Microgels form a thin protective shell around a droplet until the temperature rises above 32 degrees. Then the microgels shrink and the droplet dissolves in the surrounding liquid. A study by researchers from the University of Gothenburg now reveals the underlying mechanism behind this process. The discovery could revolutionise methods of targeting medicines to specific locations within the body.

Emulsions consist of numerous droplets that are present in a liquid without dissolving and mixing with the liquid. For example, milk consists of fat droplets stabilised by milk proteins that are dispersed in water. In many applications such as medicine delivery, it is important to not only maintain the droplet structure but also to be able to control when the droplets dissolve. This is because the encapsulated active ingredients in the droplet should only be released once the medicine has entered the body.

Temperature-sensitive emulsions

Researchers from several universities, including the University of Gothenburg, have introduced a concept of responsive emulsions to control when the droplets dissolve.

“The idea is to stabilise emulsions using temperature-sensitive microgel particles that adapt their shape to the ambient temperature. At room temperature, they swell in water, but above 32°C, they shrink and contract,” explains Marcel Rey, a researcher in Physics at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications.

Understanding the mechanism

What happens when the temperature rises above 32°C is that the droplets dissolve in the surrounding liquid as they are no longer sufficiently stabilized by the protective microgel shell. While this phenomenon has been known in science for an extended period, the researchers have now uncovered that the fundamental mechanism driving stimuli-responsive emulsions involves morphological changes in the stabilizing microgels.

“The morphological changes in the stabilizing microgels, triggered by external stimuli, play a crucial role in influencing the stability of the associated emulsions. This understanding is fundamental to the design of microgels capable of stabilizing emulsions at room temperature while facilitating dissolution at body temperature,“ explains Marcel Rey.

The stabilising microgels can be regarded as both particles and polymers. The particle character leads to a high stability of the emulsion, while the polymer character makes the microgels responsive to external influences leading to dissolution of the droplets. Achieving temperature-sensitive emulsions necessitates a delicate balance, requiring a minimal particle character for stability and a substantial polymer character for rapid and reliable dissolution of the droplets.

Emulsions can be tailored

“Now that we understand how responsive emulsions function, we can customize them to specific requirements. While our current efforts have been confined to laboratory experiments with temperature dependence, we are actively exploring the development of microgel-stabilized emulsions that respond to the pH of the surrounding fluid,” explains Marcel Rey.

Pharmaceutical research focussing on targeted medicines is crucial. The goal is to deliver medication in a higher concentration to specific diseased areas of the body rather than affecting the entire body. 

“Responsive emulsions hold great potential as a precise tool for delivering medicine to specific areas in the body. Although additional research is needed, the future looks promising, and advancements can be expected over the next 10 years,” expresses Marcel Rey.

Scientific article in Nature Communications: Interactions between interfaces dictate stimuli-responsive emulsion behaviour.

Microgels form a thin protective shell around a droplet until the temperature rises above 32 degrees. Then the microgels shrink and the droplet dissolves in the surrounding liquid. A study by researchers from the University of Gothenburg now reveals the underlying mechanism behind this process. The discovery could revolutionise methods of targeting medicines to specific locations within the body.

Emulsions consist of numerous droplets that are present in a liquid without dissolving and mixing with the liquid. For example, milk consists of fat droplets stabilised by milk proteins that are dispersed in water. In many applications such as medicine delivery, it is important to not only maintain the droplet structure but also to be able to control when the droplets dissolve. This is because the encapsulated active ingredients in the droplet should only be released once the medicine has entered the body.

Temperature-sensitive emulsions

Researchers from several universities, including the University of Gothenburg, have introduced a concept of responsive emulsions to control when the droplets dissolve.

“The idea is to stabilise emulsions using temperature-sensitive microgel particles that adapt their shape to the ambient temperature. At room temperature, they swell in water, but above 32°C, they shrink and contract,” explains Marcel Rey, a researcher in Physics at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications.

Understanding the mechanism

What happens when the temperature rises above 32°C is that the droplets dissolve in the surrounding liquid as they are no longer sufficiently stabilized by the protective microgel shell. While this phenomenon has been known in science for an extended period, the researchers have now uncovered that the fundamental mechanism driving stimuli-responsive emulsions involves morphological changes in the stabilizing microgels.

“The morphological changes in the stabilizing microgels, triggered by external stimuli, play a crucial role in influencing the stability of the associated emulsions. This understanding is fundamental to the design of microgels capable of stabilizing emulsions at room temperature while facilitating dissolution at body temperature,“ explains Marcel Rey.

The stabilising microgels can be regarded as both particles and polymers. The particle character leads to a high stability of the emulsion, while the polymer character makes the microgels responsive to external influences leading to dissolution of the droplets. Achieving temperature-sensitive emulsions necessitates a delicate balance, requiring a minimal particle character for stability and a substantial polymer character for rapid and reliable dissolution of the droplets.

Emulsions can be tailored

“Now that we understand how responsive emulsions function, we can customize them to specific requirements. While our current efforts have been confined to laboratory experiments with temperature dependence, we are actively exploring the development of microgel-stabilized emulsions that respond to the pH of the surrounding fluid,” explains Marcel Rey.

Pharmaceutical research focussing on targeted medicines is crucial. The goal is to deliver medication in a higher concentration to specific diseased areas of the body rather than affecting the entire body. 

“Responsive emulsions hold great potential as a precise tool for delivering medicine to specific areas in the body. Although additional research is needed, the future looks promising, and advancements can be expected over the next 10 years,” expresses Marcel Rey.

Scientific article in Nature Communications: Interactions between interfaces dictate stimuli-responsive emulsion behaviour.

The building sector is the second largest sector in plastic consumption and is responsible for more than a third of energy related greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Manufacturing processes of construction materials pollute air, land, and water. Accordingly, construction materials made from agro-industrial waste become increasingly attractive due to their lower environmental impact.

To contribute to a new generation of materials made from what is often considered waste, researchers in Panama have now developed a rice husk-based insulation material and evaluated its thermal and mechanical properties. They have published their results in Frontiers in Built Environment.

“Here we show that is possible to create alternative insulating material from recycled newspaper and rice husk,” said Dr Nacarí Marín Calvo, a researcher at the Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, Centro Regional de Azuero and first author of the article. “The developed material has competitive thermal conductivity compared to many natural and recycled insulation materials.”

