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)
An MIT study suggests our brains are not optimized to calculate the shortest possible route when navigating on foot. In this figure, pedestrian paths are shown in red while the shortest path is in blue. Credit: MIT
Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, when you're walking along city streets, a straight line may not be possible. How do you decide which way to go?
A new MIT study suggests that our brains are actually not optimized to calculate the so-called "shortest path" when navigating on foot. Based on a dataset of more than 14,000 people going about their daily lives, the MIT team found that instead, pedestrians appear to choose paths that seem to point most directly toward their destination, even if those routes end up being longer. They call this the "pointiest path."
This strategy, known as vector-based navigation, has also been seen in studies of animals, from insects to primates. The MIT team suggests vector-based navigation, which requires less brainpower than actually calculating the shortest route, may have evolved to let the brain devote more power to other tasks.
"There appears to be a tradeoff that allows computational power in our brain to be used for other things—30,000 years ago, to avoid a lion, or now, to avoid a perilious SUV," says Carlo Ratti, a professor of urban technologies in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Senseable City Laboratory. "Vector-based navigation does not produce the shortest path, but it's close enough to the shortest path, and it's very simple to compute it."
Ratti is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Computational Science. Christian Bongiorno, an associate professor at Université Paris-Saclay and a member of MIT's Senseable City Laboratory, is the study's lead author. Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science at MIT and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is also an author of the paper. A preprint version of this study was posted to arXiv.org earlier this year.
Vector-based navigation
Twenty years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, Ratti walked the route between his residential college and his departmental office nearly every day. One day, he realized that he was actually taking two different routes—one on to the way to the office and a slightly different one on the way back.
"Surely one route was more efficient than the other, but I had drifted into adapting two, one for each direction," Ratti says. "I was consistently inconsistent, a small but frustrating realization for a student devoting his life to rational thinking."
At the Senseable City Laboratory, one of Ratti's research interests is using large datasets from mobile devices to study how people behave in urban environments. Several years ago, the lab acquired a dataset of anonymized GPS signals from cell phones of pedestrians as they walked through Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, over a period of one year. Ratti thought that these data, which included more than 550,000 paths taken by more than 14,000 people, could help to answer the question of how people choose their routes when navigating a city on foot.
The research team's analysis of the data showed that instead of choosing the shortest routes, pedestrians chose routes that were slightly longer but minimized their angular deviation from the destination. That is, they choose paths that allow them to more directly face their endpoint as they start the route, even if a path that began by heading more to the left or right might actually end up being shorter.
"Instead of calculating minimal distances, we found that the most predictive model was not one that found the shortest path, but instead one that tried to minimize angular displacement—pointing directly toward the destination as much as possible, even if traveling at larger angles would actually be more efficient," says Paolo Santi, a principal research scientist in the Senseable City Lab and at the Italian National Research Council, and a corresponding author of the paper. "We have proposed to call this the pointiest path."
This was true for pedestrians in Boston and Cambridge, which have a convoluted network of streets, and in San Francisco, which has a grid-style street layout. In both cities, the researchers also observed that people tended to choose different routes when making a round trip between two destinations, just as Ratti did back in his graduate school days.
"When we make decisions based on angle to destination, the street network will lead you to an asymmetrical path," Ratti says. "Based on thousands of walkers, it is very clear that I am not the only one: Human beings are not optimal navigators."
Moving around in the world
Studies of animal behavior and brain activity, particularly in the hippocampus, have also suggested that the brain's navigation strategies are based on calculating vectors. This type of navigation is very different from the computer algorithms used by your smartphone or GPS device, which can calculate the shortest route between any two points nearly flawlessly, based on the maps stored in their memory.
Without access to those kinds of maps, the animal brain has had to come up with alternative strategies to navigate between locations, Tenenbaum says.
"You can't have a detailed, distance-based map downloaded into the brain, so how else are you going to do it? The more natural thing might be use information that's more available to us from our experience," he says. "Thinking in terms of points of reference, landmarks, and angles is a very natural way to build algorithms for mapping and navigating space based on what you learn from your own experience moving around in the world."
