AI detects autism speech patterns across different languages

The researchers believe their work could provide a tool that might one day transcend cultures, because of the computer’s ability to analyze words and sounds in a quantitative way regardless of language.
 Photo Credit: by Emily Wade on Unsplash

A new study led by Northwestern University researchers used machine learning — a branch of artificial intelligence — to identify speech patterns in children with autism that were consistent between English and Cantonese, suggesting that features of speech might be a useful tool for diagnosing the condition.

Undertaken with collaborators in Hong Kong, the study yielded insights that could help scientists distinguish between genetic and environmental factors shaping the communication abilities of people with autism, potentially helping them learn more about the origin of the condition and develop new therapies.

Children with autism often talk more slowly than typically developing children, and exhibit other differences in pitch, intonation and rhythm. But those differences (called “prosodic differences'' by researchers) have been surprisingly difficult to characterize in a consistent, objective way, and their origins have remained unclear for decades.

However, a team of researchers led by Northwestern scientists Molly Losh and Joseph C.Y. Lau, along with Hong Kong-based collaborator Patrick Wong and his team, successfully used supervised machine learning to identify speech differences associated with autism.

A warming climate decreases microbial diversity

Researchers with the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma are investigating plant diversity and taking samples for microbial diversity analysis. 
Credit: Institute for Environmental Genomics, University of Oklahoma

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma have found that the warming climate is decreasing microbial diversity, which is essential for soil health. Led by Jizhong Zhou, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at OU, the research team conducted an eight-year experiment that found that climate warming played a predominant role in shaping microbial biodiversity, with significant negative effect. Their findings are published in Nature Microbiology.

“Climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss from local to global scales, which could further alter ecosystem functioning and services,” Zhou said. “Despite the critical importance of belowground soil biodiversity in maintaining ecosystem functions, how climate change might affect the richness and abundant distribution of soil microbial communities (bacteria, fungi, protists) was unresolved.”

Using a long-term multifactor experimental field site at OU, researchers with the university’s Institute for Environmental Genomics examined the changes of soil microbial communities in response to experimental warming, altered precipitation and clipping (annual biomass removal) on the grassland soil bacterial, fungal and protistan biodiversity since 2009.

Stanford engineers develop tiny robots to bring health care closer to precisely targeted drug delivery

The origami millirobot integrates capabilities of spinning-enabled multimodal locomotion, cargo transportation, and targeted drug delivery.
Credit: Zhao Lab

A Stanford mechanical engineer creates multifunctional wireless robots to maximize health outcomes and minimize invasiveness of procedures.

If you’ve ever swallowed the same round tablet in hopes of curing everything from stomach cramps to headaches, you already know that medicines aren’t always designed to treat precise pain points. While over-the-counter pills have cured many ailments for decades, biomedical researchers have only recently begun exploring ways to improve targeted drug delivery when treating more complicated medical conditions, like cardiovascular disease or cancer.

A promising innovation within this burgeoning area of biomedicine is the millirobot. These fingertip-sized robots are poised to become medicine’s future lifesavers – to crawl, spin, and swim to enter narrow spaces on their mission to investigate inner workings or dispense medicines.

Right Whales’ Survival Rates Plummet After Severe Injury from Fishing Gear

Source: Duke University

Most North Atlantic right whales that are severely injured in fishing gear entanglements die within three years, a new study led by scientists at the New England Aquarium and Duke University finds.

North Atlantic right whales are a critically endangered species whose population has shrunk in recent decades. Scientists estimate fewer than 350 of the iconic whales are still alive in the wild today.

To examine the role fishing gear entanglements have played in the species’ decline, the researchers tracked the outcomes of 1,196 entanglements involving 573 right whales between 1980 and 2011 and categorized each run-in based on the severity of the injury incurred

The data revealed that male and female right whales with severe injuries were eight times more likely to die than males with minor injuries, and only 44% of males and 33% of females with severe injuries survived longer than 36 months.

Females that did survive had much lower birth rates and longer intervals between calving, a worrisome trend for the long-term survival of the species.

Infants in industrialized nations are losing a species of gut bacteria that digests breast milk

Credit: Cleyder Duque

Babies in industrialized nations have fewer bacteria that efficiently digest breast milk than babies of a hunter-gatherer group.

The guts of infants are nearly sterile at birth, but they become a community of trillions of microbial cells, known as the microbiome, by the time they reach adulthood. For infants who are breastfed, their health is off to a solid start with milk that provides nutrients for good bacteria that fight off pathogens.

But, according to a study led by researchers at Stanford Medicine, the bacteria efficient at digesting breast milk are being lost as nations industrialize. Because no other bacteria are as adept at digesting milk, researchers are concerned this bacterial exodus could mean rising cases of conditions common in the industrialized world, such as chronic inflammation.

The study found that bacteria in the genus Bifidobacterium — good bacteria that live in the intestines — are the most prevalent species in the microbiome of infants less than 6 months old around the world — regardless of whether they are fed breast milk or formula. Researchers discovered that a species called Bifidobacterium infantis (or B. infantis) — known to efficiently break down a special class of breast milk sugars known as oligosaccharides, as well as boost the immune system and bacterial microbiome development — dominates the gut microbiome of infants in nonindustrialized societies.

In contrast, Bifidobacterium breve, a species with limited capacity to break down milk sugars, is the most prevalent species in infants of industrialized nations.

Pioneering study shows climate played crucial role in changing location of ancient coral reefs

Pre-historic coral reefs dating back up to 250 million years extended much further away from the Earth’s equator than today, new research has revealed.

