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)
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Researchers use AI and robot dog to combat invasive fire ants
Credit: Dr Hualong Qiu, Guangdong Academy of Forestry
A multidisciplinary research team based across China and Brazil has used a dog-like robot and AI to create a new way to find fire ant nests. Published in the SCI journal Pest Management Science, the study highlights how a ‘CyberDog’ robot integrated with an AI model can automate the identification and control of Red Imported Fire Ants (RIFA), a globally destructive pest. Field tests carried out by the researchers reveal the robotic system can significantly outperform human inspectors, identifying three times more RIFA nests with greater precision. Eduardo Fox, postdoctoral researcher at State University of Goiás in Brazil, and corresponding author of the study explained the motivation behind this pest management approach. “Fire ant nests are difficult for untrained personnel to identify and confirm in the field, and searching large areas can be time-consuming and exhausting under the hot sun. A robot could automatically locate the nests without requiring specially trained individuals and operate at various times of the day regardless of temperature conditions.” Controlling an invasive species RIFA is one of the most destructive pests worldwide. Accidentally introduced to the United States in the 1930s, they have since spread as an invasive organism across numerous areas including China, Japan and Europe, causing extensive environmental damage and economic losses. Discussing the importance of detecting RIFA nests, Fox noted, “RIFA proliferate rapidly in established areas, displacing local fauna and flora by outcompeting and eliminating sensitive species. Small vertebrates, such as birds and reptiles, are particularly vulnerable. Additionally, RIFA associates with significant agricultural pests like mealybugs and can damage some plants, exposing them to pathogens.” Conventional approaches to controlling RIFA populations involve the use of pesticides, at the risk of harming local ecosystems. To implement effective and targeted RIFA control strategies which minimise the harm to native species, extensive monitoring of populations is essential. Training the dog The team utilised Xiaomi's CyberDog robot, integrating it with a machine learning model trained on a comprehensive dataset of over 1,100 RIFA nest images. This approach resulted in a nest detection precision rate of over 90%. They conducted rigorous field tests to measure the system's effectiveness. The CyberDog was programmed to press the nest with its front paw: when a fire ant nest mound is disturbed, the workers will rush out from cracks and openings displaying aggressive behaviour. This, the researchers said, is key for diagnosing active mounds from abandoned nests, and to avoid false positives with mounds inhabited by other species. Hualong Qiu, a researcher at Guangdong Academy of Forestry in China, and corresponding author of the study explained: “A group of students received official standard training for quarantine inspectors and were tasked with locating fire ant nests in an open field. Subsequently, the AI-trained robot was challenged with the same field, and the performances of the students and the robot were compared.” Challenges and future directions Despite the promising results, the researchers acknowledge several challenges in scaling up the technology. “The primary limitations to scaling the use of robots are their battery autonomy, which lasts about 30 minutes, and the high cost of acquiring more agile and efficient models”, noted Zheng Yan, a researcher at Lanzhou University in China and corresponding author of the study. “Currently, it is still more expensive using the robot system than through the traditional approach, but we believe production costs may optimise this with time,” he said. Improving public awareness with robots The study's findings could have a significant impact on pest control policies and public awareness. “In addition to being versatile machines for navigating urban environments, robot dogs attract a lot of public attention. Fire ants pose a serious threat in China, yet most people remain unaware of the dangers of invasive fire ant nests in public areas. Therefore, sightings of robots tracking fire ant nests are likely to captivate the public and raise awareness about the presence of fire ants”, Yan said.
The implementation of robotic dogs in automatic detection and surveillance of red imported fire ant nests
COI Statement
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
How do the characteristics of historic urban landscapes influence public sentiments, and what implications do these findings have for urban planning and development strategies?
Higher Education Press
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Spatio-temporal differentiation of the impact of five HUL characteristics on public sentiments.
In 2011, UNESCO issued The UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (“The Recommendation” hereafter), introducing the concept of “historic urban landscape” (HUL). HUL is defined as “the urban context and its geographical setting taking into consideration the historical layering of cultural and natural values and attributes”. It is noteworthy that ancient towns or historic cities, as an important subclass of HUL, have garnered increasing attention. In recent years, public perception and emotional experience of physical environments have become a focal point in urban studies, which, however, is less combined with HUL in academic efforts. Existing scholarly research predominantly focuses on public perception on the image of HUL, with subjects such as visual image perception of HUL based on digital footprints, evaluation of HUL based on online reviews, and heritage identity perception. In these studies, public sentiments and feelings are merely considered as indicators or representations of HUL perception, and their relationship with HUL preservation and sustainable development has not been fully explored.
