It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, December 24, 2022
Pipeline protest: „We experience police violence here like in a war zone“.
Story by Refresh News • Yesterday
Lindsay Nance is outside the courthouse in Morton County, North Dakota filming live on Facebook, „The trial has been postponed until January.“ She’s there to support accused activists. The 28-^year-old shoots freelance documentaries. She has been living at the Standing Rock Reservation protest camp since October of this year. 15,000 people are demonstrating against the construction of the pipeline with their mere presence. It is almost 2,000 kilometers long and is intended to transport oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The oil will be extracted beforehand using the controversial fracking method. Construction is almost complete, except for this last stretch.
The two reasons for the protest: According to the planned construction plan, the pipeline would run through an area that has belonged by treaty to the Sioux tribe „Lakota People“ living there since 1851. The fact that the land is sacred and that there are cemeteries there has also not been taken into account in the planning. In addition, it is to pass under a lake that serves as a water reservoir for the Missouri River – the Time reported. That is why the protesters call themselves „Water Protectors“. That the pipeline will eventually leak and pollute the water is to be expected. Just 150 miles from the camp, according to Washington Post spilled around 666,000 liters of oil on December 13. Veterans ask for forgiveness
About a week earlier, the responsible U.S. Army agency halted construction and ordered a new environmental assessment. The protesters celebrated, but saw this only as a stage victory. Another part of the Army showed solidarity with the protests. A group of veterans formed a human chain around the camp and later asked at a solemn ceremony in tears, publicly asking forgiveness for all the military’s crimes against Native Americans. Some of them reportedly felt for the first time as if they were serving and defending their country, Lindsay reports. Also, for the first time in modern history, hundreds of other tribes came together to support the protests, he said. They answered the call of The Standing Rock Youth Council and came to the camp. A place to pray
„It’s a place of prayer more than anything else,“ Lindsay says, describing the atmosphere. She originally came to the camp to film a music festival that activists were organizing on site. Then she went back to her apartment only once to pack – and hasn’t left the camp since. „There are sweat lodges here, sacred fires, lots of conversations and prayers with the older Lakota People – all of it shook me to the core.“ She could never have prepared for the spiritual experience. In addition, Lindsay would also have learned about an American history that she had not known before: „I met older people who were forced to go to boarding schools. There, they had no contact with their family, weren’t allowed to speak their language, and weren’t allowed to live their traditions.“ This is how the American government worked against Native American culture. BayernLB supports the pipeline
Despite the small successes and broad support, the outcome is uncertain. Not least because Donald Trump is among the investors in the $3.8 billion bank, along with many global banks. „There’s a lot of work to be done,“ Lindsay says. Among the work, to pull his money out of the investing banks. Some banks have already withdrawn their investment – but partly incomplete and more for PR purposes, the activist warns. The Bavarian state bank BayernLB is also among the investors and wants to „closely monitor the situation“, as Deutschlandfunk reports. Hopefully, she also observed the 20th of November attentively.
Rubber bullets and water cannons at freezing temperatures
On the night about a month ago, the situation between the protesters and the police escalated. Lindsay describes it as one of the worst nights of her life. Tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray were used, according to Lindsay. Despite sub-zero temperatures, water cannons were used for six hours. „Many were covered in ice and returned to their unheated tents to sleep.“ Long Range Acoustic Devices, acoustic devices used as megaphones and to emit unpleasant loud sounds, did the rest. One woman was hit in the face by a rubber bullet without warning. The nearest hospital refused to treat her swollen and bleeding eye due to lack of health insurance. Meanwhile, she is staying in a hotel not far from Trump Tower. There she is preparing for surgery on her blinded eye. At Gofundme you can support them financially. „We experience oppression and police violence here like in a war zone,“ comments Lindsay. One-sided reporting
Lindsay herself regularly reports on the events on her Facebook page. „This is very important because the mainstream media distorts facts,“ she says. In addition, she says, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department has been issuing false press releases. Another reporting controversy involved Ed Ou. The Canadian photojournalist was denied entry into the U.S. after he stated at the airport that he wanted to cover the Standing Rock Reservation. Ed has won awards and has traveled to many crisis areas as a reporter. Despite this, police officers forced him to hand over his smartphone. The fact that he had a duty of confidentiality to his informants, which was thus no longer guaranteed, did not convince the police officers, as the BBC wrote. The first negotiations
The first hearings on detained water protectors will take place in January. According to Lindsay, the mass arrest of protesters also constitutes a violation of the right of assembly. The outcome of these first negotiations then serves as a precedent for the other 500.
