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)
Monday, July 10, 2023
New center merges math, AI to push frontiers of science
ITHACA, N.Y. -- With artificial intelligence poised to assist in profound scientific discoveries that will change the world, Cornell is leading a new $11.3 million center focused on human-AI collaboration that uses mathematics as a common language.
The Scientific Artificial Intelligence Center, or SciAI Center, is being launched with a grant from the Office of Naval Research and is led by Christopher J. Earls, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell Engineering. Co-investigators include Nikolaos Bouklas, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell Engineering; Anil Damle, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science; and Alex Townsend, associate professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. All of the investigators are field faculty members of the Center for Applied Mathematics.
With the advance of AI systems – built with tangled webs of algorithms and trained on increasingly large sets of data – researchers fear AI’s inner workings will provide little insight into its uncanny ability to recognize patterns in data and make scientific predictions. Earls described it as a situation at odds with true scientific discovery.
“Scientific theories are explanatory stories that offer mechanistic insights into how the universe works,” Earls said. “These theories offer reasoning behind what has been observed, but also, they predict that which has yet to be observed. Such extrapolatory power is entirely beyond anything standard AI can achieve. Our new center will pioneer radically new AI approaches for scientific discovery.”
The SciAI Center will use mathematics as a common language between humans and machines because, Townsend said, math is how scientists have modeled the world for hundreds of years.
“Instead of getting AI to predict the future using data from a physical system, we will get AI to speak in the language of calculus and derive the underlying differential equations that govern a physical system,” Townsend said. “We are trying to develop an AI-human collaboration that can become our science teacher, revealing patterns of the natural world.”
The SciAI Center will have four intellectual thrusts – scientific data, operator learning, closure models and complex systems. Its three application areas of focus will be materials, turbulence and autonomy.
“By blending machine learning techniques with physics-informed algorithms, we can accelerate computational methods to aid in the understanding of materials and molecular systems,” said Damle, who added that Cornell’s fostering of interdisciplinary research makes it a natural home for such a center, enabling researchers from a broad set of areas to contribute.
Aside from its research goals, the center will be committed to helping populations underrepresented in science and engineering gain access to emerging AI tools through a series of student pathway programs that prepare young researchers to work in new industries.
Other institutions participating include the United States Naval Academy; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the California Institute of Technology; the University of Cambridge; Brown University; the University of California, Berkeley; and Integer Technologies.
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Rice U. physicist to lead world’s longest-running nuclear collider experiment
Frank Geurts named co-spokesperson of the STAR collaboration
IMAGE: FRANK GEURTS, A RICE UNIVERSITY PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY PROFESSOR, HAS BEEN ELECTED CO-SPOKESPERSON OF THE STAR EXPERIMENT, THE WORLD’S LONGEST-RUNNING NUCLEAR PHYSICS COLLIDER EXPERIMENT AT A PARTICLE ACCELERATOR FACILITY.view more
CREDIT: (PHOTO BY GUSTAVO RASKOSKY/RICE UNIVERSITY)
Together with Brookhaven Lab physicist Lijuan Ruan, Geurts will serve a three-year term as co-spokesperson for the STAR collaboration. This group of over 740 scientists from 74 institutions across 15 countries uses a 1,200-ton, building-sized instrument ⎯ the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, or STAR detector ⎯ to study what happens when gold ions, protons, or a wide range of other atomic nuclei collide into or zoom past each other at ultrahigh speeds.
As co-spokesperson, Geurts will help manage operations for the STAR collaboration and detector system, acting as a representative of its technical and scientific activity.
“We want to make sure that students and institutes across the collaboration can work efficiently with the data collected by the detector and help disseminate our exciting results to the scientific community and the public,” Geurts said.
RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator that is the world’s second-largest after the Large Hadron Collider, re-enacts on a subatomic scale cosmic events such as the aftermath of the Big Bang or neutron star collisions. The STAR detector system captures and analyzes data generated by the particle collisions inside RHIC to gain insight into the behavior of nuclear matter under extreme conditions.
“We're investigating very fundamental properties of nuclear matter and the best way to do that is by pushing it to its very extremes,” Geurts said. “Under extreme conditions like the Big Bang, but also when we have neutron star collisions or potentially even in supernovae, nuclear matter can melt into quarks and gluons ⎯ the substructure of these particles.”
