Given only a few frames of a video, humans can usually surmise what is happening and will happen on screen. If we see an early frame of stacked cans, a middle frame with a finger at the stack’s base, and a late frame showing the cans toppled over, we can guess that the finger knocked down the cans. Computers, however, struggle with this concept.

In a paper presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision, MIT researchers describe an add-on module that helps artificial intelligence systems called convolutional neural networks, or CNNs, to fill in the gaps between video frames to greatly improve the network’s activity recognition

IIT Bombay student develops a device to locate veins before drawing blood.

For many of us, the thought of being pricked by a needle to draw blood or inject drugs is horrifying, right? What if you had to be pierced many times because the right vein could not be identified? Nightmarish you say? Soon, this could be the thing of past, thanks to an award-winning ‘vein tracer’ by Mr. Trivikram Annamali, a student of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

The vein tracer is a simple, hand-held, lightweight device that can help medical practitioners identify the veins during a venipuncture procedure like drawing blood or administering an intravenous injection. It works using near-infrared spectroscopy, where infrared light is used to understand the interaction between matter (blood, in this case) and the infrared radiation.

MIT computer scientists have developed a system that learns to identify objects within an image, based on a spoken description of the image. Given an image and an audio caption, the model will highlight in real-time the relevant regions of the image being described.

Unlike current speech-recognition technologies, the model doesn’t require manual transcriptions and annotations of the examples it’s trained on. Instead, it learns words directly from recorded speech clips and objects in raw images, and associates them with one another.

The model can currently recognize only several hundred different words and object types. But the researchers hope that one day their combined speech-object recognition technique could save countless hours of manual labor and open new doors in speech and image recognition.

For one thing, once you pick up the pen, you then have to shift it in your hand to get it in the writing position. “You move the pen from an initial grasp to something more stable, but to do that, you’re gripping it with certain surfaces of the fingers and sliding it against other surfaces of the fingers,” said Adam Spiers, a former associate research scientist in Aaron Dollar’s lab. “It’s really quite complicated as far as all the force and frictional interactions go, but we all take it for granted as a very simple thing to do.”

So Dollar’s lab tried a simpler tack that focuses on the variation in friction of finger surfaces. Their results were recently published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and will also soon be presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018).

Although it emerged from the field of cryptocurrency, blockchain’s tamper-proof, decentralized technology has important implications not only for the financial industry but for real estate, insurance, the law and other areas. Blockchain functions like a constantly-updated database distributed among a network of computers, instead of being controlled by a single entity.

Emin Gün Sirer, associate professor of computer science and co-director of Cornell’s Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3), says the widespread adoption of blockchains and smart contracts is going to be an “extinction-level event” for many companies.

Shuddering and unable to breathe, he vomited up five plastic bags. The small pilot whale, found in a Thai canal this past June, is another symptom of a crisis in the world’s oceans. Plastic waste, mostly broken down into tiny particles, floats in huge blobs that together cover as much as 40 percent of Earth’s ocean surface. Growing public concern has inspired movements to ban single-use plastics, most notably straws. In California, a bill to ban straws unless requested at dine-in restaurants is awaiting a signature from the governor. Other states such as Hawaii, cities such as Seattle and New York, and corporations such as Amazon and Starbucks are also considering or have initiated plastic phase-out plans.

The variability of monsoon rains due to climate change affects Marathwada and Vidarbha regions the most, says a district level study

India is ranked 6th in the list of countries most vulnerable to climate change, according to Global Climate Risk Index and it is evident from the frequent occurrence of extreme weather events like floods, cyclones and droughts. Climate change affects the monsoon rains that drive agriculture in India. Though many studies have tried to assess the impact of climate change at a regional level, the policies based on such studies fail to address the grievances of agriculture and farming sector at smaller, district levels. In a new study, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have investigated the impact of climate change on agriculture in the districts of Maharashtra.

As the world heats up, plants face a dilemma – the same tiny holes they have to open to exchange gases also let out water. They can close the holes, called stomata, to stay hydrated in hotter, drier conditions but, in doing so, may miss out on critical carbon dioxide.