A four-ingredient recipe

In rural Panama, where the study was conducted, rice husk is considered agricultural waste, normally disposed of in landfills or incinerated, which makes it a significant environmental concern. To produce the mix, the husks were shredded. Then cellulose, obtained from recycled and shredded newspaper, was added, followed by borax, which made the mix resistant against fungi and gave it fire retardant properties. All components were bonded with glue.

The researchers tested different material compositions to verify the behavior of the material when more or less rice husk was used. The first mix was made from 14% newspaper, 9% rice husk, 15% borax, and 62% glue. In the other two compositions, the amount of rice husk was increased, while the amount of newspaper was decreased. The amounts of borax and glue remained unchanged. “We found that the results were similar in all three compositions in k-values, maximum stresses, and compressive strength values,” said Marín Calvo.

Head-to-head with other natural materials

Thermal conductivity, also often called k-value, describes the ability of a material to conduct heat. A lower value means the material is more suited for insulation. For the tested compositions, the k-value ranged between 0.0409-0.04607 watts per meter Kelvin (W/mK). Other natural and recycled insulation materials have k-values ranging from 0.027 to 0.1 W/ m/K.

Tensile strength is the maximum stress that a material can withstand while being stretched or pulled before breaking. Testing showed that maximum stress in average tension ranged from 1.31 to 1.76 megapascals (MPa) for the three compositions. Pascal is the unit used to measure the force applied in a 90° angle on the surface of an object. Materials based on cardboard, cement, and sand have similar tensile strength values. 

The compressive strength values obtained were between 20.19 and 21.23 MPa. Compressive strength describes a material’s ability to withstand being pushed together. The obtained values allowed the researchers to verify the possibility of using the developed material in construction applications.

Beyond building

The researchers pointed out that in the future, more studies would be needed to confirm the material’s insulating properties, and how it handles climates different to the high humidity of Panama. “As a part of future research, we are evaluating the degradation of the developed material under ambient controlled conditions,” Marín Calvo said.

Further research could also include other configurations, such as the addition of long fibers pointing in one direction to reinforce the behavior of the material in tension. “We can conclude that the material could also potentially be used in various engineering domains, including the production of lightweight components, construction panels, and sustainable packaging,” Marín Calvo concluded.

This review was designed by Professor Xiaoling Song and Professor Biao Jiang and written by Pr. Xiaoling Song and a Ph.D. student, Yifan Wu (Shanghai Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Studies, ShanghaiTech University) to summarize the application of macrocyclic molecules in cancer treatment. Macrocyclic compounds are cyclic molecules with a structure of 12 or more atoms. In the past decades, macrocycles have received increasing attention in drug development. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved several macrocyclic drugs for cancer therapy. However, the importance of this class of cancer drugs is still not widely known.

Song and Wu comprehensively summarized the applications of both FDA-approved macrocyclic drugs in the past 15 years and those promising macrocyclic small molecules currently under development for cancer therapy, providing strong evidence for the applications of macrocyclic compounds in cancer treatment (Figure). First, macrocyclic molecules can target proteins critical for tumorigenesis or cancer development. Macrocyclic compounds can block nearly 80% of cancer’s signature characteristic events to control cancer occurrence and progression, suggesting a space for using macrocyclic compounds in cancer therapy. Secondly, macrocyclic compounds can effectively overcome drug resistance caused by on-target mutations in targeted cancer therapy. Small compact macrocyclic molecules can enter the binding pocket, bind to mutant proteins, and inhibit their activities, especially those with resistant mutations around the binding pocket. These macrocyclic compounds developed recently for overcoming cancer drug resistance include the pyrazole- or pyrimidine-based TRK inhibitor Selitrectinib and the next-generation ROS1/ NTRK inhibitor Repotrectinib (TPX-0005).

Additionally, the authors reviewed the ongoing clinical trials for these novel macrocyclic drug candidates, and some of them have shown excellent therapeutic efficacy. For example, recent data from the latest Phase 1/2 clinical trial showed that first-line use of repotrectinib in ROS1-positive TKI-naïve lung cancer patients resulted in long-term progression-free survival (PFS) of 35.7 months (TRIDENT-1, NCT03093116. Byoung Chul Cho, et al. 2023 WCLC. OA 03.06).

Finally, Song and Wu provided novel insights into macrocyclic molecular drugs regarding their future directions, limitations, and combinational therapy with other drugs in clinics. This comprehensive review is beneficial for the development of novel cancer treatment strategies.

In his Value Creation project in Cell Ag class, Tufts senior Adham Ali faced an intriguing assignment: work with a group of peers to design a product that uses cellular agriculture (or cell ag, for short) to make life easier for consumers.

Majoring in biochemistry, Ali took the class as part of his minor in cell ag—a minor he registered for only this semester, because it’s brand-new at Tufts.

It’s also the world’s first and only undergraduate degree in the field.

Usually used as part of a nascent—and rapidly growing—field that cultivates lab-grown meat from cells in bioreactors, the processes of cellular agriculture can be applied to non-meat products. In the class, students used design principles to create cell-ag solutions to problems. “It was incredibly eye-opening, and it changed the way I think about research,” says Ali.

The product he and his group designed? An endless essential oil diffuser. “You would put your diffuser in the house and the cells would keep growing to create essential oils that make your house smell better,” he says. “You’d never have to go to the store for essential oils again.”

A First-Ever Opportunity

Like Ali, senior Olivia Calkins registered for the minor at the start of this semester. A chemical engineering major, Calkins always knew she wanted a career dedicated to helping animals and the environment.

“I first discovered cell ag on my first day of freshman year, and I knew right away it’s what I want to do with the rest of my life,” says Calkins. “This is my dream. I started becoming involved in the Kaplan Lab, doing everything I could to immerse myself in the field. But it wasn’t until now that I could actually get a degree in it. I’m so excited about that—it’s a huge stepping stone for cell ag.”

David Kaplan, Stern Family Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and executive director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA), agrees. The new minor is a vital step toward securing the future of cellular agriculture, according to Kaplan.

“Graduate students have had the opportunity to contribute to research and industry aims in cellular agriculture for a while now,” says Kaplan. “But while we’ve offered classes to undergraduates and welcomed them into the lab, ours is now the first program that allows them to graduate with an actual degree in the field.”

“Now we’ll have the chance to guide and collaborate with students who have an interest in cell ag from their earliest days at Tufts,” he says. “Eventually, they’ll enter the field as professionals with a deep background and years of engagement in the subject.”

