In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups — scientists and the literary world.

Snow identified this as a newly emergent divide, across which each party was more than happy to sneer at the other: Scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics.

Those divisions within the university seem now more deeply entrenched than ever before. And those working within the arts and the sciences face a third antagonist in society: Populism, with its attendant and increasing distrust of intellectuals.

We are not only living in an age where women are being under-represented in many spheres of economic life, but technology could make this even worse. Women hold just 19% of board directorships in the US and Europe. This gender gap in the boardroom persists, despite the fact that, on average, women have obtained higher educational qualifications than their male counterparts for more than two decades in many OECD countries. And the main reason is social bias.

This is on the verge of being further reinforced by artificial intelligence, as current data being used to train machines to learn are often biased.

University of Arizona (UA) organized 13th annual College of Science lecture series recently on the theme "Humans, Data and Machines." The series were addressed by experts from computer science, Data Science, law etc.  The six-lecture series is designed to delve into various aspects of the revolutionary social change now underway with the convergence of the physical, digital and biological worlds.

Replacing a human joint is common, artificial and far from permanent. The procedure involves cutting into the body to remove living bone and replacing it with metal and plastic. As these parts typically last 15 to 20 years, a second — riskier — replacement surgery sometimes is necessary. However, for a millions of patients in agony with knee or hip arthritis, such implants are welcome. Because once cartilage, the tissue lining and lubricating joints, wears away, the patient is left with bone-on-bone pain, swelling, stiffness and disability.

Washington University ,School of Medicine researchers are working on a radically different way to help people with arthritis: creating living joint replacements from the patient’s own cells and then programming those cells to fight an arthritis recurrence

Imagine internet browsing without the ability to make sense of images. It’s a problem that visually impaired computer users face every day. While screen reading technology gives users audible access to written content, it needs written descriptions to interpret images, and often there isn’t any.

Some website developers include descriptions of images in the code (called “alt text”) because it improves their websites’ search engine rankings. However, there’s no mechanism for determining whether these descriptions are accurate or informative. As a result, developers often enter one-word descriptions such as “image” or “photo,” leaving the visually impaired with no useful information about the image.

Ahmed Mahmoud hopes that his new invention – an unassuming grey box about the size of a coffee mug, attached to a metal probe – will be the key to significant improvements in crop yields for farmers in Nepal and around the world.

“It’s actually pretty straightforward in terms of function,” says the former master’s student in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “You stick the probe in the soil and it reads the moisture. It then makes that data available online or via text messages. You can query it on your phone.”

For centuries, medicine has been taking the same approach to treatments: when we feel ill, we go to the doctor, who then prescribes us a pill that we are required to take three times a day. The doctor determines the drug dosage based on our body weight. There are several disadvantages to this approach: we go to the doctor only when we are already ill. The drug dosage is imprecise. And while we administer many treatments in an attempt to control symptoms, we often do nothing at all to cure the actual disease.

The team, which included researchers in computer science, entomology, physics, and mechanical science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Leipzig University, described the work in a new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (10.1073/pnas.1713568115). Their behavioral monitoring system was designed to take advantage of recent advances in imaging and image analysis. Surprisingly, it revealed that a particular pattern of social interactions, associated with slow spread of information in human communities, appeared to allow for fast spread of information among the bees.

On the cellular highway, motor proteins called dyneins rule the road. Dyneins “walk” along structures called microtubules to deliver cellular cargo, such as signaling molecules and organelles, to different parts of a cell. Without dynein on the job, cells cannot divide and people can develop neurological diseases.

Now a new study, which appears in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, provides the first three-dimensional (3D) visualization of the dynein-dynactin complex bound to microtubules. The study leaders from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) report that a protein called dynactin hitches two dyneins together, like a yoke locking together a pair of draft horses.

MIT neuroscientists have uncovered a cellular pathway that allows specific synapses to become stronger during memory formation. The findings provide the first glimpse of the molecular mechanism by which long-term memories are encoded in a region of the hippocampus called CA3.

The researchers found that a protein called Npas4, previously identified as a master controller of gene expression triggered by neuronal activity, controls the strength of connections between neurons in the CA3 and those in another part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus. Without Npas4, long-term memories cannot form.

New research from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) may give scientists a chance to target tumors before they metastasize. The study, published recently in the Nature research journal Oncogene, shows that a protein called LTBP3 fuels a chain reaction that leads some early developing tumors to grow new blood vessels. These vessels then act like highways to spread cancer cells throughout the body, seeding metastatic tumors very early on.

“Lower LTBP3 levels appear to be associated with better prognosis in patients with certain types of cancer,” says Elena Deryugina, PhD, an assistant professor at TSRI and first author of the new study. Deryugina led the collaborative study with senior authors James P. Quigley, PhD, a TSRI professor, and Daniel Rifkin, PhD, a professor at NYU School of Medicine.

Our daily lives include hundreds of routine habits. Brushing our teeth, driving to work, or putting away the dishes are just a few of the tasks that our brains have automated to the point that we hardly need to think about them.

Although we may think of each of these routines as a single task, they are usually made up of many smaller actions, such as picking up our toothbrush, squeezing toothpaste onto it, and then lifting the brush to our mouth. This process of grouping behaviors together into a single routine is known as “chunking,” but little is known about how the brain groups these behaviors together

A new study on the mechanics of aging and longevity finds that fruit flies inhibited from producing the protein Sirt4 — which is also found in humans — are short-lived, while flies modified to make extra Sirt4 are long-lived. In addition, flies lacking Sirt4 display increased sensitivity to starvation, decreased fertility and activity, and an inability to use energy stores in their bodies.