The question for the Bergmann Lab at Stanford University is how this dilemma will play out as increasing portions of the world’s plants experience consistently warmer, drier environments. Figuring that out required the group to take a step back and better understand how plants regulate the number of stomata each leaf develops. The answer not only suggests opportunities for engineering plants to withstand climate change, but also has uncovered a previously unknown process by which plants fine-tune the amount of stomata they build.

For angiosperms — or flowering plants — one of the most important decisions facing them each year is when to flower. It is no trivial undertaking. To flower, they must cease vegetative growth and commit to making those energetically expensive reproductive structures that will bring about the next generation.

Knowledge of this process at the cellular level is critical for understanding how plants allocate resources and produce the components we care most about — including the grains, tubers, leaves, nuts and fruits that mean so much to humans and animals alike.

A simple blood test can detect the earliest changes caused by Huntington’s disease, even before scans can pick up any signs in the brain, a new UCL-led study has found.

The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, builds on recent evidence by the same research team, which found that a novel blood test can predict the onset and track the progression of the disease in people who carry the gene responsible for the incurable and fatal brain disorder.

In conducting this latest study, the team developed a tool kit to guide measurement of two early biomarkers of Huntington’s disease found in blood and brain fluid, for use in clinical trials that seek to find the first disease-altering treatment for Huntington’s.

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, applied an experimental gene therapy treatment in mice and were able to successfully target and eliminate the damaged DNA in mitochondria which causes the devastating conditions.

Their results, published in the journal Nature Medicine, could provide a practical route to treating patients with these diseases and may provide a future alternative to mitochondrial replacement therapy, or ‘three-parent IVF’. This is the first time programmable genome engineering tools have been used inside a living animal, resulting in such significant modification of mitochondrial DNA.

Cancer immunotherapy — efforts to boost a patient’s own immune system, allowing it to better fight cancer cells on its own — has shown great promise for some previously intractable cancers. Yet immunotherapy doesn’t work for everyone, for reasons that aren’t always clear. Most research and new therapies in this field have been focused on CD8+ T cells, a type of immune cell that recognizes and destroys other cells that display cancer antigens (mutated proteins that help give rise to tumors). Meanwhile, another type of immune cell, CD4+ T cells, and the molecular signals they recognize have received less attention.

Using a bioinformatics approach, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers found that CD4+ T cell’s binding partner, a molecule called MHC-II, may have even more influence on emerging tumors than MHC-I, the better known partner of CD8+ T cells.

Macrophages are immune cells that are supposed to protect the body from infection by viruses and bacteria. Yet Zika virus preferentially infects these cells. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have now unraveled how the virus shuts down the genes that make macrophages function as immune cells.

The study is published on September 10 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In pregnant women, Zika virus can stunt neonatal brain development, leading to babies born with abnormally small heads, a condition known as microcephaly. Adult brain cells may also be vulnerable to the virus.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a portable, easy-to-use device for quick and accurate screening of diseases. This versatile technology platform called enVision (enzyme-assisted nanocomplexes for visual identification of nucleic acids) can be designed to detect a wide range of diseases – from emerging infectious diseases (e.g. Zika and Ebola) and high-prevalence infections (e.g. hepatitis, dengue, and malaria) to various types of cancers and genetic diseases.

enVision takes between 30 minutes to one hour to detect the presence of diseases, which is two to four times faster than existing infection diagnostics methods. In addition, each test kit costs under S$1 – 100 times lower than the current cost of conducting similar tests. 

Imperial scientists have helped unravel the genetic code of tuberculosis (TB), enabling doctors to tailor treatments to each individual patient. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, may herald a quicker, more tailored treatment for the millions of people around the world living with tuberculosis.

The research suggests our understanding of TB’s genetic code is now so detailed we can predict which commonly used anti-TB drugs are best for treating a patient’s infection.

This study, led by the international CRyPTIC consortium based at the University of Oxford and facilitated by the United Kingdom government’s 100,000 Genomes Project in partnership with Public Health England, is by far the largest of its kind, covering over 10,000 TB genomes from 16 equal partner countries around the globe.