Image source: Renegade Medai
Feds look to modify Indian Act with Bill C-38
Yesterday
Up to 3,500 more people could qualify for Indigenous status if the government follows through on its new Bill C-38, which would modify sections of the Indian Act, the federal government said last week.
The introduction of these legislative amendments to the Indian Act seeks to address four areas, including enfranchisement, individual deregistration, natal band reaffiliation and membership, as well as outdated and offensive language related to dependent persons.
Federal Indigenous Services minister Patty Hajdu said a consultation in early 2023 will help the government shape the law.
“As we work in partnership with First Nations to right the wrongs of the past, this step is an important one. We know there is so much more to do, and we will soon launch a co-developed consultation in early 2023 to address other areas like the second-generation cut-off,” she said. “I look forward to doing this important work with partners and parliamentarians as we continue to address colonial laws and structures.”
Bill C-38 would seek to ensure First Nation individuals with family histories of enfranchisement are entitled to registration under the Indian Act and can pass on this entitlement to descendants to the same degree as those without family histories of entitlement.
“Eliminating gender-based discrimination is ongoing and requires sustained effort,” Hajdu said. “Bill C-38 proposes amendments to the Indian Act that responds to rights holders and legal action taken against the federal government related to enfranchisement, individual deregistration, natal band membership, as well as outdated and offensive language related to dependent persons.”
The changes to the Indian Act are an offshoot of public consultations held in 2018 and 2019, where input was received from over 650 participants, representing 395 First Nation communities and/or governments.
The conclusion was that Canada should work with First Nations to proactively address issues related to registration and band membership provisions of the Indian Act.
Marc Lalonde, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Iori:wase
Presenting “ionocaloric” refrigeration: A new approach to efficient and sustainable cooling
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)
Seeking to make cooling more climate friendly and efficient, researchers used an environmentally-benign solvent and a salt – versus hydrofluorocarbons or other liquid refrigerants – to present a new refrigeration system that improves over existing refrigeration technologies, including solid-state caloric effect-based approaches. Their system takes advantage of the way changing the ionic concentration in a solution drives phase transitions. Here, this enables a reversible cooling cycle that the researchers call “ionocaloric” refrigeration. For more than a century, vapor-compression technologies have dominated refrigeration applications. However, for refrigerants, these systems often use hydrofluorocarbons, which are environmentally harmful and have a significant climate impact. Thus, developing high-efficiency cooling technologies that use environmentally safe, low-climate impact alternatives has become an important goal – even more so as cooling becomes more pressing in our warming world. Caloric effect-based cooling, like magneto- or electrocaloric refrigeration, which use solid materials that heat or cool when subjected to a changing magnetic or electric field, are promising technologies. However, they remain somewhat limited by their energy efficacy and cooling potential. Here, Drew Lilley and Ravi Prasher present a new approach to cooling – ionocaloric refrigeration – which leverages the large temperature change and heat absorption associated with repeatedly melting an ethylene carbonate (EC) solvent with a sodium iodide (NaI) salt. Lilley and Prasher describe the reversible process – the cooling cycle starts by mixing the solid form of EC with NaI, which, like adding road salt to an icy road, decreases the temperature of the mix through the solid-to-liquid phase transition. Then, using electrodialysis, the NaI is removed from the mixture, which purifies the EC, causing an increase in temperature as it recrystallizes back into a solid. According to the authors, in various tests, the ionocaloric approach had a cooling potential like that of current refrigerants and greater than other caloric effect-based cooling approaches. “The findings of Lilley and Prasher point to a new member in the caloric material family. It exhibits large efficiency and could be environmentally benign,” writes Emmanuel Defay in a related Perspective. “This is a serious contender for the future of cooling.”