To elucidate the dynamic evolution process from identifying HUL characteristics to the public’s emotional responses, this study constructs an HUL–Cognition–Sentiment (HCS) analysis framework—consisting of three dimensions of heritage intrinsic value, urban functional value, and urban landscape value—and explored the spatio-temporal patterns of public sentiments and the influencing mechanisms of HUL characteristics on public sentiments in the Shaoxing ancient city.
The study employed ArcGIS Pro analytical tools to perform the model credibility analysis on the scores of public sentiments on weekdays and weekends/holidays with the aforementioned 11 explanatory variables, and has been published on the journal of Landscape Architecture Frontiers and entitled “Research on the Influencing Mechanism of Historic Urban Landscape Characteristics on Public Sentiments and the Spatio-temporal Differentiation Patterns—A Case Study of Shaoxing Ancient City in Zhejiang Province, China”.
The results show that different HUL characteristics had played varied influencing mechanisms on public sentiments, and the effects of same HUL characteristics on public sentiments also vary between weekdays and weekends/holidays and among different HULs. On weekends/holidays, public sentiments were more influenced by the intrinsic value factors of HUL (e.g., heritage level, heritage age), whereas on weekdays, they were more affected by urban functional value factors (e.g., density of transportation facilities), and urban landscape value factors (e.g., degree of mixed land use) played a greater role in arousing people’s positive sentiments.
It is important to note that the influence of HUL characteristics on public sentiments is not static. Urban designers should propose more targeted development planning and policies based on the local impact characteristics of HUL on public sentiments. This aligns with the core idea of HUL, which is to balance HUL preservation with urban development through comprehensive urban planning and management measures, thereby achieving a sustainable urban environment and enhancing people’s well-being.
Research on the Influencing Mechanism of Historic Urban Landscape Characteristics on Public Sentiments and the Spatio-temporal Differentiation Patterns—A Case Study of Shaoxing Ancient City in Zhejiang Province, China
Freeze-frame: U of A researchers develop world's fastest microscope that can see electrons in motion
University of Arizona
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Mohammed Hassan, associate professor of physics and optical sciences, let a group of researchers in developing the first transmission electron microscope powerful enough to capture images of electrons in motion.
Imagine owning a camera so powerful it can take freeze-frame photographs of a moving electron – an object traveling so fast it could circle the Earth many times in a matter of a second. Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed the world's fastest electron microscope that can do just that.
They believe their work will lead to groundbreaking advancements in physics, chemistry, bioengineering, materials sciences and more.
"When you get the latest version of a smartphone, it comes with a better camera," said Mohammed Hassan, associate professor of physics and optical sciences. "This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smart phones; it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before – like electrons. With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves."
Hassan led a team of researchers in the departments of physics and optical sciences that published the research article "Attosecond electron microscopy and diffraction" in the Science Advances journal. Hassan worked alongside Nikolay Golubev, assistant professor of physics; Dandan Hui, co-lead author and former research associate in optics and physics who now works at the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Husain Alqattan, co-lead author, U of A alumnus and assistant professor of physics at Kuwait University; and Mohamed Sennary, a graduate student studying optics and physics.
A transmission electron microscope is a tool used by scientists and researchers to magnify objects up to millions of times their actual size in order to see details too small for a traditional light microscope to detect. Instead of using visible light, a transmission electron microscope directs beams of electrons through whatever sample is being studied. The interaction between the electrons and the sample is captured by lenses and detected by a camera sensor in order to generate detailed images of the sample.
Ultrafast electron microscopes using these principles were first developed in the 2000's and use a laser to generate pulsed beams of electrons. This technique greatly increases a microscope's temporal resolution – its ability to measure and observe changes in a sample over time. In these ultrafast microscopes, instead of relying on the speed of a camera's shutter to dictate image quality, the resolution of a transmission electron microscope is determined by the duration of electron pulses.
The faster the pulse, the better the image.
Ultrafast electron microscopes previously operated by emitting a train of electron pulses at speeds of a few attoseconds. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second. Pulses at these speeds create a series of images, like frames in a movie – but scientists were still missing the reactions and changes in an electron that takes place in between those frames as it evolves in real time. In order to see an electron frozen in place, U of A researchers, for the first time, generated a single attosecond electron pulse, which is as fast as electrons moves, thereby enhancing the microscope's temporal resolution, like a high-speed camera capturing movements that would otherwise be invisible.