Preparing Students to Be Pioneers

The minor in cellular agriculture has been designed to provide undergraduates with the opportunity to advance tissue engineering research and to translate cellular agriculture research into food industry innovation. A convergence of many disciplines, the minor is available to students in either Tufts School of Engineering or the School of Arts and Sciences.

Students who register for the minor take six classes in the subject, including two core courses, a research project course, and three elective courses. Electives include offerings such as Food, Nutrition, and Culture; Food Systems: From Farm to Table; and Bringing Products to Market.

As seniors, both Ali and Calkins fulfilled the requirements for the minor before the minor even existed. That was, according to Calkins, a happy coincidence— “purely the result of curiosity and love for the subject,” as she puts it. Both students also took advantage of opportunities to conduct their own research in the Kaplan Lab and as well as summer internships that exposed them to aspects of the industry.

In addition, they co-founded the Tufts chapter of the Alt Protein Project, a global initiative by the Good Food Institute to increase university engagement in the field of alternative protein sources. Now, while also working on senior thesis projects, they are in the process of planning a Spring 2024 research conference open to students at all universities in the area, with the aim of increasing awareness of opportunities in the field.

And what’s next? After graduation, Calkins will go to work for a Boston-based company that makes bioreactors for cultivated meat. Ali aims to pursue an MD/Ph.D. degree, with the goal of becoming an expert in the area where knowledge about cellular agriculture overlaps with medical practice.

“No matter what,” Ali says, “I want to figure out how whatever I end up doing can be applied to cellular agriculture.”

A placenta (commonly known as the “afterbirth” or “ʻiēwe” (ēwe or ʻiewe) in Hawaiian) is a temporary organ which connects the mother to the fetus via the umbilical cord. Its purpose is to deliver nutrients and oxygen to the fetus while serving as a barrier to prevent infections or viruses from entering the developing fetus. 

A new study by researchers at the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women & Children examined placentas donated by women who delivered in Hawaiʻi from 2006 to 2021, and found the presence of microplastic particles in the placenta.

Microplastics are visible to the naked eye, and examples can range from the plastic beads once found in exfoliating soaps, to particles from disintegrating plastic bags, to bits of plastic found in microwavable containers which are then inadvertently consumed by humans.

“We were shocked that these little pieces of plastic were getting across the mom’s gut and landing in the placenta,” said Dr. Men Jean Lee, an obstetrician and researcher at JABSOM and Kapiʻolani Medical Center. Dr. Lee, Dr. Rodrigo Weingrill and Dr. Johann Urschitz from UH Mānoa’s Institute for Biogenesis Research co-authored the research recently published in Environment International. 

The researchers collected and studied 10 placentas in 2006, 2013 and 2021 and found the presence of microplastics grew each year. 

• In 2006, 6 of the 10 placentas contained microplastics. 
• In 2013, microplastics were found in 9 of the 10 placentas. 
• In 2021, researchers found microplastics in all 10 placentas.

“We believe that the plastics may be floating around in food or being inhaled. It’s coming through our digestive fluids or lungs, and the particles are getting absorbed through the gut and traveling through the bloodstream, and then somehow collecting in the placenta during pregnancy,” Lee said. “The big question is, as it’s traveling through the placenta, can it get through the umbilical cord and then to the baby? We don’t know that right now.”

Link to global plastic production

We know that the rise in microplastics found in the placentas of Hawaiʻi mothers corresponds with the skyrocketing levels of global plastic production. 

According to the Journal of Hazardous Materials, more than 6,000 megatons of plastic were produced in 2020. Less than 2,000 megatons were produced in 2000. 

Lee believes Hawaiʻi’s remote location creates an added dependency on plastic. 

“We’re the world’s most remote population center or island chain. We’re 2,300 miles from California and 4,000 miles from Japan,” Lee said. “For daily conveniences, we commonly use plastic wrap, plastic containers, plastic bags and single use water bottles.”

She suggests Hawaiʻi’s location in the center of the Pacific Ocean, tropical climate, and lack of recycling centers can exacerbate how these plastics are disintegrating or breaking down.

“The incineration of garbage, landfills and marine pollution affect our communities. When trash is being burned, dust particles are released, and can spread into the air we breathe,” Lee said.  “In fact, we are concerned about how the debris from the recent Lahaina fires may contain microplastics and other chemical toxins in the remains of the fires. Meanwhile, we already know that sunlight, heat and salt can speed up the breakdown of these everyday plastics. I’ve noticed plastic bags, even shoes, wear out quickly in Hawaiʻi and turn to dust. I never experienced this when I was living back in New York.”

Can microplastics enter the fetus too?

Lee and the JABSOM researchers will continue their research, now focused on seeing if the microplastics can pierce the protection of the placenta and enter the fetus before birth. 

“We’re not trying to scare people,” Lee said, but acknowledges there are other questions that still need to be answered. “What are the sources of maternal microplastics? What are the plastics doing in the mother’s body and the placenta? Are they benign, or are they crossing over to the fetal side into the umbilical cord that is connected to the baby? If they are getting to the other side, are they affecting fetal growth and what happens to the baby when he/she grows up?”

With the world projected to be highly urbanized by 2050, cities are encouraged to take urgent climate actions to mitigate and adapt to the threats of climate change. As climate change intensifies and urbanization increases rapidly, local governments are expected now more than ever to lead climate action planning. However, studies show the limitations of the existing climate action plans (CAPs). So scientists from Hiroshima University have created an Urban Climate Action Planning (UCAP) framework to guide the development of urban CAPs and support the assessment of the level of suitability of these plans.

Their work is published as a critical review in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews on October 22, 2023.

More than half of the world’s population presently resides in urban areas, and this number continues to rise. At the same time, urban areas are the most vulnerable to a changing climate and its associated challenges, including heatwaves, floods, storm surges, and other natural hazards.

Cities are responsible for over 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy. Scientists know that it is necessary to move beyond the “business as usual” approach to achieving sustainable urban development. The importance of urban CAPs in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change is already well documented. Recent research has highlighted the need for urgent urban climate actions to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop systems for climate adaptation.

The Hiroshima University scientists noted the pressing need for a more scholarly criticism of the existing CAPs and their suitability in guiding climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. “Here, we propose the UCAP framework to guide the development of suitable CAPs that are comprehensive and consistent with globally accepted standards and benchmarks. Their study further pilot-tested the UCAP framework with climate plans from 257 cities worldwide,” said Prince Dacosta Aboagye, a doctoral student from Ghana at Hiroshima University.