"As smartphone and portable electronics increasingly couple human and artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the computational mechanisms used by our brain and how they relate to those used by machines," Ratti says.Communicating vehicles could ease through intersections more efficiently
Researchers suggest electric vehicles need to be made lighter
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
A pair of economists, one with the University of Calgary, the other, the University of California, along with a civil engineer from Carnegie Mellon University, is suggesting in a Comment piece in the journal Nature, that electric vehicles (EVs) need to be lighter if they are to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. In their paper, Blake Shaffer, Maximilian Auffhammer and Constantine Samaras suggest that the added weight of EVs makes them less safe and less efficient and therefore less economical.
In their paper, the authors note that climate change has put EVs on a path to replace cars powered by gasoline. But they also note that for the changeover to be successful EVs need to be made much lighter.
EVs are heavier than gasoline-powered vehicles because of their heavy battery packs. They are also heavier because engineers have to add strength to the vehicles to allow them to carry such heavy batteries. Therefore, the authors conclude, batteries need to be made lighter. They note that up until now, most of the engineering effort involved with batteries has been focused on making them hold more energy so that EVs can travel farther on a charge. But they suggest that focus now needs to include reducing weight. They point out that heavier EVs, in addition to being less efficient because of their weight, pose a danger in collisions with gasoline powered cars due to the weight differential. They note also that heavier vehicles produce more tread wear on tires, which means more roadside pollution.
The authors have several suggestions to help the EV industry reduce its weight problem. The first is to shrink the size of the batteries by using other materials that are more energy dense and removing those that are heavy, such as the liquid electrolytes. They also suggest it should be possible to lighten the frames of EVs that had been made heavier to hold the heavy batteries—again, by using other, lighter materials. They note also that adding technology to reduce crashes could help with acceptance of EVs. And they suggest that efforts could be made by communities to promote less driving. The pandemic, they point out, has shown that more people could be working at home.Why some electric car owners revert back to buying gasoline-powered vehicles
More information:Blake Shaffer et al, Make electric vehicles lighter to maximize climate and safety benefits,Nature(2021).DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-02760-8
The variety of humble algae that cover the surface of ponds and seas could hold the key to boosting the efficiency of artificial photosynthesis, allowing scientists to produce more energy and lower waste in the process.
A study by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists showed how encasingalgaeprotein inliquid dropletscan dramatically enhance the algae'slight-harvesting and energy-conversion properties, making it up to three times more efficient. This energy is produced as the algae undergoes photosynthesis, which is the process used by plants, algae and certain bacteria to harness energy from sunlight and turn it into chemical energy.
By mimicking how plants convert sunlight into energy, artificial photosynthesis may be a sustainable way of generating electricity that does not rely on fossil fuels or natural gas, which are non-renewable. As the natural energy conversion rate from sunlight to electricity is low, boosting the overall electricity produced could make artificial photosynthesis commercially viable.
The study, led by Assistant Professor Chen Yu-Cheng from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, looked at a particular type of protein found in red algae. These proteins, called phycobiliproteins, are responsible for absorbing light within algae cells to kick-start photosynthesis.
Phycobiliproteins harvest light energy from across the spectral range of light wavelengths, including those which chlorophylls absorb poorly, and convert it to electricity.
Asst Prof Chen said: "Due to their unique light-emitting and photosynthetic properties, phycobiliproteins have promising potential applications in biotechnology and solid-state devices. Boosting the energy from the light-harvesting apparatus has been at the center of development efforts for organic devices that use light as a power source."
Using algae as a source of biological energy is a popular topic of interest in sustainability and renewable energy, as algae usage potentially reduces the amount of toxic by-products created in the manufacturing of solar panels.
The study supports NTU's commitment to sustainability as part of its 2025 strategic plan, which seeks to understand, articulate, and address humanity's impact on the environment
The findings were published and selected as the cover of the scientific journal ACS Applied Materials Interfaces.