Hassan and his colleagues based their work on the Nobel Prize-winning accomplishments of Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huilliere, who won the Novel Prize in Physics in 2023 after generating the first extreme ultraviolet radiation pulse so short it could be measured in attoseconds.
Using that work as a steppingstone, U of A researchers developed a microscope in which a powerful laser is split and converted into two parts – a very fast electron pulse and two ultra-short light pulses. The first light pulse, known as the pump pulse, feeds energy into a sample and causes electrons to move or undergo other rapid changes. The second light pulse, also called the "optical gating pulse" acts like a gate by creating a brief window of time in which the gated, single attosecond electron pulse is generated. The speed of the gating pulse therefore dictates the resolution of the image. By carefully synchronizing the two pulses, researchers control when the electron pulses probe the sample to observe ultrafast processes at the atomic level.
"The improvement of the temporal resolution inside of electron microscopes has been long anticipated and the focus of many research groups – because we all want to see the electron motion," Hassan said. "These movements happen in attoseconds. But now, for the first time, we are able to attain attosecond temporal resolution with our electron transmission microscope – and we coined it 'attomicroscopy.' For the first time, we can see pieces of the electron in motion."
Sandia Science & Technology Park injecting billions into state economy
DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
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The Sandia Science & Technology Park opened in 1998 as a hub for public-private partnerships and has played a vital role in the economic success of Albuquerque and surrounding counties.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The Sandia Science & Technology Park is being credited with playing a critical role in New Mexico’s economy over the last 25 years, creating high-paying jobs and bringing state-of-the-art technologies to the marketplace.
A study by the Mid-Region Council of Governments shows that over that time, businesses located within the technology park paid out $7.7 billion in wages in the five-county region of Bernalillo, Sandoval, Valencia, Torrance and southern Santa Fe counties. It also shows the park generated more than 6,500 jobs and nearly $4.4 billion in taxable consumer spending as a result of those jobs.
“The Sandia Science & Technology Park is a successful public-private partnership that has thrived for a quarter-century,” said James Peery, Labs Director of Sandia National Laboratories. “Sandia is committed to continuing to grow the park through collaboration, facilitating companies’ access to the Labs’ world-class technologies, expertise and facilities. The goal is to bring high-quality jobs and economic prosperity to the community and the state of New Mexico.”
The technology park was established in 1998 through a partnership between the nonprofit Sandia Science & Technology Park Development Corporation and Sandia National Labs. The collaboration fosters high-wage private-sector job creation through economic partnerships among park companies, Sandia, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the U.S. Space Force.
“The Sandia Science & Technology Park has succeeded in meeting my expectations from when I first helped incorporate the park in 1998,” said Sherman McCorkle, chairman of the SS&TP Development Corp. “The park serves as a valuable technology hub for the state of New Mexico and a driving force for national security development, positioning us at the forefront of growth.”
High-paying, tech-driven employment
The biennial study by Mid-Region Council of Governments looked at not only the number of jobs created but also the quality of those jobs. As of June 2024, there were 42 companies in the park, with 2,038 employees. The average wage of those employees was $92,336.
“We know in America the best jobs in today’s world are technology-based jobs, and this park has the best of technology-based jobs because they work with Sandia National Laboratories, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the new U.S. Space Force,” added McCorkle.
The work performed at the park also helps spur job growth outside of the park. The report shows that 4,375 jobs were linked to the SS&TP in 2022, and 4,528 jobs were linked in 2023. Those jobs were from industries including construction, manufacturing, retail trade, professional and technical services, healthcare and social assistance, accommodation and food services along with various other industries. About half of those were direct employment at the technology park and the other half were indirect.
Regenerating the economy
The technology park also plays a vital role in the local economy through consumer spending. The report analyzed increases in consumer spending and gross regional product attributed to the park and its employees.
Through its 25 years, the park is credited with nearly $4.4 billion in taxable consumer spending in the five-county area. This references the disposable income spent by park employees and their families on goods and services. In 2022 and 2023 alone, that number reached nearly $172 million.
The report also looks at gross regional product, which includes what the businesses in the park spend in the community on things like equipment, goods and services to keep those businesses running. While a cumulative 25-year gross regional product number was not included, in 2022 that number reached more than $429 million, and in 2023 it reached $421 million.
“Since its inception, the Sandia Science & Technology Park has surpassed the expectations of achieving economic competitiveness and prosperity for our local, regional and national economies,” said Dan Sanchez, member of the founding SS&TP community advisory council and assistant manager for programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia site office.