MIT engineers have united the principles of self-assembly and 3-D printing using a new technique, which they highlight today in the journal Advanced Materials.

By their direct-write colloidal assembly process, the researchers can build centimeter-high crystals, each made from billions of individual colloids, defined as particles that are between 1 nanometer and 1 micrometer across.

“If you blew up each particle to the size of a soccer ball, it would be like stacking a whole lot of soccer balls to make something as tall as a skyscraper,” says study co-author Alvin Tan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “That’s what we’re doing at the nanoscale.”

IIT Bombay and TIFR researchers demonstrate a method to turn heat into usable spin current

Much of modern life is unimaginable without electronic devices like the computer or the mobile phone you are reading this article on, the television in your living room, the microwave oven in your kitchen or many others! But soon, electronic devices may be superseded by a new generation of spintronic devices that make use of a quantum mechanical property of electrons called spin. In a new study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) have demonstrated that heat energy can be converted into 'spin current'. Their work was featured on the front page of the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Typically, when architects or engineers design a new building, it’s only at the end of the process — if ever — that a lifecycle analysis of the building’s environmental impact is carried out. And by then, it may be too late to make significant changes. Now, a faster and easier system for doing such analyses could change all that, making the analysis an integral part of the design process from the beginning.

The new process, described in the journal Building and Environment in a paper by MIT researchers Jeremy Gregory, Franz-Josef Ulm and Randolph Kirchain, and recent graduate Joshua Hester PhD ’18, is simple enough that it could be integrated into the software already used by building designers so that it becomes a seamless addition to their design process.

Dopamine, a signaling molecule used throughout the brain, plays a major role in regulating our mood, as well as controlling movement. Many disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia, are linked to dopamine deficiencies.

MIT neuroscientists have now devised a way to measure dopamine in the brain for more than a year, which they believe will help them to learn much more about its role in both healthy and diseased brains.

“Despite all that is known about dopamine as a crucial signaling molecule in the brain, implicated in neurologic and neuropsychiatric conditions as well as our abilty to learn, it has been impossible to monitor changes in the online release of dopamine over time periods long enough to relate these to clinical conditions,” says Ann Graybiel, an MIT Institute Professor, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.

A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.

While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

An international team of researchers led by Princeton physicist Zahid Hasan has discovered a quantum state of matter that can be “tuned” at will — and it’s 10 times more tuneable than existing theories can explain. This level of manipulability opens enormous possibilities for next-generation nanotechnologies and quantum computing.

“We found a new control knob for the quantum topological world,” said Hasan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. “We expect this is tip of the iceberg. There will be a new subfield of materials or physics grown out of this. … This would be a fantastic playground for nanoscale engineering.”

Hasan and his colleagues, whose research appears in the of Nature, are calling their discovery a “novel” quantum state of matter because it is not explained by existing theories of material properties.

A team of Caltech researchers has developed a biological toolkit of proteins that can be assembled together in different ways, like Legos, to program new behaviors in cells. As a proof-of-concept, they designed and constructed a circuit that can be added to human cells growing in a laboratory dish, detect if a cancer-causing gene is activated in the cells, and if so, cause the cells to self-destruct.

The research was done in the laboratory of Michael Elowitz, professor of biology and biological engineering and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. A paper describing the work appears in the September 21 issue of the journal Science.

Conventional computers store information in a bit, a fundamental unit of logic that can take a value of 0 or 1. Quantum computers rely on quantum bits, also known as a "qubits," as their fundamental building blocks. Bits in traditional computers encode a single value, either a 0 or a 1. The state of a qubit, by contrast, can simultaneously have a value of both 0 and 1. This peculiar property, a consequence of the fundamental laws of quantum physics, results in the dramatic complexity in quantum systems. 

Quantum computing is a nascent and rapidly developing field that promises to use this complexity to solve problems that are difficult to tackle with conventional computers. A key challenge for quantum computing, however, is that it requires making large numbers of qubits work together—which is difficult to accomplish while avoiding interactions with the outside environment that would rob the qubits of their quantum properties.