The framework is intended to guide the development of suitable CAPs. In practice, their goal is for the framework to serve as a tool for developing city-specific CAPs that are consistent with acceptable climate action planning standards and benchmarks. In their UCAP framework, the scientists used approaches in relevant existing climate action planning tools. They also included emerging concepts from academic studies and climate planning reports to enhance the comprehensiveness of the framework.

Their proposed UCAP framework includes 43 globally acknowledged criteria across three stages of climate planning. The suitability analysis shows that more than half of the existing urban CAPs have a medium level of suitability, with almost 40 percent having a weak level of suitability. “We discovered that urban CAPs adopted or published recently (since 2018) are more likely to be suitable than those adopted or published earlier (2015 to 2017). Remarkably, urban CAPs from the Global South are more suitable than those from the Global North, probably due to the influx of consultants and experts in supporting CAP development in Global South cities,” said Ayyoob Sharifi, a professor at Hiroshima University.

The authors hope to see more city governments adopting the UCAP framework to develop suitable climate plans to guide urban climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. This will contribute to reducing the climate risk of urban residents and play an integral role in achieving global climate goals. “In the future, we hope to explore the impacts of suitable CAPs on urban climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. We will build the capacity of city governments and policymakers on the use of the framework for developing and evaluating the suitability status of their CAPs. We will also urge corporate and educational institutions to adopt the UCAP framework in their climate planning,” said Aboagye.

The authors are Prince Dacosta Aboagye from the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University and Ayyoob Sharifi from the IDEC Institute at Hiroshima University and the School of Architecture and Design, Lebanese American University.

###

About Hiroshima University

Since its foundation in 1949, Hiroshima University has striven to become one of the most prominent and comprehensive universities in Japan for the promotion and development of scholarship and education. Consisting of 12 schools for undergraduate level and 4 graduate schools, ranging from natural sciences to humanities and social sciences, the university has grown into one of the most distinguished comprehensive research universities in Japan. English website: https://www.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/en

University of Queensland scientists have analysed more than 3.8 million volunteer hours of birdwatching data to identify Australia’s most elusive species.

Louis Backstrom from UQ’s School of the Environment led the research and said the Coxen’s fig-parrot was the bird that was most elusive to Australian birdwatchers, based on the data found in the eBird and Birdata databases.

“Coxen’s fig-parrots are small, dumpy, green parrots with very short tails, and historically they were scattered in rainforests between Bundaberg in Queensland and the Hastings River in New South Wales,” Mr Backstrom said.

“They’ve been sighted only once in every 81,000 citizen science bird surveys on the east coast of Australia.

“But there are so few recent sightings that this mysterious little bird could be extinct.”

Senior author on the research paper, Professor James Watson, said being on the ‘least known’ list did not automatically mean the bird was rare.

“This list of elusive birds doesn’t necessarily show the species that have the lowest populations or ones which are being driven to extinction by human activities because many of our rare and threatened species are actually quite well-known,” Professor Watson said.

“Many endangered species receive research and conservation attention or are frequently seen by citizen scientists and birdwatchers.

“What this list shows is our country’s most hard to find species – while some are quite rare, many simply live in remote and hard to get to places while others are secretive or nocturnal.”

The researchers hope the insights can assist conservation efforts.

“The work we have been doing in the Research and Recovery of Endangered Species Group at UQ has already helped conservation efforts for Australia’s night parrot, red goshawk and Australian masked owl,” Professor Watson said.

“This list has helped us identify those species that need more attention.

“Hopefully, we have also inspired bird lovers around the country to seek out these lesser-known, hidden gems.”

The research is published in the international journal Emu.

The team would like to thank Rohan Clarke, Glen Ehmke, Birdlife Australia, CSIRO publishing, Mark Balman and Birdlife International for facilitating and permitting the use of the data in the analysis.

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – Alexandre Deur has spent his career studying the mystifying spin structure of the nucleon — which is also one of the primary missions of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, where Deur has been a staff scientist for nearly 20 years.

A particle’s spin is one of its basic characteristics, like its mass or electric charge, and physicists have long tried to nail down the dynamics at work behind the spin of particles made of quarks, like the proton, or what they call the “spin puzzle.”

“Understanding this puzzle would reassure us that we do understand quantum chromodynamics (QCD), since QCD is the theory that tells us how quarks and gluons behave,” Deur said. “Also, the nucleon is a key ingredient of the world around us, so understanding it is important.”

Decades of research in Jefferson Lab’s experimental halls have helped Deur fit a few of those puzzle pieces together, and it has also just earned him the rare honor of being elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

An APS fellowship recognizes those members who have made advances in physics research or significant innovations in the application of physics to science and technology. Deur was cited for “scientific leadership of experimental studies of nucleon spin structure in the strong QCD regime.”

Deur said he’s grateful and happy to be nominated by his professional peers and selected by the APS Council.

“It also reminded me how lucky I was to get to closely work with talented and kind colleagues who did much of the research that was recognized by this fellowship nomination,” he said.

Deur singled out several of those colleagues for their important research contributions, including Volker Burkert, Jian-Ping Chen and Andrew M. Sandorfi at Jefferson Lab, Stanley Brodsky at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, Gordon Cates and Xiaochao Zheng at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Guy F. de Teramond at the University of Costa Rica, and Sebastian Kuhn at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

Spin and symmetry

A nucleon is a proton or neutron made up of quarks bound by gluons, which all combine to give the nucleon its spin.

“The spin of the particle is a very useful property to help with research, and what we do at the lab is an example of it,” Deur said. “But it is also an essential ingredient of our universe. In fact, spin is the key to the marvelous diversity of the universe.”

All fundamental particles of matter such as quarks and electrons have a spin of ½ (measured in units of the Planck constant), which is why matter doesn’t collapse in on itself.

The particles that compose the four fundamental forces of nature — the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity — have an integer spin of 1 or 2. Another force important to Jefferson Lab research, the emerging force that binds nuclei (known as the Yukawa force) has spin 0.

When a force has an even spin of 0 or 2, it’s an attractive force, which is responsible for stable nuclei, shining stars and the structure we see in the universe.

When the spin of the force is odd, or 1, the force is repulsive between like charges and attractive between opposite charges. This is what allows for neutral atoms and chemistry, which is the basis for life itself.