The new study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates how changes in temperature and plate tectonics, where the positions of Earth’s continents were in very different positions than today, have determined the distribution of corals through the ages.

Although climate has often been regarded as the main driver of the location of coral reefs, this has yet to be proven due to limited fossil records. Now, for the first time, a team of international scientists used habitat modelling and reconstructions of past climates to predict the distribution of suitable environments for coral reefs over the last 250 million years.

The researchers, from the University of Vigo, in Spain, the University of Bristol and University College London in the UK, then checked their predictions using fossil evidence of warm-water coral reefs. They showed that corals in the past, from 250 to about 35 million years ago, existed much further from the equator than today, due to warmer climatic conditions, and a more even distribution of shallow ocean floor.

“Our work demonstrates that warm-water coral reefs track tropical-to-subtropical climatic conditions over geological timescales. In warmer intervals, coral reefs expanded poleward. However, in colder intervals, they became constrained to tropical and subtropical latitudes,” said first author Dr Lewis Jones, a computational paleobiologist research fellow at the University of Vigo.

No signs (yet) of life on Venus

Venus from Mariner 10 
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used a combination of biochemistry and atmospheric chemistry to test the ‘life in the clouds’ hypothesis, which astronomers have speculated about for decades, and found that life cannot explain the composition of the Venusian atmosphere.

Any life form in sufficient abundance is expected to leave chemical fingerprints on a planet’s atmosphere as it consumes food and expels waste. However, the Cambridge researchers found no evidence of these fingerprints on Venus.

Even if Venus is devoid of life, the researchers say their results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, could be useful for studying the atmospheres of similar planets throughout the galaxy, and the eventual detection of life outside our Solar System.

“We’ve spent the past two years trying to explain the weird sulfur chemistry we see in the clouds of Venus,” said co-author Dr Paul Rimmer from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “Life is pretty good at weird chemistry, so we’ve been studying whether there’s a way to make life a potential explanation for what we see.”

The researchers used a combination of atmospheric and biochemical models to study the chemical reactions that are expected to occur, given the known sources of chemical energy in Venus’s atmosphere.

Novel host cell pathway hijacked during COVID-19 infection

Graphic showing how the ESCPE-1 host cell pathway is hijacked by SARS-CoV-2 during the infection of human cells
Credit: Second Bay Studios

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has been investigating how the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, manipulates host proteins to penetrate into human cells. After identifying Neuropilin-1 (NRP1) as a host factor for SARS-CoV-2 infection, new findings published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today 14 June describe how the coronavirus subverts a host cell pathway in order to infect human cells.

SARS-CoV-2 continues to have a major impact on communities and industries around the world. In an attempt to find innovative strategies to block SARS-CoV-2 infection, the team previously identified NRP1 as an important receptor at the surface of cells that is hijacked by SARS-CoV-2 to enhance infection.

NRP1 is a dynamic receptor that senses the microscopic cellular environment through the recognition of proteins containing specific neuropilin-binding sequences, called ligands. By mimicking this neuropilin-binding sequence, SARS-CoV-2 is able to subvert this receptor to enhance its entry and infection of human cells.

Photon twins of unequal origin

The quantum dots of the Basel researchers are different, but send out exactly identical light particles.
Credit: University of Basel, Department of Physics

Researchers have created identical light particles with different quantum dots - an important step for applications such as tap-proof communication.

Many technologies that take advantage of quantum effects are based on exactly the same photons. However, it is extremely difficult to manufacture them. Not only must the wavelength (color) of the photons exactly match, but also their shape and polarization.

A team of researchers from the University of Basel around Richard Warburton, in collaboration with colleagues from the Ruhr University in Bochum, has now succeeded in producing identical photons that come from different, widely separated sources.

Individual photons from quantum dots

In their experiments, physicists use so-called quantum dots, i.e. structures a few nanometers in semiconductor materials. Electrons are trapped in these quantum dots, which only assume very specific energy levels and can emit light when moving from one level to another. With the help of a laser pulse that triggers such a transition, individual photons can be produced at the push of a button.

Eternal matter waves

The central part of the experiment in which the coherent matter waves are created. Fresh atoms (blue) fall in and make their way to the Bose-Einstein Condensate in the center. In reality, the atoms are not visible to the naked eye.
Image processing by Scixel.

Imagining our everyday life without lasers is difficult. We use lasers in printers, CD players, pointers, measuring devices, and so on. What makes lasers so special is that they use coherent waves of light: all the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be thought of as waves. As a result, we can build ‘atom lasers’ containing coherent waves of matter. But can we make these matter waves last, so that they may be used in applications? In research that was published in Nature this week, a team of Amsterdam physicists shows that the answer to this question is affirmative.

Getting bosons to march in sync

The concept that underlies the atom laser is the so-called Bose-Einstein Condensate, or BEC for short. Elementary particles in nature occur in two types: fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles like electrons and quarks – the building blocks of the matter that we are made of. Bosons are very different in nature: they are not hard like fermions, but soft: for example, they can move through one another without a problem. The best-known example of a boson is the photon, the smallest possible quantity of light. But matter particles can also combine to form bosons – in fact, entire atoms can behave just like particles of light. What makes bosons so special is that they can all be in the exact same state at the exact same time, or phrased in more technical terms: they can ‘condense’ into a coherent wave. When this type of condensation happens for matter particles, physicists call the resulting substance a Bose-Einstein Condensate.