A vision for the future
The future of the technology park continues to look bright. Among the companies that are flourishing is Rocket Lab, which was one of the park’s first residents. Rocket Lab is one of only two companies in the country that specializes in the production of highly efficient and radiation-resistant compound semiconductors used in space to convert light to electricity and power spacecraft. In July, Rocket Lab was awarded up to $23.9 million in funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to expand production of its semiconductors for spacecraft and satellites. This will add more than 100 jobs.
Another park anchor, BlueHalo, which specializes in cutting-edge technology for global defense, was recently awarded a $95.4 million contract for advanced directed energy prototype development by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. The contract enables BlueHalo’s continued work to design and build cutting-edge laser weapon systems. The company recently expanded its facilities from 50,000 square feet to more than 200,000 square feet.
The technology park and the City of Albuquerque are also partnering on a second public art project. Artists have the unique opportunity to partner with scientists and innovators to develop a large-scale technology-based public piece of art in the park. The city’s Public Arts Program is funding the $600,000 for the project. The field has been narrowed from 151 applicants to five finalists.
The Sandia Science & Technology Park recently celebrated its 25th anniversary and hopes to mark many more.
“The impact on Sandia is big,” said Mary Monson, senior manager for Technology Partnerships and Business Development at Sandia Labs. “Our suppliers and partners are in the park. We are able to access them easily and they are able to access Sandia. It’s key to our mission success at the Labs. We are a leader in the Department of Energy complex in tech transfer with a $140 billion dollar impact over 20 years, which coincides with the inception and the growth of the park. It has been an important tool for us.”
Media resources available for download Mid-Region Council of Governments report Full list of Sandia Science & Technology Park companies and organizations Mary Monson soundbite 1 Mary Monson soundbite 2 Sherman McCorkle soundbite 1 Sherman McCorkle soundbite 2 Sherman McCorkle soundbite 3
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.
Rocket Lab was awarded CHIPS funding this year to expand production of its semiconductors for spacecraft and satellites.
Credit
Rocket Lab
Life from a drop of rain: New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls
A Nobel-winning biologist, two engineering schools, and a vial of Houston rainwater cast new light on the origin of life on Earth
University of Chicago
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A new paper from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Houston Chemical Engineering Department and Chicago Center for the Origins of Life suggests rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived.
Credit: UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering / Peter Allen, Second Bay Studios
One of the major unanswered questions about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells.
“This is a distinctive and novel observation,” Tirrell said.
The research looks at “coacervate droplets” – naturally occurring compartments of complex molecules like proteins, lipids, and RNA. The droplets, which behave like drops of cooking oil in water, have long been eyed as a candidate for the first protocells. But there was a problem. It wasn’t that these droplets couldn’t exchange molecules between each other, a key step in evolution, the problem was that they did it too well, and too fast.
Any droplet containing a new, potentially useful pre-life mutation of RNA would exchange this RNA with the other RNA droplets within minutes, meaning they would quickly all be the same. There would be no differentiation and no competition – meaning no evolution.
And that means no life.
“If molecules continually exchange between droplets or between cells, then all the cells after a short while will look alike, and there will be no evolution because you are ending up with identical clones,” Agrawal said.
“Engineers have been studying the physical chemistry of these types of complexes – and polymer chemistry more generally – for a long time. It makes sense that there's expertise in the engineering school,” Szostak said. “When we're looking at something like the origin of life, it's so complicated and there are so many parts that we need people to get involved who have any kind of relevant experience.”
In the early 2000s, Szostak started looking at RNA as the first biological material to develop. It solved a problem that had long stymied researchers looking at DNA or proteins as the earliest molecules of life.
“It's like a chicken-egg problem. What came first?” Agrawal said. “DNA is the molecule which encodes information, but it cannot do any function. Proteins are the molecules which perform functions, but they don't encode any heritable information.”
Researchers like Szostak theorized that RNA came first, “taking care of everything” in Agrawal’s words, with proteins and DNA slowly evolving from it.
“RNA is a molecule which, like DNA, can encode information, but it also folds like proteins so that it can perform functions such as catalysis as well,” Agrawal said.
RNA was a likely candidate for the first biological material. Coacervate droplets were likely candidates for the first protocells. Coacervate droplets containing early forms of RNA seemed a natural next step.
That is until Szostak poured cold water on this theory, publishing a paper in 2014 showing that RNA in coacervate droplets exchanged too rapidly.