“So it is hard to overstate the importance of spin,” said Deur. “It shapes our universe.”

Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE Office of Science user facility, can be used to study this spin. It enables this research by blasting the nucleon with an electron beam, subjecting it to the electromagnetic field of the electrons. This disturbs the motion and arrangement of the quarks and gluons inside the nucleon, which in turn either makes its spin to wobble (if beam energy is low) or probe the quarks and gluons that generate it (if the beam energy is high). In both cases, we learn about the origin of the nucleon spin.

The research recognized by the APS involved studying the nucleon at high, intermediate and low beam energies to see how the particle’s properties changed with different energy levels, from the quark and gluon domain to the global view domain.

“It is the fundamental aspect of what we do,” Deur said. “Here at Jefferson Lab, we are learning how the strong interaction works when it becomes truly strong. We are also learning the inner workings of the nucleon.

“And there is ‘collateral learning’: Nature reuses often similar recipes, so by learning about the strong force, I also learn about the other ones, as well as other captivating aspects of the universe.

“The recipe nature used — as far as we can presently tell with confidence — is gauge theory, and it really provides a satisfactory picture because it is eventually a simple and beautiful answer: Why does the apple fall or the magnet stick to the fridge, and everything else that makes the universe move? Because of forces. But what causes forces? It’s the interchange between bits of matter of fundamental particles with integer spins — photons, gluons, gravitons. But where do those come from? From the fact that we must respect the natural symmetries of the universe.”

Gauge theory involves both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and is part of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics.

Answering the big questions

Deur was born in France in 1973 and came to physics through natural inclination that was nurtured by familial influence. His family includes a number of engineers and science-minded individuals. His father was a research engineer who also studied general physics and enjoyed discussing science with his young son.

While in middle school, Deur read a popular account of Einstein’s work, and he later read about quantum phenomena.

“I was eager to understand those apparent mysteries,” Deur said.

While physics, biology and chemistry came to him quite intuitively, it was the greater intellectual challenge that he believed physics posed that convinced him to pursue it in college and as a career.

“My interest is to see how it beautifully explains the basic things around us, and beyond,” Deur said. “It feels a bit like when one watches the stars at night. We feel small but connected to a very big picture. That creates a sense of wonder and awe and we want to explore it. Physics is like that. It also gives a perspective on the three big questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? I do not worry about these questions anymore since I learned physics.”

Deur first arrived at Jefferson Lab in 1997 as a graduate research assistant, fulfilling then-compulsory service in the French military through “international cooperation” — e.g., research at a foreign laboratory. After three years, he returned to France to earn a doctorate in nuclear physics from Blaise Pascal University, graduating summa cum laude. He credits his research experience at Jefferson Lab for his completing a typically three-year doctoral program in just 10 months.

From 2000 to 2003, he served first as a postdoctoral research associate and then a research scientist at UVa, working on experiments at SLAC and Jefferson Lab. In 2004, he joined Jefferson Lab as a staff scientist.

By Tamara Dietrich

-end-

Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. JSA is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. (SURA).

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

DURHAM, N.C. — We humans are fixated on big brains as a proxy for smarts. But headless animals called brittle stars have no brains at all and still manage to learn through experience, new research reveals.

Relatives of starfish, brittle stars spend most of their time hiding under rocks and crevices in the ocean or burrowing in the sand.

These shy marine creatures have no brain to speak of — just nerve cords running down each of their five wiggly arms, which join to form a nerve ring near their mouth.

“There’s no processing center,” said lead author Julia Notar, who did the research as part of her biology Ph.D. in professor Sönke Johnsen’s lab at Duke University.

“Each of the nerve cords can act independently,” Notar said. “It’s like instead of a boss, there’s a committee.”

In the case of brittle stars, that seems to be enough to learn by association, Notar, Johnsen and former Duke undergraduate Madeline Go report in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

This type of learning involves associating different stimuli via a process called classical conditioning. A famous example is Pavlov’s dog experiments, which showed that dogs repeatedly fed at the ringing of a bell would eventually start drooling at the mere sound of a bell, even when no food was around.

Humans do this all the time. If you hear the “ding” of a smartphone over and over again with each new alert, eventually the sound starts to have a special meaning. Just hearing someone’s phone ping or buzz with the same chime as yours is enough to make you reflexively reach for your own phone in anticipation of the next text, email, or Instagram post.

Classical conditioning has been demonstrated in a handful of previous studies in starfish.  But most echinoderms — a group of some 7,000 species that includes brittle stars and similarly brainless starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers — have not been tested.

To find out if brittle stars are capable of learning, the researchers put 16 black brittle stars (Ophiocoma echinata) in individual water tanks and used a video camera to record their behavior.

Half the brittle stars were trained by dimming the lights for 30 minutes whenever the animals were fed. Every time the lights went out, the researchers would put a morsel of shrimp — “which they love” — in the tanks, placed just out of reach.

The other half got just as much shrimp and also experienced a 30-minute dark period, but never at the same time — the animals were fed under lit conditions.

Whether it was light or dark, the animals spent most of their time hiding behind the filters in their tanks; only coming out at mealtime. But only the trained brittle stars learned to associate darkness with food.

Early in the 10-month-long experiment, the animals stayed hidden when the lights went out. But over time, the animals made such a connection between the darkness and mealtime that they reacted as if food was on its way and crept out of hiding whenever the lights went out, even before any food was put in the tanks.

These brittle stars had learned a new association: lights out meant that food was likely to show up. They didn’t need to smell or taste the shrimp to react. Just sensing the lights go dim was enough to make them come when called for dinner.

They still remembered the lesson even after a 13-day ‘break’ without training, i.e., dimming the lights over and over again without feeding them.

Notar said the results are “exciting” because “classical conditioning hasn’t really been shown definitively in this group of animals before.”

“Knowing that brittle stars can learn means they’re not just robotic scavengers like little Roombas cleaning up the ocean floor,” Notar said. “They’re potentially able to expect and avoid predators or anticipate food because they’re learning about their environment.”

As a next step, Notar hopes to start to tease apart how they manage to learn and remember using a nervous system that is so different from our own.

“People ask me all the time, ‘how do they do it?’” Notar said. “We don’t know yet. But I hope to have more answers in a few years.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Department of Defense through the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program, the Duke Nicholas School Rachel Carson Scholars program and the Duke Biology Department.