Data collected from the collisions offers scientists a snapshot of a primordial state of matter present in the first instants of the universe’s existence known as quark-gluon plasma.
“It's basically a soup made up of the particles that form the substructure of protons and neutrons,” Geurts said. “In this soup, these so-called quarks and gluons are effectively liberated, not knowing anymore to what neutron or proton they originally belonged. On top of that, because of the high energies, many more quarks and antiquarks are created in this hot soup. There's a high degree of collectivity in these multiparticle systems.”
Using STAR, scientists learn about difficult-to-study fundamental forces that govern matter in the universe, such as the strong nuclear force.
“From early experimental results, we learned that quark-gluon plasma is not so much a hot gas of liberated quarks,” Geurts said. “Instead, it has the characteristics of a hot and strongly interacting fluid with nearly no viscosity, behaving almost like an ideal liquid. This is very interesting, because ⎯ even though we are looking at what is truly the hottest place in the universe ⎯ we find effects of strongly interacting systems that at times look very similar to what you see in matter at ultracold temperatures.”
“Let’s take a gold nucleus, for example,” Geurts said. “You have a lot of neutrons ⎯ which carry no electrical charge ⎯ and protons packed together at the center of an atom. Because protons are positively charged, these particles repel one another, so something else must be way stronger than this electromagnetic force in order to keep them all together. That’s the strong force at work.”
Geurts’ leadership role foregrounds Rice’s long-standing contribution as one of STAR’s founding members. Not only have Rice scientists been actively involved in the collaboration over its near-quarter-century duration, but the university has also helped improve the detector’s particle identification capabilities.
“We can now say with much better precision what kind of particles we see being created in these collisions,” Geurts said.
Geurts, who joined STAR in 2000 as a postdoctoral researcher, highlighted its role as a training ground for generations of scientists.
“We have graduate students who were not born when we started the experiment. We have professors who started their careers as graduate students in this experiment and now are leading new groups throughout the world in this endeavor. The data collected by STAR will continue to serve as an invaluable resource for many more doctoral theses and papers to come.”
Both the detector and the collider are scheduled to run experiments and continue recording data through the end of 2025, after which they will cease operations. Components of RHIC will be transformed into an Electron-Ion Collider, which is expected to begin operation in the early 2030s.
“Our responsibility as a management team is to pave the way for STAR to continue being an innovative and productive scientific enterprise during its post-operational phase,” Geurts said. “We expect that STAR will continue to come up with very exciting science for five, eight, maybe ten years after we record our last heavy-ion collision in 2025.”
The STAR detector at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory
A computer rendering of a collision in the STAR detector
CREDIT
(Courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory)
STAR detector (IMAGE)
RICE UNIVERSITY
The STAR detector at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory
https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/06/230503_Frank-Guerts_1LG.jpg CAPTION: Frank Geurts, a Rice University physics and astronomy professor, has been elected co-spokesperson of the STAR experiment, the world’s longest-running nuclear physics collider experiment at a particle accelerator facility. (Photo by Gustavo Raskosky/Rice University)
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 4,552 undergraduates and 3,998 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 and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
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Astronomers discover elusive planet responsible for spiral arms around its star
University of Arizona researchers have discovered a young exoplanet that could explain this phenomenon and provide clues about planetary formation.
IMAGE: THE LARGE BINOCULAR TELESCOPE IN ARIZONA. THE LBTI INSTRUMENT COMBINES INFRARED LIGHT FROM BOTH 8.4M MIRRORS TO IMAGE PLANETS AND DISKS AROUND YOUNG AND NEARBY STARS.view more
CREDIT: D. STEELE, LARGE BINOCULAR TELESCOPE OBSERVATORY
Depictions of the Milky Way show a coiling pattern of spiral "arms" filled with stars extending outward from the center. Similar patterns have been observed in the swirling clouds of gas and dust surrounding some young stars – planetary systems in the making. These so-called protoplanetary disks, which are the birthplaces of young planets, are of interest to scientists because they offer glimpses into what the solar system may have looked like in its infancy and into how planets may form in general. Scientists have long thought that spiral arms in these disks could be caused by nascent planets, yet none had been detected until now.
In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, University of Arizona researchers report the discovery of a giant exoplanet, dubbed MWC 758c, that may be generating the spiral arms in its infant planetary system. The UArizona astronomers also propose possibilities as to why scientists have struggled to find this planet in the past, as well as how their methods may apply to detecting other concealed planets in similar circumstances.