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)
In a Policy Forum, Christine Borgman and Amy Brand argue that most universities lag behind industry, business, and government when it comes to leveraging data they generate for strategic decision-making and planning. Their view is informed by interviews with university leaders from 12 U.S. institutions. Interview questions addressed factors including participants' roles in considering how data is used in making key decisions, and the state of data infrastructure and management at their respective universities. Through their interviews, the authors note several common challenges universities face in capturing and exploiting institutional data. These include a lack of staff expertise in data management or governance and tension among stakeholders regarding data access, control, use and privacy. Investing in knowledge infrastructures, data management capacity, and transparent data sources could help address these challenges. “Even when their universities are ‘data rich,’ they also may be ‘data poor’ in that they are struggling to exploit data resources to their strategic advantage, or ‘data blind’ in being reluctant to initiate stakeholder discussions necessary to build consensus or governance,” write Borgman and Brand. “We encourage university leaders to embrace more objective and transparent data-informed models for decision-making.”
VIDEO: A GLASSFROG DURING DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ACTIVITY, SHOWING THE CHANGE IN RBC PERFUSION WITHIN ITS CIRCULATORY SYSTEM. THE SAME ANIMAL WAS FILMED ACROSS ALL THREE CONDITIONS USING TRANSMITTED LIGHT.view more
CREDIT: JESSE DELIA
DURHAM, N.C. -- Glassfrogs make themselves transparent while they rest by taking red blood cells from circulation and concealing them in their livers. A multi-disciplinary team of biologists and biomedical engineers has shown how these frogs make themselves see-through in research that appears December 23 in the journal Science.
It’s easy to miss a glassfrog in its natural environment. The northern glassfrog, Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni,measures no more than a few centimeters, and they are most active at night, when their green skin helps them blend in with the surrounding leaves and foliage.
But these amphibians become true masters of camouflage during the day when they’re asleep.
“When glassfrogs are resting, their muscles and skin become transparent, and their bones, eyes and internal organs are all that’s visible,” said Carlos Taboada, a post-doctoral fellow at Duke and a co-first author of the paper. “These frogs sleep on the bottoms of large leaves, and when they’re transparent, they can perfectly match the colors of the vegetation.”
Many animals in the sea can change the color of their skin or become completely transparent, but it’s a far less common skillset on land. One reason transparency is so difficult to achieve is because of red blood cells in the circulatory system. Red blood cells are adept at absorbing green light, which is the color of light usually reflected by plants and other vegetation. In return, these oxygen-rich cells reflect red light, making blood –– and by extension the circulatory system –– highly visible, especially against a bright green leaf.
Glassfrogs are some of the only land-based vertebrates that can achieve transparency, which has made them a target for study. Taboada first began studying glass frogs as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke who specializes in studying transparency. Working with Jesse Delia, who traveled around the world collecting different glassfrogs for the study, they observed that red blood cells seemed to be disappearing from the circulating blood whenever the frogs became transparent.
They conducted additional imaging tests on the animals, proving via optical models that the animals were able to achieve transparency because they were pushing red blood cells out of their vessels. He suspected that the cells were being stored in one of the frog’s inner organs which are packaged in a reflective membrane.
For a see-through animal, its biology was shockingly challenging to decipher. The research drew on the expertise of biologists and biomedical engineers not only at Duke but at the American Museum of Natural History, Stanford University and the University of Southern California.
“If these frogs are awake, stressed or under anesthesia their circulatory system is full of red blood cells and they are opaque,” explained Delia, now a post-doctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. “The only way to study transparency is if these animals are happily asleep, which is difficult to achieve in a research lab. We were really banging our heads against the wall for a solution.”
But Taboada had learned about an imaging technology called photoacoustic microscopy, or PAM, when he was studying biliverdin, the compound that gives certain species of frogs their signature green color. PAM involves shooting a safe laser beam of light into tissue, which is then absorbed by molecules and converted into ultrasonic waves. These sound waves are then used to make detailed biomedical images of the molecules. The imaging tool is non-invasive, quiet, sensitive and, in a stroke of luck, available at Duke.