The results suggest that boosting Sirt4 activity may be an important avenue for treating age-related metabolic decline and disorders, such as diabetes and obesity, and promoting a healthy lifespan. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bean plants that suppress secondary root growth in favor of boosting primary root growth forage greater soil volume to acquire phosphorus, according to Penn State researchers, who say their recent findings have implications for plant breeders and improving crop productivity in nutrient-poor soils.

The increase in the length of the root is referred to as primary growth, while secondary growth is the increase in thickness or girth of the root. Because root growth confers a metabolic cost to the plant, bean plants growing in phosphorus-depleted soils that send out longer, thinner roots have an advantage in exploring a greater volume of soil and acquiring more phosphorus.

MIT researchers have devised a miniaturized system that can deliver tiny quantities of medicine to brain regions as small as 1 cubic millimeter. This type of targeted dosing could make it possible to treat diseases that affect very specific brain circuits, without interfering with the normal function of the rest of the brain, the researchers say.

Using this device, which consists of several tubes contained within a needle about as thin as a human hair, the researchers can deliver one or more drugs deep within the brain, with very precise control over how much drug is given and where it goes. In a study of rats, they found that they could deliver targeted doses of a drug that affects the animals’ motor function.

 For a brain-computer interface (BCI) to be truly useful for a person with tetraplegia, it should be ready whenever it’s needed, with minimal expert intervention, including the very first time it’s used. In a new study in the Journal of Neural Engineering, researchers in the BrainGate collaboration demonstrate new techniques that allowed three participants to achieve peak BCI performance within three minutes of engaging in an easy, one-step process.

One participant, “T5,” a 63-year-old man who had never used a BCI before, needed only 37 seconds of calibration time before he could control a computer cursor to reach targets on a screen, just by imagining using his hand to move a joystick.

Members of the Keplinger Research Group. From right: Assistant Professor Christoph Keplinger, graduate student Eric Acome, undergraduate student Madison Emmett, graduate student Nick Kellaris, graduate student VC Gopaluni Venkata, undergraduate student Madeline King, graduate student Shane Mitchell, PhD candidate Timothy Morrissey and undergraduate student Garrett Smith. Photo by Glenn Asakawa / University of Colorado Boulder.

In the basement of the Engineering Center at Colorado University (CU Boulder), a group of researchers is working to create the next generation of robots.

Colorado University (CU Boulder) researchers have developed a new type of malleable, self-healing and fully recyclable “electronic skin” that has applications ranging from robotics and prosthetic development to better biomedical devices.

Electronic skin, known as e-skin, is a thin, translucent material that can mimic the function and mechanical properties of human skin. A number of different types and sizes of wearable e-skins are now being developed in labs around the world as researchers recognize their value in diverse medical, scientific and engineering fields.  

To power entire communities with clean energy, such as solar and wind power, a reliable backup storage system is needed to provide energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t out.

One possibility is to use any excess solar- and wind-based energy to charge solutions of chemicals that can subsequently be stored for use when sunshine and wind are scarce. During these down times, chemical solutions of opposite charge can be pumped across solid electrodes, thus creating an electron exchange that provides power to the electrical grid.

The rapid development of flexible and wearable electronics is giving rise to an exciting range of applications, from smart watches and flexible displays—such as smart phones, tablets, and TV—to smart fabrics, smart glass, transdermal patches, sensors, and more. With this rise, demand has increased for high-performance flexible batteries. Up to now, however, researchers have had difficulty obtaining both good flexibility and high energy density concurrently in lithium-ion batteries.

A team led by Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the department of applied physics and mathematics at Columbia Engineering, has developed a prototype that addresses this challenge: a Li-ion battery shaped like the human spine that allows remarkable flexibility, high energy density, and stable voltage no matter how it is flexed or twisted. The study is published in Advanced Materials.

“Hairy” nanoparticles made with light-sensitive materials that assemble themselves could one day become “nano-carriers” providing doctors a new way to simultaneously introduce both therapeutic drugs and cancer-fighting heat into tumors. That’s one potential application for a new technology that combines water-repelling yet light-sensitive and water-absorbing materials into polymeric nano-reactors for creating photo-responsive gold nanoparticles.

Light of specific wavelengths causes the nanoparticles to assemble and disassemble on demand, allowing the dynamic organization of the nanoparticles for smart in vitro drug release. By including chemotherapy molecules in the nanoparticle structures when they are assembled, the molecules could be drawn into tumors – and then released with the application of a light at a shorter wavelength that triggers disassembly through photo-cleavage

That’s the idea behind a collaborative research project led by University at Buffalo and Institute of Semiconductors (IoP) at Chinese Academy of Science (CAS). The tab — a triboelectric nanogenerator — is described in a study published online Jan. 31 in the journal Nano Energy.

“No one likes being tethered to a power outlet or lugging around a portable charger. The human body is an abundant source of energy. We thought: ‘Why not harness it to produce our own power?’” says lead author Qiaoqiang Gan, PhD, associate professor of electrical engineering in UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Artificial eye automatically stretches to simultaneously focus and correct astigmatism and image shift

Inspired by the human eye, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an adaptive metalens, that is essentially a flat, electronically controlled artificial eye. The adaptive metalens simultaneously controls for three of the major contributors to blurry images: focus, astigmatism, and image shift.The research is published in Science Advances.

Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sound waves can be used to produce ultra miniature optical diodes that are tiny enough to fit onto a computer chip. These devices, called optical isolators, may help solve major data capacity and system size challenges for photonic integrated circuits, the light-based equivalent of electronic circuits, which are used for computing and communications.

Isolators are nonreciprocal or “one-way” devices similar to electronic diodes. They protect laser sources from back reflections and are necessary for routing light signals around optical networks. Today, the dominant technology for producing such nonreciprocal devices requires materials that change their optical properties in response to magnetic fields, the researchers said.