“You can make all kinds of droplets of different types of coacervates, but they don't maintain their separate identity. They tend to exchange their RNA content too rapidly. That’s been a long-standing problem,” Szostak said. “What we showed in this new paper is that you can overcome at least part of that problem by transferring these coacervate droplets into distilled water – for example, rainwater or freshwater of any type – and they get a sort of tough skin around the droplets that restricts them from exchanging RNA content.”
‘A spontaneous combustion of ideas’
Agrawal started transferring coacervate droplets into distilled water during his PhD research at the University of Houston, studying their behavior under an electric field. At this point, the research had nothing to do with the origin of life, just studying the fascinating material from an engineering perspective.
“Engineers, particularly Chemical and Materials, have good knowledge of how to manipulate material properties such as interfacial tension, role of charged polymers, salt, pH control, etc.,” said University of Houston Prof. Alamgir Karim, Agrawal’s former thesis advisor and a senior co-author of the new paper. “These are all key aspects of the world popularly known as ‘complex fluids’ - think shampoo and liquid soap.”
Agrawal wanted to study other fundamental properties of coacervates during his PhD. It wasn’t Karim’s area of study, but Karim had worked decades earlier at the University of Minnesota under one of the world’s top experts – Tirrell, who later became founding dean of the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
During a lunch with Agrawal and Karim, Tirrell brought up how the research into the effects of distilled water on coacervate droplets might relate to the origin of life on Earth. Tirrell asked where distilled water would have existed 3.8 billion years ago.
“I spontaneously said ‘rainwater!’ His eyes lit up and he was very excited at the suggestion,” Karim said. “So, you can say it was a spontaneous combustion of ideas or ideation!”
Tirrell brought Agrawal’s distilled water research to Szostak, who had recently joined the University of Chicago to lead what was then called the Origins of Life Initiative. He posed the same question he had asked Karim.
“I said to him, ‘Where do you think distilled water could come from in a prebiotic world?’” Tirrell recalled. “And Jack said exactly what I hoped he would say, which was rain.”
Working with RNA samples from Szostak, Agrawal found that transferring coacervate droplets into distilled water increased the time scale of RNA exchange – from mere minutes to several days. This was long enough for mutation, competition, and evolution.
“If you have protocell populations that are unstable, they will exchange their genetic material with each other and become clones. There is no possibility of Darwinian evolution,” Agrawal said. “But if they stabilize against exchange so that they store their genetic information well enough, at least for several days so that the mutations can happen in their genetic sequences, then a population can evolve.”
Rain, checked
Initially, Agrawal experimented with deionized water, which is purified under lab conditions. “This prompted the reviewers of the journal who then asked what would happen if the prebiotic rainwater was very acidic,” he said.
Commercial lab water is free from all contaminants, has no salt, and lives with a neutral pH perfectly balanced between base and acid. In short, it’s about as far from real-world conditions as a material can get. They needed to work with a material more like actual rain.
What’s more like rain than rain?
“We simply collected water from rain in Houston and tested the stability of our droplets in it, just to make sure what we are reporting is accurate,” Agrawal said.
In tests with the actual rainwater and with lab water modified to mimic the acidity of rainwater, they found the same results. The meshy walls formed, creating the conditions that could have led to life.
The chemical composition of the rain falling over Houston in the 2020s is not the rain that would have fallen 750 million years after the Earth formed, and the same can be said for the model protocell system Agrawal tested. The new paper proves that this approach of building a meshy wall around protocells is possible and can work together to compartmentalize the molecules of life, putting researchers closer than ever to finding the right set of chemical and environmental conditions that allow protocells to evolve.
“The molecules we used to build these protocells are just models until more suitable molecules can be found as substitutes,” Agrawal said. “While the chemistry would be a little bit different, the physics will remain the same.”
Citation: “Did the exposure of coacervate droplets to rain make them the first stable protocells?” Agrawal et al, Science Advances, August 21, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn9657
Coacervate protocells
microscopy image of three coexisting populations of stable coacervate protocells. The protocells contain long single-stranded RNAs, labeled with green, red, and blue fluorescent dyes. The absence of any intermixing of colors suggests that the exchange of RNA between the stable protocells is restricted.
Although the exact chemical composition of both the early pre-biological molecules and early rain remain lost to time, the new paper from UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal outlines how such a transition could have occurred. “While the chemistry would be a little bit different, the physics will remain the same,” Agrawal said.
Credit
UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering / Aman Agrawal