“PAM is the ideal tool for non-invasive imaging of red blood cells because you don’t need to inject contrast agents, which would be very difficult for these frogs,” explained Junjie Yao, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke who specializes in PAM technologies. “The red blood cells themselves provide the contrast, because different types of cells absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light. We could optimize our imaging systems to specifically look for red blood cells and track how much oxygen was circulating in the frog’s bodies.”
In their imaging set-up, the frogs slept upside down in a petri dish, similar to how they would sleep on a leaf, and the team shined a green laser at the animal. The red blood cells in the frog’s body absorbed the green light and emitted ultrasonic waves, which were then picked up by an acoustic sensor to trace their whereabouts, with high spatial resolution and high sensitivity.
The results were startlingly clear: When the frogs were asleep, they removed nearly 90 percent of their circulating red blood cells and stored them in their liver.
In further tests, the team also saw that red blood cells flowed out of the liver and circulated when the frogs were active, and then re-aggregated in the liver while the frogs were recovering.
“The primary result is that whenever glassfrogs want to be transparent, which is typically when they're at rest and vulnerable to predation, they filter nearly all the red blood cells out of their blood and hide them in a mirror-coated liver -- somehow avoiding creating a huge blood clot in the process,” said Johnsen. “Whenever the frogs need to become active again, they bring the cells back into the blood stream, which gives them the metabolic capacity to move around.”
According to Delia and Taboada, this process raises questions about how the frogs can safely store almost all their red blood cells in their liver without clotting or damaging their peripheral tissues. One potential next step, they said, could be to study this mechanism and how it could one day apply to vascular issues in humans.
This work also introduces glassfrogs as a useful model for research, especially when paired with the state-of-the-art photoacoustic imaging. As long-time glassfrog researchers, they are excited about the new avenues of study now available to them and interested collaborators.
“We can learn more about the glassfrog’s physiology and behavior, or we can use these models to optimize imaging tools for biomedical engineering,” Delia said. “This started because Carlos and I thought this frog was doing something weird with its blood, and it led to productive collaborations both at Duke and across the globe.”
“Our successful collaboration has been a great example of how multiple disciplines can jointly advance science in the most synergistic way,” said Yao. “We are extremely excited about the future interactions between the biology and engineering teams. With all the strength on board, the sky is the limit.”
This work was supported the National Geographic Society grant (NGS-65348R-19), the Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellowship (LT 000660/2018-L), the Gerstner Scholars Fellowship provided by the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History, start-up funds from Stanford University and start-up funds from Duke University, the National Institutes of Health grants (R01 EB028143 R01 NS111039 and RF1 NS115581 BRAIN Initiative), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2144788), the Duke Institute of Brain Science Incubator award, the American Heart Association Collaborative Sciences award (18CSA34080277), and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2020-226178).
CITATION: “Glassfrogs Conceal Blood in Their Liver to Maintain Transparency,” Carlos Taboada, Jesse Delia, Maomao Chen, Chenshuo Ma, Xiaorui Peng, Xiaoyi Zhu, Liaming Jiang, Tri Vu, Qifa Zhou, Junjie Yao, Laureo O’Connell, Sonke Johnsen. Science, December 22, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abl6620
a male glassfrog photographed in ventral view using a flash, showing its transparency. The team measured muscle and ventral skin and found that these tissues transmit over 90% of visible light and are still perfectly functional. These tissues are so transparent that their organs and bones can be viewed through them.
Photoacoustic Microscopy images showing circulating red blood cells within a glassfrog while asleep and under anesthesia (which breaks blood storage). This system uses light to induce absorption in a hemoglobin and an ultrasound transducer to map the soundwaves back to the point of optical absorption. The color scheme shows the percent of hemoglobin bound with oxygen. These images were acquired on an OR-PAM system developed by Dr. Junjie Yao’s lab.