"Our study puts forward a solid piece of evidence that these spiral arms are caused by giant planets," said Kevin Wagner, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the UArizona Steward Observatory. "And with the new James Webb Space Telescope, we will be able to further test and support this idea by searching for more planets like MWC 758c."
The planet's star is located about 500 light-years away from Earth and is only a few million years old – an embryo compared to our own 4.6-billion-year-old sun. Hence, the system still has a protoplanetary disk, as it takes about 10 million years for the circling debris to either be ejected out of the system, ingested by the star, or formed into planets, moons, asteroids and comets. The prominent spiral pattern in this system's debris was first discovered in 2013, and astronomers were quick to point out the connection to theoretical simulations of forming giant planets.
"I think of this system as an analogy for how our own solar system would have appeared less than 1% into its lifetime," Wagner said. "Jupiter, being a giant planet, also likely interacted with and gravitationally sculpted our own disk billions of years ago, which eventually led to the formation of Earth."
Astronomers have imaged most of the protoplanetary disks in stellar systems that are visible using current telescopes. Out of about 30 identified disks, around one-third feature spiral arms – prominent swirls within the gas and dust particles of the disk.
"Spiral arms can provide feedback on the planet formation process itself," Wagner said. "Our observation of this new planet further supports the idea that giant planets form early on, accreting mass from their birth environment, and then gravitationally alter the subsequent environment for other, smaller planets to form."
Spiral arms are generated due to the orbiting companion's gravitational pull on the material orbiting the star. In other words, the presence of a massive companion, such as a giant planet, was expected to trigger the spiral pattern in the disk. However, previous attempts to detect the responsible planet have turned up empty – until now.
"It was an open question as to why we hadn't seen any of these planets yet," Wagner said. "Most models of planet formation suggest that giant planets should be very bright shortly after their formation, and such planets should have already been detected."
The UArizona researchers were finally able to detect MWC 758c by using the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer, or LBTI, a UArizona-built instrument connecting the telescope's two 8.4-meter primary mirrors that can observe at longer wavelengths in the mid-infrared range, unlike most other instruments used for observing exoplanets at shorter, or bluer, wavelengths. According to Steve Ertel, a co-author on the paper and LBTI lead instrument scientist, the instrument has a camera that can detect infrared light in a similar manner to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
Even though the exoplanet is estimated to be at least twice the mass of Jupiter, it was invisible to other telescopes because of its unexpected red color – the "reddest" planet ever discovered, Ertel said. Longer, redder wavelengths are more difficult to detect than shorter wavelengths because of the thermal glow of Earth's atmosphere and the telescope itself. The LBTI is among the most sensitive infrared telescopes yet constructed and due to its larger size, can even outperform JWST for detecting planets very close to their stars, such as MWC 758c.
"We propose two different models for why this planet is brighter at longer wavelengths," Ertel said. "Either this is a planet with a colder temperature than expected, or it is a planet that's still hot from its formation, and it happens to be enshrouded by dust."
"If there is a lot of dust surrounding this planet, the dust will absorb shorter wavelengths, or bluer light, making the planet appear bright only at longer, redder wavelengths," said co-author Kaitlin Kratter, a UArizona theoretical astrophysicist. "In the other scenario of a colder planet surrounded by less dust, the planet is fainter and emits more of its light at longer wavelengths."
Wagner said large amounts of dust in the planet's vicinity may tip off that the planet is still forming, and that it might be in the process of generating a system of moons like the Jovian moons around Jupiter. On the flip side, if the planet follows the colder model, there might be something going on in these early stellar systems that causes planets to form colder than expected, prompting planetary scientists to revise their planet formation models and exoplanet detection strategies.
"In either case, we now know that we need to start looking for redder protoplanets in these systems that have spiral arms," Wagner said.
The UArizona astronomers anticipate that once they observe the giant exoplanet with the James Webb Space Telescope, they will be able to make a judgement call as to which of the two scenarios is playing out in the infant system. The team has been granted time to use JWST in early 2024 to complete these observations.
"Depending on the results that come from the JWST observations, we can begin to apply this newfound knowledge to other stellar systems," Wagner said, "and that will allow us to make predictions about where other hidden planets might be lurking and will give us an idea as to what properties we should be looking for in order to detect them."