Tripling artificial photosynthesis efficiency
Microalgae absorb sunlight and convert it into energy. In order to amplify the amount of energy that algae can generate, the research team developed a method to encase red algae within small liquid crystal micro-droplets that are 20 to 40 microns in size and exposed them to light.
When light hits the droplet, an effect known as the "whispering-gallery mode" occurs, in which light waves travel around the curved edges of the droplet. Light is effectively trapped within the droplet for a longer period of time, giving more opportunity for photosynthesis to take place, hence generating more energy.
The energy generated during photosynthesis in the form of free electrons can then be captured through electrodes as an electrical current.
"The droplet behaves like a resonator that confines a lot of light," said Asst Prof Chen.
"This gives the algae more exposure to light, increasing the rate of photosynthesis. A similar result can be obtained by coating the outside of the droplet with the algae protein too."
"By exploiting microdroplets as a carrier for light-harvesting biomaterials, the strong local electric field enhancement and photon confinement inside the droplet resulted in significantly higher electricity generation," he said.
The droplets can be easily produced in bulk at low cost, making the research team's method widely applicable.
According to Asst Prof Chen, most algae-based solar cells produce an electrical power of 20–30 microwatts per square centimeter (µW/cm2). The NTU algae-droplet combination boosted this level of energy generation by at least two to three times, compared to the energy generation rate of the algae protein alone.
Converting 'bio-trash' to bio-energy
One of the challenges of artificial photosynthesis is generating energy as efficiently as other solar-powered energy sources, such as solar panels. On average, solar panels have an efficiency rating of 15 to 20 percent while artificial photosynthesis is currently estimated to be 4.5 percent efficient.
Asst Prof Chen said: "Artificial photosynthesis is not as efficient as solar cells in generating electricity. However, it is more renewable and sustainable. Due to increasing interest in environmentally-friendly and renewable technologies, extracting energy from light-harvesting proteins in algae has attracted substantial interest in the field of bio-energy."
Asst Prof Chen envisions one potential use case of "algae farms," where densely growing algae in bodies of water could eventually be combined with larger liquid crystal droplets to create floating power generators.
"The micro-droplets used in our experiments have the potential to be scaled up to larger droplets which can then be applied to algae outside of a laboratory environment to create energy. While some might consider algae growth to be unsightly, they play a very important role in the environment. Our findings show that there is a way to convert what some might view as 'bio-trash' into bio-power," said Asst Prof ChenEngineered cyanobacteria uses electricity to turn carbon dioxide into fuel
More information:Zhiyi Yuan et al, Light-Harvesting in Biophotonic Optofluidic Microcavities via Whispering-Gallery Modes,ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces(2021).DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c09845
As a robotics engineer, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, gets her inspiration from biological systems. The collective behaviors of ants, honeybees and birds to solve problems and overcome obstacles is something researchers have developed in aerial and underwater robotics. Developing small-scale swarm robots with the capability to traverse complex terrain, however, comes with a unique set of challenges.
In research published inScience Robotics, Ozkan-Aydin presents how she was able to build multi-legged robots capable of maneuvering in challenging environments and accomplishingdifficult taskscollectively, mimicking their natural-world counterparts.
"Legged robots can navigate challenging environments such as rough terrain and tight spaces, and the use of limbs offers effective body support, enables rapid maneuverability and facilitates obstacle crossing," Ozkan-Aydin said. "However, legged robots face unique mobility challenges in terrestrial environments, which results in reduced locomotor performance."
For the study, Ozkan-Aydin said, she hypothesized that a physical connection between individual robots could enhance the mobility of a terrestrial legged collective system. Individual robots performed simple or small tasks such as moving over a smooth surface or carrying a light object, but if the task was beyond the capability of the single unit, the robots physically connected to each other to form a larger multi-legged system and collectively overcome issues.
"When ants collect or transport objects, if one comes upon an obstacle, the group works collectively to overcome that obstacle. If there's a gap in the path, for example, they will form a bridge so the other ants can travel across—and that is the inspiration for this study," she said. "Through robotics we're able to gain a better understanding of the dynamics and collective behaviors of these biological systems and explore how we might be able to use this kind of technology in the future."