CREDIT
Junjie Yao, Duke University
Glassfrogs “hide” blood in their liver while sleeping to stay transparent
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)
Tiny, translucent glassfrogs increase their transparency two- to threefold while sleeping by temporarily storing red blood cells in their liver, according to a new study. The findings – which provide insight into this unique adaptation in vertebrates – could be used in understanding blood flow more broadly and in the development of new anticoagulants or other cardiovascular drugs. The glassfrog (Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni) is a tropical, leaf-dwelling frog species with a transparent body and translucent skin – adaptations these frogs use as camouflage against would-be predators as they sleep on green leaves during the day. For many vertebrates, particularly terrestrial species, achieving a glassfrog’s level of transparency is challenging because of the numerous red blood cells (RBCs) that circulate continuously throughout the body, rendering even highly transparent tissues opaque. In this study, Carlos Taboada and colleagues investigated how glassfrogs seemingly overcome this physiological barrier. Using calibrated color photography to measure animal transparency and photoacoustic imaging to trace the movement of RBCs in living frogs, Taboada et al. found that glassfrogs become 34 to 61% more transparent, on average, while sleeping, suggesting that the animals actively maintain their dynamic transparency. According to the authors, they do this by removing roughly 89% of their RBCs from circulation and “hiding” them in the liver during sleep, without any detrimental vascular or metabolic effects. As the frogs wake up and become more active, the number of RBCs in circulation increases greatly, as does their opacity. Since such high local concentrations of RBCs in most vertebrates often results in vaso-occlusion, or clotting, these findings may offer insights into the mechanisms involved in preventing these and other vascular pathologies. “The mechanism that drives RBC re-distribution in glassfrogs is not understood. It is unclear if the glassfrog can actively manipulate the changes in RBC circulation – for example, in the presence of a predator,” write Nelly Cruz and Richard White in a related Perspective. “Another intriguing question is how sequestration of RBCs in the liver affects cellular respiration and whether the glassfrog has a special metabolism that adapts to the drastic changes in RBC circulation.
New research shows that glassfrogs—known for their highly transparent undersides and muscles—perform their “disappearing acts” by stowing away nearly all of their red blood cells into their uniquely reflective livers. The study, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and Duke University, is being published Friday in the journal Science. The work could lead to new avenues of research tied to blood clots, which the frogs somehow avoid while packing and unpacking about 90 percent of their red blood cells into their livers on a daily basis.
“There are more than 150 species of known glassfrogs in the world, and yet we’re really just starting to learn about some of the really incredible ways they interact with their environment,” said co-lead author Jesse Delia, a Gerstner postdoctoral fellow in the Museum’s Department of Herpetology.
Glassfrogs, which live in the American tropics, are nocturnal amphibians that spend their days sleeping upside down on translucent leaves that match the color of their backs—a common camouflage tactic. Their tummies, however, show something surprising: translucent skin and muscle that allows their bones and organs to be visible, giving the glassfrog its common name. Recent research has proposed that this adaptation masks the frogs’ outlines on their leafy perches, making them harder for predators to spot.
Transparency is a common form of camouflage among animals that live in water, but it’s rare on land. In vertebrates, attaining transparency is difficult because their circulatory system is full of red blood cells that interact with light. Studies have shown that ice fish and larval eels achieve transparency by not producing hemoglobin and red blood cells. But glassfrogs use an alternative strategy, according to the findings of the new study.
“Glassfrogs overcome this challenge by essentially hiding red blood cells from view,” said Carlos Taboada, the study’s co-lead author from Duke University. “They almost pause their respiratory system during the day, even at high temperatures.”
At Duke, the researchers used a technique called photoacoustic imaging, which uses light to induce sound-wave propagation from red blood cells. This allows researchers to map the location of the cells within sleeping frogs without restraint, contrast agents, sacrifice, or surgical manipulation—particularly important to this study because glassfrog transparency is disrupted by activity, stress, anesthesia, and death.
The researchers focused on one particular species of glassfrog, Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni. They found that resting glassfrogs increase transparency two- to threefold by removing nearly 90 percent of their red blood cells from circulation and packing them within their liver, which contains reflective guanine crystals. Whenever the frogs need to become active again, they bring the red blood cells back into the blood, which gives the frogs the ability to move around—at which point, light absorption from these cells breaks transparency.