CITATION:  “Learning Without a Brain: Classical Conditioning in the Ophiuroid Ophiocoma echinata,” Julia C. Notar, Madeline C. Go, and Sönke Johnsen. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Nov. 21, 2023. DOI: 10.1007/s00265-023-03402-x

A senior biology student at The University of Texas at Arlington recently earned an award for her research about antimicrobial drug resistance.

Christina Nguyen received the second-place award at the 2023 UT System LSAMP (Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) Conference held in El Paso, Texas. Nguyen’s award-winning project focused on bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, an increasingly challenging problem in health care.

“I had the privilege of hearing multiple fascinating presentations from students all over Texas, and it was fun sharing my work with other accomplished undergraduate researchers,” Nguyen said.

Her research project involves the study of gene expression in a drug-resistant, Gram-negative bacterium called Acinetobacter baumannii, or A. baumannii. Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is transcribed into functional gene products such as proteins. Gram-negative bacteria are among the world’s most significant public health problems due to their high resistance to antibiotics.

“When discussing issues in public health, it is imperative to mention how antimicrobial drug resistance is a serious threat,” Nguyen said. “Gram-negative bacteria are extremely resistant to antibiotics because of the presence of an outer membrane barrier. Multi-drug resistant Gram-negative infections are typically treated with colistin, the ‘last resort’ antibiotic. However, among Gram-negative bacteria, it has been observed that A. baumannii can develop intrinsic resistance to colistin.”

This resistance intensifies the need to identify novel ways to target in A. baumannii for new antibiotic development, Nguyen said. She and her collaborators hypothesize that a pair of lipoproteins, called lpp1 and lpp2, contribute to cell envelope stability when in the presence of outer membrane stress.

“My project aims to evaluate the expression of these lipoprotein genes in response to outer membrane stress as well as what regulates the expression of these genes on the transcriptional level,” she said.

Nguyen, who grew up in Mansfield, became interested in biology in high school. Her youth pastor’s empathy and spirit of service while battling terminal cancer inspired her to pursue medicine. She chose to attend UTA after working with UTA student organizations at volunteer events. The University’s diverse student body was also a draw.

After taking a microbiology course as a student, Nguyen became interested in undergraduate research, eventually joining the lab of Joseph Boll, assistant professor of biology.

“Christina is a brilliant, hard-working, driven individual who is going to do great things in science and medicine,” Boll said. “She is also one of the most caring and patient individuals that I have worked with, going out of her way to ensure those around her are successful. It was a real treat to have her in the laboratory, and I know big things are in store for her.”

The LSAMP program’s overall goal is to assist universities in diversifying the nation’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce by increasing the number of STEM degrees awarded to populations historically underrepresented in these disciplines.

Astronomers have uncovered evidence of a rotating disc of material circling a massive young star in a nearby galaxy for the first time. Megan Reiter, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, was part of the team of researchers who announced their discovery in a study published in Nature.

“This is strong evidence that high-mass stars, which are several times bigger than the Sun, form in the same way as lower-mass stars,” Reiter said. “That’s been a big question for a long time.”

Located in a galaxy neighboring the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud, the disc-sporting star was first discovered thanks to a protostellar jet ⎯ a signature feature of forming stars.

“As a star forms, the cloud of surrounding matter collapses, forming a disc,” Reiter said. “The disc feeds material onto the star, which will throw away about 1-10% of it into these big bipolar jets. These jets can be quite large, so they’re easy to spot. Because they are shot out as part of this accretion process, the jets are also a bit of a history record that can tell you something about how the star is putting itself together.”

The jet was first spotted using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument on the European Southern Observatory ’s Very Large Telescope.

“After we saw the jet, the natural next thing to say is, well, these jets have to come from a disc ⎯ there must be a disc around that star,” Reiter said.

To test this hypothesis, the team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to collect data on the fledgling star and its surroundings.

“Trying to spot a disk around a high-mass star is challenging, not least because it’s a relatively short-lived phenomenon,” Reiter said, explaining that a low-mass star like the Sun ⎯ with an approximate lifespan of 10 billion years ⎯ would only sport a disc for 3-10 million years during its formation.

Moreover, at least in the Milky Way, the stardust swirling around high-mass stars tends to shroud their surroundings from view, making it difficult to observe a disc taking shape. Thankfully, visibility is much better in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where star-forming matter is different.

“It’s arguably more exciting to discover a disc in this neighboring galaxy as opposed to our own, because the conditions there are closer to what we think things were like earlier in the universe,” Reiter said. “It’s like we’re getting a window into how stars formed earlier on in the evolution of the universe.”

Anna McLeod, an associate professor at Durham University in the U.K. and lead author of the study, said that upon seeing evidence for a rotating structure in the ALMA data, she and her team could scarcely believe they had detected the first extragalactic accretion disc.

“It was a special moment,” McLeod said. “We know discs are vital to forming stars and planets in our galaxy, and here for the first time we’re seeing direct evidence for this in another galaxy.”

The research was supported by the Royal Society (URF/R1/221620), the German Research Foundation (KU 2849/9) and the National Science Foundation (2008101, 2206511, 2142300).

-30-

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Peer-reviewed paper:

A likely Keplerian disk feeding an optically revealed massive young star | Nature | DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06790-2

Authors: Anna McLeod, Pamela Klaassen, Megan Reiter, Jonathan Henshaw, Rolf Kuiper and Adam Ginsburg

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06790-2

Video is available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0EKI0FKciI&t=15s
Description: Using ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, astronomers have for the first time found a disc around a young star outside our own galaxy. This video summarizes the discovery.
Credit: ESO
Directed by: Angelos Tsaousis and Martin Wallner.
Editing: Angelos Tsaousis.
Web and technical support: Gurvan Bazin and Raquel Yumi Shida.
Written by: Pamela Freeman and Tom Howarth.
Music: Stellardrone — Light Years.
Footage and photos: ESO / L. Calçada, M. Kornmesser, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), A McLeod et al.
Scientific consultant: Paola Amico, Mariya Lyubenova.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOXWF8X5CGc
Description: This video starts with a wide view of the Milky Way, zooming into the Large Magellanic Cloud 160,000 light-years away, all the way to the young star system HH 1177 within it. With the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers found a jet system coming from a young, massive star. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, in which ESO is a partner, a rotating disc was also discovered — a first outside our own galaxy. An artist’s impression, at the end, reveals the system according to these observations.
Credit: ESO

