Laser system to defend space assets from debris in Earth’s orbit

Earth’s lower orbit is filling up with junk that poses a threat to space assets. New WVU research explores whether space-based lasers can zap even tiny particles or large fields of debris off potential collision courses with objects like satellites or space stations.
Illustration Credit: Savanna Leech | West Virginia University

If West Virginia University research pays off, debris that litters the planet’s orbit and poses a threat to spacecraft and satellites could get nudged off potential collision courses by a coordinated network of space lasers.

Hang Woon Lee, director of the Space Systems Operations Research Laboratory at WVU, said a junkyard of human-made debris, including defunct satellites, is accumulating around Earth. The more debris in orbit, the higher the risk that some of that debris will collide with manned and unmanned space assets. He said he believes the best chance for preventing those collisions is an array of multiple lasers mounted to platforms in space. The artificial intelligence-powered lasers could maneuver and work together to respond rapidly to debris of any size.

Lee, an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, is a 2023 recipient of NASA’s prestigious Early Career Faculty award for potentially breakthrough research. NASA is supporting Lee’s rapid-response debris removal study with $200,000 in funding per year for up to three years. 

Llamas Help Mitigate Effects of Climate Change

Photo Credit: Dr. Anais Zimmer

Introducing llamas (Llama glama) into land exposed by retreating glaciers can speed the establishment of stable soils and ecosystem formation, mitigating some of the harmful effects of climate change, according to experimental research conducted by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and partner institutions in Peru.

“Glaciers are melting rapidly around the world, creating unstable and dangerous landscapes, acid rock drainage, and land rushes for mining that are disrespecting local and Indigenous land rights,” said Tim Beach, professor of geography and the environment and one of the paper’s authors. “The research shows that llamas, when managed by Indigenous herders, are accelerating soil fertility and plant succession.”

The study is published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Land exposed by glacial melting initially has low nutrient soil that is inhospitable to vegetation. Without intervention, these landscapes can take hundreds of years to stabilize.

Small doses of mushrooms can have a beneficial effect on mental disorders

"Liberty Cap" Psilocybin mushroom
Photo Credit: Ameruverse Digital Marketing Media

A new research result from the University of Southern Denmark opens the door to the possibility of using psilocybin, the active compound in mushrooms with psychedelic properties, as a therapeutic tool through microdosing.

Psilocybin has long been recognized as a classic psychedelic substance and has recently been investigated for its potential to assist in the treatment of various psychiatric disorders, primarily depression and addiction, through therapy supplemented with a high dose of psilocybin.

In such therapeutic treatment, the patient takes psilocybin after thorough therapeutic preparation and undergoes a psychedelic experience in a supportive environment with a trained therapist. Subsequently, the experience is integrated over several therapy sessions.

Experiments are being conducted with patients at hospitals, including Bispebjerg Hospital and Rigshospitalet.

Reducing fishing gear could save whales with low impacts to California’s crab fishermen

 Less gear in the water means fewer chances for Whales to become entangled.
Photo Credit E. Lyman/ NOAA Sanctuaries

Sometimes simple solutions are better. It all depends on the nature of the problem. For humpback whales, the problem is the rope connecting a crab trap on the seafloor to the buoy on the surface. And for fishermen, it’s fishery closures caused by whale entanglements.

Managing this issue is currently a major item on California’s agenda, and it appears less fishing gear may be the optimal solution. So says a team of researchers led by Christopher Free, at UC Santa Barbara, after modeling the benefits and impacts that several management strategies would have on whales and fishermen. Their results, published in the journal Biological Conservation, find that simply reducing the amount of gear in the water is more effective than dynamic approaches involving real-time monitoring of whale populations. There may even be solutions on the horizon that provide these benefits with fewer drawbacks.

“We were trying to figure out what types of management strategies would work best at reducing whale entanglements in the Dungeness crab fishery while also minimizing impacts to fishing,” said first author Free, a researcher at the university’s Marine Science Institute. “And what we found is that some of the simpler strategies, such as just reducing the amount of gear allocated to the fishermen, outperformed a lot of the more complex management strategies.”

How Tubular Bacterial Weapons Compromise Plant Cells to Cause Disease

An apple tree infected with fire blight reveals leaves that appear as if they were burned. HHMI Investigator Sheng Yang He and a team of researchers identified a plug-like molecule that could lead to new techniques to fight fire blight and other plant diseases.
Photo Credit: Sebastian Stabinger
(CC BY-SA 3.0.)

Some bacteria attack crops by delivering proteins that puncture the plant’s cell membranes, according to new research that explains the long-sought mechanism by which pathogens can release water within plant tissues, causing devastating infections.

In experiments first described in a preprint on bioRxiv and later published in Nature, a team led by plant microbiologist Sheng Yang He went a step further and found a way to block the holes the microbes make. Their research identified a plug-like molecule that showed potential for controlling diseases including fire blight, which can kill off apple and pear trees, leaving orchards looking as if they were burned.

“For 25 years, my lab and others have been trying to understand exactly how these bacterial proteins manipulate water within leaves,” says He, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator at Duke University. “Now we have an answer: They open up channels through which water can move, disrupting plants’ internal water balance.”

Researchers have searched for this kind of detailed insight in hopes of opening the door to improved ways for fighting plant disease. Usually making such a connection can take years, if it is possible at all. However, He and his colleagues capitalized on this discovery quickly — using the dimensions of the pores to identify molecules perfectly sized for blocking them and protecting plants.