Image of a giant planet driving spiral arms in a protoplanetary disk from theoretical simulations.
CREDIT
L. Krapp and K. Kratter, University of Arizona
The MWC 758 planetary system observed by the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) at infrared wavelengths. Theoretical simulations suggest that the newly discovered planet, "c", is likely responsible for driving the spiral pattern in the disk of gas and dust surrounding the young star.
IMAGE: PEDRO MACHADO, ASTROPHYSICIST AT INSTITUTE OF ASTROPHYSICS AND SPACE SCIENCES (IA), AT THE FACULTY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LISBON (PORTUGAL).view more
It is almost three kilometers in diameter and takes four and a half years to complete its orbit around the sun. We’re talking about 2001 QL160, or rather the asteroid 32599 Pedromachado. Pedro Machado has been honored by the Work group for the Nomenclature of Small Bodies (WGSBN 2) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) with the attribution of his name to an asteroid.
Pedro Machado is a specialist in planetary atmospheres, but this is a recognition for his contribution to another field of study of the Solar System: the detection and characterization of asteroids and other objects that lie beyond Neptune’s orbit, called trans-Neptunians. In some cases, this work crosses the study of planetary atmospheres, as it involves the study of regions of transition between the atmosphere and outer space, the so-called exospheres, in which particles are lost out into space.
“It is an unexpected honor and a great satisfaction to see my name on the list of new asteroids”, says Pedro Machado. “I am very grateful for this recognition of my work by the scientific community”, adds the researcher.
32599 Pedromachado orbits the Sun between the planets Mars and Jupiter, in the region known as the Asteroid Belt. It was discovered in 2001 through the Lowell Observatory program Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS) by NASA and Lowell Observatory, for the detection of spatial objects in near-Earth orbits.
According to the process of naming astronomical objects, this asteroid was initially assigned a provisional name, 2001 QL160, which includes the year of discovery, as well as letters and numbers denoting the day of the year and order of the discovery. After determining its orbit reliably, it received the definitive designation of 32599 by the IAU Minor Planet Center. Only from that moment on could be proposed a name for this asteroid for evaluation by the Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclatures.
With this attribution, Pedro Machado joins other IA researchers, Nuno Peixinho (IA and University of Coimbra, Portugal) and Pedro Lacerda (Instituto Pedro Nunes and IA, Portugal), who also saw their work recognized with the attribution of their names to asteroids 40210 Peixinho and 10694 Lacerda.
WGSBN Bulletin
CREDIT
WGSBN
CAPTION
Image of asteroid 243 Ida, taken by the Galileo spacecraft. Despite being about ten times larger than asteroid 32599 Pedromachado, 243 Ida is also found in the Asteroid Belt.
CREDIT
NASA/JPLV
Pedro Mota Machado (b. 1967) is a Portuguese professor at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Portugal). He studies the atmospheres of Venus and Mars, observes stellar occultations by asteroids, and is an author of books on poetry and ethno-photography.
Research underlines: Birth-control pills affect the body's ability to regulate stress
New study shows that birth-control pills negatively impact women's stress response.
IMAGE: "I HOPE THAT OUR RESEARCH CAN CONTRIBUTE TO IMPROVED TREATMENT AND PREVENTION OF STRESS-RELATED CONDITIONS IN WOMEN. IN ADDITION, THE STUDY ALSO CONTRIBUTES TO A BROADER UNDERSTANDING OF THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN GENDER AND STRESS HORMONES," SAYS MICHAEL WINTERDAHL. PHOTO: AUview more
CREDIT: AU
Research underlines: Birth-control pills affect the body's ability to regulate stress
New study shows that birth-control pills negatively impact women's stress response.
Women have used birth-control pills since the 1960s, but researchers still do not know everything about the body's complex reaction to the small, hormone-laden pill.
Researchers from Aarhus University and the United States have studied the stress response of 131 young women when having a blood sample taken. Some of the women were on birth-control pills, while others were not. The researchers specifically measured the levels of the stress hormone ACTH in the women’s blood.
The study showed that 15 minutes of social activity after having a blood sample taken lowers stress hormone levels in women who are not on the birth-control pill. In contrast, women who are on birth-control pills do not experience any reduction of their ACTH levels.