In most vertebrates, aggregating red blood cells can lead to potentially dangerous blood clots in veins and arteries. But glassfrogs don’t experience clotting, which raises a set of significant questions for biological and medical researchers.
“This is the first of a series of studies documenting the physiology of vertebrate transparency, and it will hopefully stimulate biomedical work to translate these frogs’ extreme physiology into novel targets for human health and medicine,” Delia said.
Other authors on the study include Maomao Chen, Chenshuo Ma, Xiaorui Peng, Xiaoyi Zhu, Tri Vu, Junjie Yao, and Sönke Johnsen from Duke University; Laiming Jiang and Qifa Zhou, from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and Lauren O’Connell, from Stanford University.
This study was supported in part by the National Geographic Society, grant # NGS-65348R-19; the Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellowship # LT 000660/2018-L; the Gerstner Scholars Fellowship provided by the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History; start-up funds from Stanford University; start-up funds from Duke University; the National Institutes of Health, grant #s R01 EB028143, R01 NS111039, RF1 NS115581 BRAIN Initiative; a Duke Institute of Brain Science Incubator award; the American Heart Association Collaborative Sciences award 18CSA34080277; and a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant 2020- 226178.
ABOUT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY (AMNH)
The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is one of the world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses more than 40 permanent exhibition halls and galleries for temporary exhibitions, the Rose Center for Earth and Space and the Hayden Planetarium, and the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, which opens February 2023. The Museum’s scientists draw on a world-class permanent collection of more than 34 million specimens and artifacts, some of which are billions of years old, and on one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Museum grants the Ph.D. degree in Comparative Biology and the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree, the only such freestanding, degree-granting programs at any museum in the United States. The Museum’s website, digital videos, and apps for mobile devices bring its collections, exhibitions, and educational programs to millions around the world. Visit amnh.org for more information.
The artificial intelligence algorithms behind the chatbot program ChatGPT — which has drawn attention for its ability to generate humanlike written responses to some of the most creative queries — might one day be able to help doctors detect Alzheimer’s Disease in its early stages. Research from Drexel University’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems recently demonstrated that OpenAI’s GPT-3 program can identify clues from spontaneous speech that are 80% accurate in predicting the early stages of dementia.
Reported in the journal PLOS Digital Health, the Drexel study is the latest in a series of efforts to show the effectiveness of natural language processing programs for early prediction of Alzheimer’s – leveraging current research suggesting that language impairment can be an early indicator of neurodegenerative disorders.
Finding an Early Sign
The current practice for diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease typically involves a medical history review and lengthy set of physical and neurological evaluations and tests. While there is still no cure for the disease, spotting it early can give patients more options for therapeutics and support. Because language impairment is a symptom in 60-80% of dementia patients, researchers have been focusing on programs that can pick up on subtle clues — such as hesitation, making grammar and pronunciation mistakes and forgetting the meaning of words — as a quick test that could indicate whether or not a patient should undergo a full examination.
“We know from ongoing research that the cognitive effects of Alzheimer’s Disease can manifest themselves in language production,” said Hualou Liang, PhD, a professor in Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems and a coauthor of the research. “The most commonly used tests for early detection of Alzheimer’s look at acoustic features, such as pausing, articulation and vocal quality, in addition to tests of cognition. But we believe the improvement of natural language processing programs provide another path to support early identification of Alzheimer’s.”
A Program that Listens and Learns
GPT-3, officially the third generation of OpenAI’s General Pretrained Transformer (GPT), uses a deep learning algorithm — trained by processing vast swaths of information from the internet, with a particular focus on how words are used, and how language is constructed. This training allows it to produce a human-like response to any task that involves language, from responses to simple questions, to writing poems or essays.
GPT-3 is particularly good at “zero-data learning” – meaning it can respond to questions that would normally require external knowledge that has not been provided. For example, asking the program to write “Cliff’s Notes” of a text, would normally require an explanation that this means a summary. But GPT-3 has gone through enough training to understand the reference and adapt itself to produce the expected response.