Using a 3D printer, Ozkan-Aydin built four-legged robots measuring 15 to 20 centimeters, or roughly 6 to 8 inches, in length. Each was equipped with a lithium polymer battery, microcontroller and three sensors—a light sensor at the front and two magnetic touch sensors at the front and back, allowing the robots to connect to one another. Four flexible legs reduced the need for additional sensors and parts and gave the robots a level of mechanical intelligence, which helped when interacting with rough or uneven terrain.
"You don't need additional sensors to detect obstacles because the flexibility in the legs helps therobotto move right past them," said Ozkan-Aydin. "They can test for gaps in a path, building a bridge with their bodies; move objects individually; or connect to move objects collectively in different types of environments, not dissimilar to ants."
Ozkan-Aydin began her research for the study in early 2020, when much of the country was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After printing each robot, she built each one and conducted her experiments at home, in her yard or at the playground with her son. The robots were tested over grass, mulch, leaves and acorns. Flat-ground experiments were conducted over particle board, and she built stairs using insulation foam. The robots were also tested over shag carpeting, and rectangular wooden blocks were glued to particle board to serve as rough terrain.
When an individual unit became stuck, a signal was sent to additional robots, which linked together to provide support to successfully traverse obstacles while working collectively.
Ozkan-Aydin says there are still improvements to be made on her design. But she expects the study's findings will inform the design of low-cost legged swarms that can adapt to unforeseen situations and perform real-world cooperative tasks such as search-and-rescue operations, collective object transport, space exploration and environmental monitoring. Her research will focus on improving the control, sensing and power capabilities of the system, which are essential for real-world locomotion and problem-solving—and she plans to use this system to explore the collective dynamics of insects such as ants and termites.
"For functional swarm systems, the battery technology needs to be improved," she said. "We need small batteries that can provide more power, ideally lasting more than 10 hours. Otherwise, using this type of system in the real world isn't sustainable." Additional limitations include the need for more sensors and more powerful motors—while keeping the size of the robots small.
"You need to think about how the robots would function in the real world, so you need to think about how much power is required, the size of the battery you use. Everything is limited so you need to make decisions with every part of the machine."
An online method to allocate tasks to robots on a team during natural disaster scenarios
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore
Multi-robot task allocation for a 4-robot team performing a set of ~20 tasks – The top diagram shows the routes traced by 4 robots as they visited different tasks, as decided by simulated execution of our algorithm by each robot; each robot starts and ends at the same depot, marked by the yellow hexagon. The bottom diagram shows how our algorithm works at a particular task-planning instance of the robot R4 (marked by the yellow circle in the top diagram; the location of the peer robots at that instance are marked by the X symbol in the top diagram). Here, the bigraph on the left connects all robots with all available tasks, thus representing various potential allocation strategies. The bigraph on the right is the outcome of robot R4 executing our algorithm, which indicates that robot R4 has now selected to perform task-20 next. Credit: Dr. Payam Ghassemi.
Teams of robots could help users to complete numerous tasks more rapidly and efficiently, as well as keeping human agents out of harm's way during hazardous operations. In recent years, some studies have particularly explored the potential of robot swarms in assisting human agents during search-and-rescue missions; for instance, while seeking out survivors of natural disasters or delivering food and survival kits to them.
Researchers at University of Buffalo have recently developed a technique that could enhance the performance ofrobotteams during disaster response missions. This technique, introduced in a paper published in Elsevier's journalRobotics and Autonomous Systems, is designed to allocate tasks to different robots in a team, so that they can complete missions most effectively.
"Over the past three to four years, we have been exploring unique ways to coordinate large teams of ground robots and drones for assisting in hazard mapping and search-and-rescue operations that are critical to emergency and disaster response applications," Dr. Souma Chowdhury, one of the researchers who led the study, told Tech Xplore. "During these research explorations, we converged upon the need for an algorithm that can quickly (on the go) allocate tasks among robots in the team."