To avoid causing any additional stress to the test subjects, a small intravenous catheter was inserted in connection with the first blood sample. The researchers could then draw blood after the social activity without having to prick the women with a needle again.
Women played board games and sang songs together
The test subjects had an average age of 20.5 years. After having a blood sample taken, they could then participate in one of six different group activities such as playing board games, getting to know each other in a group session, singing songs together or attending a church service.
"Being with other people is one of the most effective ways of reducing stress. Our results are really important because they indicate that people who use birth-control pills do not experience the same reduced stress hormone levels in connection with social activity as people who do not use the pill," says Michael Winterdahl. He is a visiting scholar at the Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit at the Department of Clinical Medicine and is the last author of the article.
Several competing hypotheses
The study differs from previous studies that have primarily focused on the stress hormone cortisol in extreme circumstances. In this study, the researchers measured the stress hormone ACTH, which changes significantly faster than cortisol. This makes it possible to observe and analyse rapid changes in a person’s stress response.
It has long been known that birth-control pills affect the stress response in women. However, looking at the stress hormone ACTH in connection with a social activity is a new approach.
"By studying ACTH levels, we take another step towards understanding how the brain regulates stress as ACTH acts as a neurotransmitter from the brain to the adrenal cortex, which produces cortisol. When we analyse ACTH levels, we can gain insight into the quick-response mechanism that controls the body's reaction to stress,” says Michael Winterdahl.
Birth-control pills are known for being able to affect the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. As the name indicates, the stress signal travels from the hypothalamus in the brain through the pituitary gland, that releases ACTH, to the adrenal glands, that release cortisol.
The researchers still need a final explanation for why birth-control pill users do not experience the same reduction of stress hormone levels in connection with social activities as people who are not on the pill.
"There are several competing hypotheses that try to explain the lower cortisol levels in people who use birth-control pills. Our research has pushed us closer to an explanation that centres on the brain and the ACTH dynamics. The biochemistry is complex, but we are working based on the assumption that birth-control pills can suppress the body's own production of progesterone," says Michael Winterdahl.
Progesterone is broken down into the hormone allopregnanolone, which is involved in a wide range of calming effects and can have an influence on the stress response.
Differences between phases
The study involved women who used birth-control pills and women who didn’t. The women were at different phases of their menstrual cycle.
The study revealed that the stress response in women who do not take birth-control pills depends on where they are in their monthly cycle. The stress-reducing group activities had no effect on the ACTH levels of the women who were in the proliferative phase of their cycle – just after their period has ended and the body begins producing hormones to get ovulation started.
"Progestrone levels are very low during the proliferative phase of a natural cycle. This leads to a minimal conversion of progestrone into the hormone allopregnanolone. Since allopregnanolone is important for activating the receptors that regulate the stress response, we don’t see a reduction in ACTH levels in women with a natural cycle who have just had their period," says Michael Winterdahl.
He points out that women are also generally more physically active during the proliferative phase, and that could be seen as an adaption in which the stress response and behaviour change in step with the cycle. In women who use birth-control pills, the stress response is ‘disconnected’, meaning it can not be adapted to a given situation.
Research still cannot explain exactly how this affects women. Additional research is therefore necessary to clarify the complex mechanisms involved in the correlation between hormone levels and the stress response.
"It’s also relevant to point out that birth-control pills aren’t just contraceptives. There are different generations of the pill, each with its own chemical structure due to the hormones used, which means the pills have different side-effect profiles. It’s therefore crucial that our experiments are reproduced with a larger and more diverse group of test subjects,” says Michael Winterdahl.
The research results - more information
The study is a cross-sectional study and data was collected in California as part of a major study entitled "Endogenous Oxytocin Release Eliminates In-Group Bias in Monetary Transfers With Perspective-Taking". The test subjects were primarily young and predominantly white individuals, which limits the generalisability of the study to other age groups and ethnicities.
The study was conducted in collaboration with Professor Paul J. Zak, Claremont Graduate University, California, United States.
The original study was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Aarhus University Research Foundation provided funding for the Danish study.
Visiting scholar Michael Winterdahl Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine - Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit Telephone: +45 25 17 81 11 Email: michael.winterdahl@au.dk
JOURNAL
Behavioural Brain Research
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Adrenocorticotropic hormone secretion in response to anticipatory stress and venepuncture: The role of menstrual phase and oral contraceptive use