Image downloads:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/11/230127_megan-reiter-physics-and-astronomy-webb-telescope_Martin-81.jpg
CAPTION: Megan Reiter is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University.
Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/images/large/eso2318a.jpg
CAPTION: This artist’s impression shows the HH 1177 system, which is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy of our own. The young and massive stellar object glowing in the center is collecting matter from a dusty disc while also expelling matter in powerful jets. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, in which ESO is a partner, a team of astronomers managed to find evidence for the presence of this disc by observing its rotation. This is the first time a disc around a young star — the type of disc identical to those forming planets in our own galaxy — has been discovered in another galaxy.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/images/large/eso2318b.jpg
CAPTION: With the combined capabilities of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, a disc around a young massive star in another galaxy has been observed. Observations from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the VLT, left, show the parent cloud LHA 120-N 180B in which this system, dubbed HH 1177, was first observed. The image at the center shows the jets that accompany it. The top part of the jet is aimed slightly towards us and thus blueshifted; the bottom one is receding from us and thus redshifted. Observations from ALMA, right, then revealed the rotating disc around the star, similarly with sides moving towards and away from us.
Credit: ESO/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/A. McLeod et al.

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/images/large/eso2318c.jpg
CAPTION: This mosaic shows, at its center, a real image of the young star system HH 1177, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy neighboring the Milky Way. The image was obtained with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on ESO’s Very Large Telescope and shows jets being launched from the star. Researchers then used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, in which ESO is a partner, to find evidence for a disc surrounding the young star. An artist’s impression of the system, showcasing both the jets and the disc, is shown on the right panel. Credit: ESO/A. McLeod et al./M. Kornmesser

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/images/large/eso1903a.jpg
CAPTION: This dazzling region of newly forming stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The relatively small amount of dust in the LMC and MUSE’s acute vision allowed intricate details of the region to be picked out in visible light. Credit: ESO, A McLeod et al.

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/images/large/eso1903d.jpg
CAPTION: This chart shows the location of the HII region LHA 120-N 180B in the constellation of Mensa (The Table Mountain). Mensa is the only constellation named after a geographical feature on Earth — it was named after Table Mountain in South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope by French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille. This map includes most of the stars visible to the unaided eye under good conditions, and the region of sky shown in this image is indicated. Credit: ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope

Related stories:

Webb Space Telescope reveals previously shrouded newborn stars:
https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/webb-space-telescope-reveals-previously-shrouded-newborn-stars

Links:

Reiter website: https://megantheastronomer.wordpress.com/
Department of Physics and Astronomy: https://physics.rice.edu/
Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu/

About Rice:

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering, humanities, music, natural sciences and social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,574 undergraduates and 3,982 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction, No. 2 for best-run colleges and No. 12 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

What does a person look like? If you use the popular artificial intelligence image generator Stable Diffusion to conjure answers, too frequently you’ll see images of light-skinned men.

Stable Diffusion’s perpetuation of this harmful stereotype is among the findings of a new University of Washington study. Researchers also found that, when prompted to create images of “a person from Oceania,” for instance, Stable Diffusion failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. Finally, the generator tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru) as well as those from Mexico, India and Egypt.

The researchers will present their findings the week of Dec. 6 at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore.

“It’s important to recognize that systems like Stable Diffusion produce results that can cause harm,” said Sourojit Ghosh, a UW doctoral student in the human centered design and engineering department. “There is a near-complete erasure of nonbinary and Indigenous identities. For instance, an Indigenous person looking at Stable Diffusion’s representation of people from Australia is not going to see their identity represented — that can be harmful and perpetuate stereotypes of the settler-colonial white people being more ‘Australian’ than Indigenous, darker-skinned people, whose land it originally was and continues to remain.”

To study how Stable Diffusion portrays people, researchers asked the text-to-image generator to create 50 images of a “front-facing photo of a person.” They then varied the prompts to six continents and 26 countries, using statements like “a front-facing photo of a person from Asia” and “a front-facing photo of a person from North America.” They did the same with gender. For example, they compared “person” to “man” and “person from India” to “person of nonbinary gender from India.”

The team took the generated images and analyzed them computationally, assigning each a score: A number closer to 0 suggests less similarity while a number closer to 1 suggests more. The researchers then confirmed the computational results manually. They found that images of a “person” corresponded most with men (0.64) and people from Europe (0.71) and North America (0.68), while corresponding least with nonbinary people (0.41) and people from Africa (0.41) and Asia (0.43).

Likewise, images of a person from Oceania corresponded most closely with people from majority-white countries Australia (0.77) and New Zealand (0.74), and least with people from Papua New Guinea (0.31), the second most populous country in the region where the population remains predominantly Indigenous.

A third finding announced itself as researchers were working on the study: Stable Diffusion was sexualizing certain women of color, especially Latin American women. So the team compared images using a NSFW (Not Safe for Work) Detector, a machine-learning model that can identify sexualized images, labeling them on a scale from “sexy” to “neutral.” (The detector has a history of being less sensitive to NSFW images than humans.) A woman from Venezuela had a “sexy” score of 0.77 while a woman from Japan ranked 0.13 and a woman from the United Kingdom 0.16.

“We weren’t looking for this, but it sort of hit us in the face,” Ghosh said. “Stable Diffusion censored some images on its own and said, ‘These are Not Safe for Work.’ But even some that it did show us were Not Safe for Work, compared to images of women in other countries in Asia or the U.S. and Canada.”

While the team’s work points to clear representational problems, the ways to fix them are less clear.

“We need to better understand the impact of social practices in creating and perpetuating such results,” Ghosh said. “To say that ‘better’ data can solve these issues misses a lot of nuance. A lot of why Stable Diffusion continually associates ‘person’ with ‘man’ comes from the societal interchangeability of those terms over generations.”

The team chose to study Stable Diffusion, in part, because it’s open source and makes its training data available (unlike prominent competitor Dall-E, from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI). Yet both the reams of training data fed to the models and the people training the models themselves introduce complex networks of biases that are difficult to disentangle at scale.

“We have a significant theoretical and practical problem here,” said Aylin Caliskan, a UW assistant professor in the Information School. “Machine learning models are data hungry. When it comes to underrepresented and historically disadvantaged groups, we do not have as much data, so the algorithms cannot learn accurate representations. Moreover, whatever data we tend to have about these groups is stereotypical. So we end up with these systems that not only reflect but amplify the problems in society.”