“GPT3’s systemic approach to language analysis and production makes it a promising candidate for identifying the subtle speech characteristics that may predict the onset of dementia,” said Felix Agbavor, a doctoral researcher in the School and the lead author of the paper. “Training GPT-3 with a massive dataset of interviews – some of which are with Alzheimer’s patients — would provide it with the information it needs to extract speech patterns that could then be applied to identify markers in future patients.”
Seeking Speech Signals
The researchers tested their theory by training the program with a set of transcripts from a portion of a dataset of speech recordings compiled with the support of the National Institutes of Health specifically for the purpose of testing natural language processing programs’ ability to predict dementia. The program captured meaningful characteristics of the word-use, sentence structure and meaning from the text to produce what researchers call an “embedding” – a characteristic profile of Alzheimer’s speech.
They then used the embedding to re-train the program — turning it into an Alzheimer’s screening machine. To test it they asked the program to review dozens of transcripts from the dataset and decide whether or not each one was produced by someone who was developing Alzheimer’s.
Running two of the top natural language processing programs through the same paces, the group found that GPT-3 performed better than both, in terms of accurately identifying Alzheimer’s examples, identifying non-Alzheimer’s examples and with fewer missed cases than both programs.
A second test used GPT-3’s textual analysis to predict the score of various patients from the dataset on a common test for predicting the severity of dementia, called the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE).
The team then compared GPT-3’s prediction accuracy to that of an analysis using only the acoustic features of the recordings, such as pauses, voice strength and slurring, to predict the MMSE score. GPT-3 proved to be almost 20% more accurate in predicting patients’ MMSE scores.
“Our results demonstrate that the text embedding, generated by GPT-3, can be reliably used to not only detect individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease from healthy controls, but also infer the subject’s cognitive testing score, both solely based on speech data,” they wrote. “We further show that text embedding outperforms the conventional acoustic feature-based approach and even performs competitively with fine-tuned models. These results, all together, suggest that GPT-3 based text embedding is a promising approach for AD assessment and has the potential to improve early diagnosis of dementia.”
Continuing the Search
To build on these promising results, the researchers are planning to develop a web application that could be used at home or in a doctor’s office as a pre-screening tool.
“Our proof-of-concept shows that this could be a simple, accessible and adequately sensitive tool for community-based testing,” Liang said. “This could be very useful for early screening and risk assessment before a clinical diagnosis.”
IMAGE: MORE THAN 192,000 SMALL SEISMIC EVENTS, EACH REPRESENTED HERE AS A SINGLE BLACK DOT, REVEAL IN 3D THE SHAPE AND LOCATION OF THE SILLS BENEATH HAWAI‘I.view more
CREDIT: CALTECH/WILDING ET AL
Magma pumping through a massive complex of flat, interconnected chambers deep beneath volcanoes in Hawai‘i appears to be responsible for an unexplained swarm of tiny earthquakes felt on the Big Island over the past seven years, in particular since the 2018 eruption and summit collapse of Kīlauea.
The pancake-like chambers, called “sills,” channel magma laterally and upward to recharge the magma chambers of at least two of the island’s active volcanoes: Mauna Loa and Kīlauea. Using a machine-learning algorithm, geoscientists at Caltech were able to use data gathered from seismic stations on the island to chart out the structure of the sills, mapping them with never-before-seen precision and demonstrating that they link the volcanoes.
Further, the researchers were able to monitor the progress of the magma as it pushed upward through the sills, and to link that to Kīlauea’s activity. They analyzed a period that ended in May 2022, so it is not yet possible to say whether they can spot the magma flow that led to the November 27 eruption of Mauna Loa, but the team intends to look at that next.
“Before this study, we knew very little about how magma is stored and transported deep beneath Hawai‘i. Now, we have a high-definition map of an important part of the plumbing system,” says John D. Wilding (MS ’22), Caltech graduate student and co-lead author of a paper describing the research that was published in the journal Science on December 22. The study represents the first time scientists have been able to directly observe a magma structure located this deep underground. “We know pretty well what the magma is doing in the shallow part of the system above 15 kilometer depth, but until now, everything below that has just been the subject of speculation,” Wilding says.
