is required for the treatment. The genetic material is a released into these cells", - says Alexander Timin, head of the Laboratory for microencapsulation and controlled delivery of biologically active compounds at St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.

He added, currently, the gene therapy is actively developing and, in this regard, it is required to apply genome editing tools, which use two RNA and DNA molecules. It should be delivered by single carrier. It is a very urgent task.

In the course of the study, various methods of genetic material delivery were considered and compared with existing analogues (technologies developed by the leading universities in the United States and China). The research team analyzed various parameters: editing efficiency, delivery efficiency, and carrier toxicity. Scientists identified, that their own development has a number of advantages in some parameters compared to the corresponding counterparts.

"The developed carrier is highly efficient, low toxic and obtains surface modification with various targeting ligands. In addition, the technology is able to protect the genetic material in the body from the premature degradation due to various biological factors, thus preserving all the properties and genetic effects. Currently, the development is at the stage of pre-clinical studies and is being tested on laboratory animals ", - mentioned Igor Radchenko, director of the "RASA-Polytech" center.
It should be noted that "RASA-Polytech" center was initially founded by Prof. Gleb B. Sukhorukov of QMUL. Now this center is rapidly growing together with new young researchers, who continue to intensively collaborate with Prof. Sukhorukov.

As for the technological mechanism, in case of oncological diseases, researchers use microinjections to insert the carriers directly into the tumor, or to inject the carriers into the bloodstream. In order to reach the required organ, the "beacons" were attached to the carriers. These are antibodies, which are able to bind to receptors on the surface of the cells affected by pathogens.

In the future, the researchers plan to conduct an experiment jointly with colleagues from Belgium, to test the developed technology in the case of HIV infection.

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) use mouse embryonic stem cells to engineer three-dimensional functional heart organoids resembling the developing heart

Tokyo, Japan -Heart development as it happens in vivo, or in a living organism, is a complex process that has traditionally been difficult to mimic in vitro, or in the laboratory. In a new study, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) developed three-dimensional functional heart organoids from mouse embryonic stem cells that closely resemble the developing heart.

The heart consists of multiple layers of tissue including many different cell types, including working heart muscle, connective tissue cells, and cells that make up blood vessels. These cells work together to ensure a proper functioning of the heart and thus the constant supply of fresh, oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. Studying all forms of heart disease in the laboratory and developing novel drugs to treat these diseases require disease models that closely resemble the actual heart. While effort has been made to generate heart muscle cells in vitro, these cells present as clumps without the tissue organization seen in vivo.

"Despite its seemingly simple function, the heart is a complex organ with an even more complex structure," say corresponding authors of the study Professors Jiyoung Lee and Fumitoshi Ishino. "To achieve that level of structural complexity, during development the heart is exposed to a myriad of signals. We wanted to capitalize on our knowledge of the signaling molecules during heart development and generate heart organoids that resemble the developing heart more closely than current techniques."

To achieve their goal, the researchers looked into the factors involved in heart development in vivo and speculated that the protein fibroblast growth factor 4 (FGF4) and a complex consisting of the proteins laminin and entactin (LN/ET complex), all of which are known are expressed in the embryonic heart, are necessary and sufficient to enable structural similarity between the heart organoids and the actual embryonic heart. Indeed, mouse embryonic stem cells exposed to FGF4 and LN/ET showed considerable similarity to the developing heart based on structural as well as molecular analyses.

Intriguingly, the process of development in the heart organoids closely reflected the morphological changes during embryonic heart development in vivo. A closer look at the cellular components making up the heart organoids revealed that cells of the embryonic heart, including cells of all four chambers as well as of the conduction system, were present in the structural organization seen during embryonic development. Importantly, the heart organoids possessed functional properties close to their in vivo-counterpart.

"These are striking results that show how our method provides a biomimetic model of the developing heart using a rather simple protocol. This tool could be helpful in studying the molecular processes during heart development, and in developing and testing novel drugs against heart disease," say Professors Lee and Ishino.