To that end, the researchers decided to include in the published paper only blurred copies of images that sexualized women of color.

“When these images are disseminated on the internet, without blurring or marking that they are synthetic images, they end up in the training data sets of future AI models,” Caliskan said. “It contributes to this entire problematic cycle. AI presents many opportunities, but it is moving so fast that we are not able to fix the problems in time and they keep growing rapidly and exponentially.”

This research was funded by a National Institute of Standards and Technology award.

For more information, contact Ghosh at ghosh100@uw.edu and Caliskan at aylin@uw.edu.

The ARIES-HM3 Randomized Clinical Trial assessed the safety and efficacy of excluding aspirin from the antithrombotic regimen in patients with advanced heart failure who have undergone implantation of a fully magnetically levitated left ventricular assist device (LVAD).

“We can now safely say that not giving aspirin is not only safe from a thromboembolic risk profile but results in improved adverse event rate by a significant reduction in non-surgical bleeding which is a well-known complication related to LVAD therapy,” said Mirnela Byku, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, co-author of the study and director of the UNC Durable Mechanical Circulatory Device Program at the UNC School of Medicine. “Improving not only longevity but also reducing morbidity and improving quality of life is a big focus in the field of MCS.”

Until this study, there had been no consensus in the field about use of or dose of aspirin in the LVAD population. The paper was published in JAMA.

The international clinical trial followed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design and involved 628 patients across 51 centers in 9 countries. The patients were divided into two groups: one receiving aspirin (100mg/d) and the other receiving a placebo in addition to vitamin K antagonist (VKA) therapy.

A focus was to determine if the likelihood a patient experiences major nonsurgical hemocompatibility-related adverse events (such as stroke, pump thrombosis, major bleeding, or arterial peripheral thromboembolism) within 12 months differed between the two groups.

The results showed not giving aspirin to patients with advanced heart failure, treated with a fully magnetically levitated LVAD who are receiving VKAs, did not make their survival worse. Furthermore, aspirin avoidance was associated with a significant reduction (34%) in major nonsurgical bleeding events.

About UNC School of Medicine

The UNC School of Medicine (SOM) is the state’s largest medical school, graduating more than 180 new physicians each year. It is consistently ranked among the top medical schools in the US, including 5^th overall for primary care by US News & World Report, and 6^th for research among public universities. More than half of the school’s 1,700 faculty members served as principal investigators on active research awards in 2021. Two UNC SOM faculty members have earned Nobel Prize awards.

# # # #

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has joined a global consortium of scientists from federal laboratories, research institutes, academia and industry to address the challenges of building large-scale artificial intelligence systems and advancing trustworthy and reliable AI for scientific discovery.

The partnership, known as the Trillion Parameter Consortium, or TPC, seeks to grow and improve large-scale generative AI models aimed at tackling complex scientific challenges. These include the development of scalable model architectures and related training strategies, as well as data organization and curation for the training of models; the optimization of AI libraries for current and future exascale computing platforms; and the assessment of progress on scientific task learning, reliability and trust.

It’s a logical partnership, as ORNL’s documented mission of developing safe, trustworthy and energy-efficient AI will strengthen the consortium’s goals for responsible AI. Further, the laboratory is home to more than 300 researchers who use AI to tackle challenges of importance to DOE, and it hosts the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Frontier, which was built in part to facilitate energy-efficient and scalable AI-based algorithms and simulations.

ORNL’s AI research thrusts, when deployed alongside these resources, will be critical in assisting the consortium in tackling a number of challenges, including:

• Building an open community of researchers interested in creating state-of-the-art, large-scale generative AI models aimed broadly at advancing progress on scientific and engineering problems by sharing methods, approaches, tools, insights and workflows.

• Incubating, launching and coordinating projects voluntarily to avoid duplication of effort and to maximize the impact of the projects in the broader AI and scientific community.
   
• Creating a global network of resources and expertise to facilitate the next generation of AI and bring together researchers interested in developing and using large-scale AI for science and engineering.

“An integrated and community approach focusing on security, trustworthiness and energy efficiency is crucial to leverage the full potential of AI for scientific discovery and national security,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, ORNL distinguished R&D staff scientist and director of lab’s AI Initiative. “For this reason, ORNL expects to be a critical resource for the consortium going forward, and we look forward to ensuring the future of AI across the scientific spectrum.”

Specifically, TPC aims to provide the community with a venue in which multiple large model-building initiatives can collaborate to leverage global efforts, with flexibility to accommodate the diverse goals of individual initiatives. The consortium includes teams that are undertaking initiatives to leverage emerging exascale computing platforms to train LLMs — or alternative model architectures — on scientific research including papers, scientific codes and observational and experimental data to advance innovation and discoveries. Trillion-parameter models represent the next great milestone in large-scale scientific AI, as only the largest commercial AI tools currently approach this scale.

Training LLMs with this many parameters requires exascale-class computing resources such as Frontier. Even with such resources, however, training a state-of-the-art trillion-parameter model will require months of dedicated time, which is intractable on all but the largest systems. Consequently, such efforts will involve large multidisciplinary, multi-institutional teams, and TPC is envisioned as a vehicle to support collaboration and cooperative efforts among and within such teams.

ORNL’s AI research portfolio dates back more than four decades to 1979, when the laboratory launched the Oak Ridge Applied Artificial Intelligence Project. AAIP evaluated AI’s potential to advance scientific research, particularly across four key areas: spectroscopy, environmental management, nuclear fuel reprocessing and programming assistance.

Today the laboratory’s AI Initiative focuses on the development of secure, trustworthy and energy-efficient AI across a wide range of applications at the laboratory, from biology to chemistry to national security.

Other TPC partners include Allen Institute for AI; Argonne National Laboratory: Barcelona Supercomputing Center; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Caltech; CEA; Cerebras; Cineca; CSC – IT Center for Science; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; ETH Zürich; Flinders University; Fujitsu; Intel; Juelich; Kotoba Technology; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Microsoft; National Center for Supercomputing Applications; National Renewable Energy Laboratory; NCI Australia; New Zealand eScience Infrastructure: NVIDIA; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Pawsey Institute; Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Rutgers University; SambaNova; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Stanford University; STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UKRI; Texas Advanced Computing Center; Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility; Together AI; Tokyo Institute of Technology; Université de Montréal; the University of Chicago; the University of Delaware; the University of Illinois Chicago; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; the University of Tokyo; and the University of Utah.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.