When they reviewed previous research studies, the researchers found that very few of the existing methods for multi-robot task allocation were able to handle simultaneous tasks with strict time deadlines and adapt to new unexpected tasks that may arise during a mission, while also considering the flight range, payload capacity and onboard computing constraints of real-world robots. They thus set out to develop an approach that would successfully do all these things.
"A further objective of our study was to demonstrate the capabilities of this new method on an original flood response application, where a team of drones is employed to quickly deliver or drop survival kits at specified task locations during a simulated flood scenario over a 20x30 km2 area," Dr. Chowdhury said.
In their study, Dr. Chowdhury and his colleague Dr. Payam Ghassemi considered teams of robots and the tasks they are meant to complete as two distinct sets of data. This allowed them to reduce the task of allocating problems to them, so that it primarily entailed mapping or matching pairs of elements from these two sets (i.e., a robot in the team with the task it would complete). Essentially, at any point when the model is required to make a decision, it connects every idle robot in set 1 to one of the tasks remaining in set 2, via an "edge."
"Our technique then uses an incentive function to weight these edges, with a higher weight indicating a higher relative affinity of a robot to undertake the task connected by the concerned edge," Dr. Ghassemi, the other researcher involved in the study, said. "A weighted bigraph matching problem is then solved to produce a one-to-one mapping that yields the immediate next task to be assigned to each robot. By designing the incentive function to account for the robot's global state, the robot's state relative to a task and the remaining time to complete the task, our approach becomes uniquely cognizant of robot's constraints and task deadlines."
The technique has several advantages over alternative, existing optimization-based multi-robot task allocation methods. For instance, its execution times are significantly shorter, as it can make task allocation decisions within a few hundred milliseconds.
In addition to being faster than other existing methods, the researchers' technique alleviates the need for synchronous decision-making among robots. This means that its functioning has a lower dependence on the communication networks connecting robots in a team.
Drs. Chowdhury and Ghassemi evaluated their technique in a series of tests. Remarkably, they found that it could complete the same percentage of tasks as general optimization-based methods that provide provably optimal solutions, yet its computing times were almost 1,000 times lower.
"This observation, along with our technique's ability to make asynchronous decisions, implies that our method could be readily implemented on widely available and inexpensive ground robots and drones," Dr. Chowdhury said. "Such simple robots usually present frugal computing and communication capabilities."
Interestingly, the researchers showed that their method can also be scaled up to tackle highly complex problems that involve teams with up to 100 robots that are meant to complete 1,000 tasks, while retaining its sub-second computing time performance. So far, very few teams have tried to tackle these large-scale problems using existing task allocation tools.
"The outcome of our study represents an important step forward for the multi-robotics community in terms of providing tangible evidence for the vision that very large and scalable teams of robots could revolutionize disaster response and other time sensitive operations," Dr. Chowdhury said. "Lastly, by directly considering the realities of robot's range and payload constraints, task deadlines and appearance of new tasks on the go (the latter are ubiquitous to disaster response operations), our findings take us closer to transitioning multi-robot task allocation algorithms to practice in complex large-scale operations."
In the future, the online multi-robot task allocation technique developed by this team of researchers could facilitate the large-scale deployment of drone swarms or other robot teams during complex search and rescue missions. Meanwhile, Drs. Chowdhury and Ghassemi plan to conduct further experiments to evaluate their algorithm in more realistic simulations, created using contemporary gaming engines. This could finally allow them to deploy and test their technique on real teams of drones and four-wheeled ground robots.
"The University at Buffalo, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has recently unveiled a massive state-of-the-art outdoor drone testing facility, which would be a perfect setting for conducting these experiments in real-world conditions," Dr. Chowdhury added. "On a more fundamental level, we plan to alleviate the need for handcrafting the incentive function for different types of operations and robots, and further minimize inter-robot communication needs. To this end, under a new research grant from the National Science Foundation, we are exploring how machine learning approaches can be used to learn incentive functions that will allow our algorithm to generalize over a wide range of real-world scenarios with minimal human inputs."A framework for adaptive task allocation during multi-robot missions
More information:Payam Ghassemi and Souma Chowdhury, Multi-robot task allocation in disaster response: addressing dynamic tasks with deadlines and robots with range and payload constraints,Robotics and Autonomous Systems(2021).DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2021.103905
Dr Tatheer Zahra was inspired by a material used in running shoes and memory foam pillows to design a 3D-printed product that could help protect buildings from collision damage and other high impact forces, equivalent to a car traveling at 60km/hr.