With data on more than 192,000 small temblors (less than magnitude 3.0) that occurred over the 3.5-year period from 2018 to mid-2022, the team was able to map out more than a dozen sills stacked on top of one another. The largest is about 6 kilometers by 7 kilometers. The sills tend to be around 300 meters thick, and are separated by a distance of about 500 meters.
“Volcanic earthquakes are typically characterized by their small magnitude and frequent occurrence during magmatic unrest,” says Weiqiang Zhu, postdoctoral scholar research associate in geophysics and co-lead author of the Science paper. “We are excited about recent advances in machine learning, particularly deep learning, which are helping to accurately detect and locate these small seismic signals recorded by dense seismic networks. Machine learning can be an effective tool for seismologists to analyze large archived datasets, identify patterns in small earthquakes, and gain insights into underlying structures and physical mechanisms.”
Wilding and Zhu worked with Jennifer Jackson, the William E. Leonhard Professor of Mineral Physics; and Zachary Ross, assistant professor of geophysics and William H. Hurt Scholar; who are both senior authors on the paper. In October, Ross was named one of the 2022 Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering, which will provide funding to support this research moving forward.
The team did not have to place a single piece of hardware to do the study; rather, they relied on data gathered by United States Geological Survey seismometers on the island. However, the machine-learning algorithm developed in Ross’s lab gave them an unprecedented ability to separate signal from noise—that is, to clearly identify earthquakes and their locations, which create a sort of 3-D “point cloud” that illustrates the sills.
"It’s analogous to taking a CT [computerized tomography] scan, the way a doctor can visualize the inside of a patient’s body," Ross says. “But instead of using controlled sources with X-rays, we use passive sources, which are earthquakes.”
The team was able to catalog about 10 times as many earthquakes as was previously possible, and they were able to pinpoint their locations with a margin of error of less than a kilometer; previous locations were determined with error margins of a few kilometers. The work was accomplished using a deep-learning algorithm that had been taught to spot earthquake signals using a training dataset of millions of previously identified earthquakes. Even with small earthquakes, which might not stand out to the human eye on a seismogram, the algorithm finds patterns that distinguish quakes from background noise. Ross previously used the technique to reveal how a naturally occurring injection of underground fluids drove a four-year-long earthquake swarm near Cahuilla, California.
The sills appear to be at depths ranging from around 36–43 kilometers. (For reference, the deepest humans have ever drilled into the Earth is a little over 12 kilometers.) Scientists have long known that a phase boundary is present at a depth of around 35 kilometers beneath Hawai‘i; at such a phase boundary, rock of the same chemical composition transitions from one group of minerals above to a different group below. Studying the new data, Jackson recognized that the transitions occurring in this rock coupled to magma injections could host chemical reactions and processes that stress or weaken the rock, possibly explaining the existence of the sills—and by extension, the active seismicity.
“The transition of spinel to plagioclase within the lherzolite rock may be occurring through diffuse migration, entrapment, and crystallization of magma melts within the shallow lithospheric mantle underneath Hawai‘i,” Jackson says. “Such assemblages can exhibit transient weakening arising from coupled deformation and chemical reactions, which could facilitate crack growth or fault activation. Recurrent magma injections would continuously modulate grain sizes in the sill complex, prolonging conditions for seismic deformation in the rock. This process could exploit lateral variations in strength to produce and sustain the laterally compact seismogenic features that we observe.”
It is unclear whether the sills beneath the Big Island are unique to Hawai‘i or whether this sort of subvolcanic structure is common, the researchers say. “Hawai‘i is the best-monitored island in the world, with dozens of seismic stations giving us a window into what’s going on beneath the surface. We have to wonder, at how many other locations is this happening?” Wilding says.
Also unclear is exactly how the magma’s movement triggers the tiny quakes. The earthquakes map out the structures, but the actual mechanism of earthquakes is not well understood. It could be that the injection of a lot of magma into a space creates a lot of stress, the researchers say.
The paper is titled “The magmatic web beneath Hawai‘i.” This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Computations for this research were conducted in the Resnick High Performance Computing Center, a facility supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech.