New dog, old tricks: New AI approach yields ‘athletically intelligent’ robotic dog

A doglike robot can navigate unknown obstacles using a simple algorithm that encourages forward progress with minimal effort.

Video Credit: Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute/Stanford University

With a simplified machine learning technique, AI researchers created a real-world “robodog” able to leap, climb, crawl, and squeeze past physical barriers as never before.

Someday, when quakes, fires, and floods strike, the first responders might be packs of robotic rescue dogs rushing in to help stranded souls. These battery-powered quadrupeds would use computer vision to size up obstacles and employ doglike agility skills to get past them.

Toward that noble goal, AI researchers at Stanford University and Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute say they have developed a new vision-based algorithm that helps robodogs scale high objects, leap across gaps, crawl under thresholds, and squeeze through crevices – and then bolt to the next challenge. The algorithm represents the brains of the robodog.

“The autonomy and range of complex skills that our quadruped robot learned is quite impressive,” said Chelsea Finn, assistant professor of computer science and senior author of a new peer-reviewed paper announcing the teams’ approach to the world, which will be presented at the upcoming Conference on Robot Learning. “And we have created it using low-cost, off-the-shelf robots – actually, two different off-the-shelf robots.”

Insect Cyborgs: Towards Precision Movement

Image Credit: ©Dai Owaki

Insect cyborgs may sound like science fiction, but it's a relatively new phenomenon based on using electrical stimuli to control the movement of insects. These hybrid insect computer robots, as they are scientifically called, herald the future of small, high mobile and efficient devices.

Despite significant progress being made, however, further advances are complicated by the vast differences between different insects' nervous and muscle systems.

In a recent study published in the journal eLife, an international research group has studied the relationship between electrical stimulation in stick insects' leg muscles and the resultant torque (the twisting force that makes the leg move).

Predictions of the effect of drugs on individual cells are now possible

How differently do various cancer cells respond to the effects of drugs? A new method from Zurich researchers now makes it possible to accurately predict the effect on individual cells.
Photo Credit: National Cancer Institute

Experts from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and University Hospital Zurich have used machine learning to jointly create a innovative method. This new approach can predict how individual cells react to specific treatments, offering hope for more accurate diagnoses and therapeutics.

Cancer is triggered by changes in cells that lead to the proliferation of pathogenic tumor cells. In order to find the most effective combination and dosage of drugs, it is advantageous if physicians can see inside the body, so to speak, and determine what effect the drugs will have on individual cells.

An interdisciplinary research team of biomedical and computer scientists from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and the University Hospital Zurich has now developed a machine learning approach that allows such cell changes and drug effects to be modelled and predicted with much greater accuracy and nuance than before.

Growth of coral reefs likely cannot keep pace with rising sea level

The upper panel shows a coral reef margin in Belize with living branched Acropora (elkhorn) and platy Millepora (fire) corals, which are both competitive and fast-growing. The lower panel shows broken branches of dead Acropora corals overgrown by weedy, fertile hill and finger corals (Porites) as well as fleshy algae.
Photo Credit: E. Gischler.

In identifying and dating coral remains in drill cores taken from Belize reefs, a team of experts from Goethe University Frankfurt and partners from Germany, the USA and Canada has shown the importance of specific types of coral for reef-building during the current Holocene geological epoch, dating back some 12,000 years. The scientists found that certain coral species disappeared for longer periods in the past due to climate changes, and identified another climate-related threat to coral reefs: In addition to warming and ocean acidification, among others, the rising sea level also threatens coral reefs, whose growth rates cannot keep up. 

Tropical coral reefs could end up being one of the first victims of climate change. The marine diversity hotspots are threatened by and declining as a result of global warming, ocean acidification, a deterioration of water quality, as well as diseases of reef-building organisms, and their growth is unable to keep up with the projected rise in sea levels. These are some of the conclusions drawn by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Goethe University Frankfurt's Institute of Geosciences, the company ReefTech Inc., the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center of Ocean Research, the University of Ottawa's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and the GSI Helmholtz Center of Heavy Ion Research. Their findings are based on an examination of 22 drill cores collected from the Belize barrier reef and atolls, the largest reef system in the Atlantic Ocean, which focused on identifying and dating coral growth and accretion rates over the past 9,000 years. 

Optimizing Continuous-Variable Functions with Quantum Annealing

Quantum annealing (QA) can be competitive to classical algorithms in optimizing continuous-variable functions when running on appropriate hardware, show researchers from Tokyo Tech. By comparing the performance of QA running on a D-Wave quantum computer to that of state-of-the-art classical algorithms, they find that a sufficient suppression of thermal noise can enable QA to significantly outperform classical algorithms.

Quantum annealing (QA) is a cutting-edge algorithm that leverages the unique properties of quantum computing to tackle complex combinatorial optimization problems (a class of mathematical problems dealing with discrete-variable functions). Quantum computers use the rules of quantum physics to solve such problems potentially faster than classical computers. In essence, they can explore multiple solutions to a problem simultaneously, giving them a significant speed advantage for certain tasks over classical computers. In particular, QA harnesses the phenomenon of "quantum tunneling," where particles can "tunnel" through energy barriers without the requisite energy to cross over them, to find solutions for combinatorial optimization problems.

Up until now, QA has almost exclusively been used to solve discrete-variable functions (functions that have discrete-valued variables). The potential of QA for optimizing continuous-variable functions has remained largely unexplored.