Credit: QUT
A material used in running shoes and memory foam pillows has inspired the design of a 3-D-printed product that could help protect buildings from collision damage and other high impact forces, equivalent to a car traveling at 60km/hr.
Published in Smart Materials and Structures, Dr. Tatheer Zahra from the QUT Centre for Materials Science and QUT School of Civil and Environmental Engineering used off-the-shelf bioplastic to 3-D print geometric shapes that mimic the behavior of auxetic materials.
"Rather than flattening when stretched or bulging when compressed, auxetic materials expand or contract in all directions at once, which makes them highly energy-absorbent and load resistant," Dr. Zahra said.
"But existing commercial auxetic material is expensive and not locally available, so I designed geometric shapes that achieved the same behavior."
Dr. Zahra said 3-D printing auxetic geometries could potentially replace steel and fiber reinforced polymer mesh reinforcements in composites, and could also be used as a flexible and widely applicable protective wall render.
She said the energy absorption would be equivalent to a 20mm thick reinforced composite protective render over a full-scale building wall, which could potentially withstand the impact force of a car traveling at 60km/hr.
A 180g auxetic geometry resists 25kN force (approx. 2500kg) by contracting in all directions to absorb energy of around 260 J without showing damage or changes in shape when released. If scaled-up, these geometries may be useful in saving buildings and other structures from collision impact. Credit: QUT
"At scale, composites embedded with these geometries could theoretically resist high impact or shock energy caused by gas explosions, earthquakes and wind forces, and car collisions."
"In Australia, there's an estimated 2000 vehicular crashes each year. Direct building damage cost at 2.5 per cent would put the damage bill at about $38.65M/year for housing."
"Since vehicles also crash into apartments, office building, restaurants and convenience stores, this cost of building damage would probably be higher."
"Loss of life would be the highest cost."
Dr. Zahra said protection for masonry walls was especially important because it was an essential part of most commercial and residential buildings.
"Masonry is a very cheap material that is resilient to noise, heat, and has better fire protection properties compared to wood or steel, but its mortar joints weaken the overall structural strength."
Credit: QUT
"If auxetic geometries were embedded into the mortar to make protective composites, they would also be protected from microorganisms and temperatures over 60°C, and should last the design life of the structure," she said.
Proven at lab scale, Dr. Zahra now aims to test the designs on full scale masonry and concrete structures at the QUT Banyo Pilot Plant.
"The designs would be good prospects for commercialisation through additive manufacturing because the production process is flexible and materials are readily available," Dr. Zahra said.
"3-D printing would also allow us to change the material, size or design of geometric shapes to suit different structures and load requirements."
Dr. Zahra said bioplastics provided a more sustainable, low carbon emission alternative to fiber-reinforced plastic or other non-biodegradable polymers.
She said it was also more cost effective than using available auxetic fabrics, which could cost up to $400 per square meter and were not biodegradable.
Mike Pence endorses a fringe dissident group to lead Iran, calling the leader of the group that forbids members from sexual thoughts 'an inspiration'
Bryan Metzger
Former Vice President Mike Pence and Mujahedin-e Khalq leader Maryam Rajavi. Attila Kisbenedek and Siavosh Hosseini/Getty Images
Mike Pence endorsed the MEK, a fringe Iranian dissident group with little support in Iran.
The group forbids members from thinking sexual thoughts, considering them a distraction from their goals.
Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo have also endorsed the group.
Former Vice President Mike Pence offered his support on Thursday to a fringe Iranian dissident group that seeks to overthrow the Iranian government, calling the group's long-time leader, Maryam Rajavi, an "inspiration to the world."
"One of the biggest lies the ruling regime has sold the world is that there's no alternative to the status quo," Pence said, referring to Iran's theocratic government, where an ayatollah wields supreme power and influences who can run for elected positions. "But there is an alternative, a well-organized, fully prepared, perfectly qualified and popularly supported alternative called the MEK."
The room then erupted in cheers, with members of the audience chanting the phrase "M-E-K" repeatedly.
"The MEK is committed to democracy, human rights, and freedom for every citizen of Iran. And it's led by an extraordinary woman. Mrs. Rajavi is an inspiration to the world," Pence declared.
The former vice president criticized the Biden administration for its "embrace" of the JCPOA, or the Iran nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew the United States in 2018. Negotiations between the US and Iran over reviving the nuclear accord remain stalled.
Maryam Rajavi has been the leader of the mysterious group ever since the group's previous leader, Rajavi's husband Massoud, disappeared during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where the group was formerly headquartered.
Both the New York Times and BBC report that the group forbids members from thinking sexual thoughts, participating in "self-criticism rituals" and record any such thoughts in a notebook.
"We had a little notebook, and if we had any sexual moments we should write them down. For example, 'Today, in the morning, I had an erection,'" a former member of the group told the BBC.
"You can't have a personal life when you're struggling for a cause," a current member told the Times.
It is unclear whether Pence was paid to speak to the group, and a spokesperson for Pence did not respond to a request for comment.
Brazil scientists test frozen jaguar semen to help species
DIANE JEANTET and TATIANA POLLASTRI Fri, October 29, 2021,
JUNDIAI, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian and American scientists on Thursday tranquilized a wild-born female jaguar now living in a protected area in Sao Paulo state. They're hoping the 110-pound feline named Bianca could make history for the second time in two years.
In 2019, Bianca gave birth to the first jaguar cub ever born from artificial insemination. Now, the 8-year-old could once again advance the cause of preserving her species. That is, if all goes according to plan and she becomes pregnant using semen that is frozen.
Scientists say frozen semen would be easy to transport, and so help ensure genetic diversity of jaguars whose populations are increasingly fragmented by habitat destruction, according to Lindsey Vansandt, a theriogenologist — a specialist in veterinary reproductive medicine — at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden.
“The population sort of becomes smaller and smaller, and then you get inbreeding which has lots of bad consequences,” Vansandt told The Associated Press moments after performing the procedure on an unconscious Bianca atop a surgery table.
“If we can take sperm from one male and inseminate a female from another location, we can keep their gene flow moving and keep the population more healthy," Vansandt said.
Wildlife experts from the Cincinnati Zoo, the Federal University of Mato Grosso and the environmental organization Mata Ciliar have for years developed their insemination program for the Western Hemisphere's largest feline. They work with individuals rescued from habitat loss in the Amazon rainforest, Cerrado savanna and Pantanal wetlands, all of which have suffered a surge of deforestation and fires in recent years.
“Look what happened in the Pantanal, the Cerrado,” said Cristina Adania, a veterinarian and coordinator of Mata Ciliar. "They are being killed before we even get to treat them, so something has to be done.”
Displaced jaguars are unlikely to thrive in new environments, which may be the range of another territorial individual, according to Panthera. Plus, they are unfamiliar with where best to find prey, which can leave them hunting livestock, putting them in ranchers' crosshairs.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List classifies jaguars as “near threatened” — a grade above vulnerable — though their population is on the decline and their habitat “severely fragmented.”
Bianca was still a cub in the Amazon when she was rescued and delivered to Mata Ciliar. Like some of the wild-born cats living at the Brazilian Center for the Conservation of Neotropical Felines in Jundiai, she can't be reintroduced to the wild, Adania said. Another female jaguar at the facility, named Tabatinga, was also artificially inseminated on Thursday.
Unfrozen jaguar semen only stays good for a few hours, Vansandt said. Frozen semen can be used for years, but typically has a lower success rate for felines than with humans.
If Bianca's case is successful, it would remove the strain and stress of transporting carnivores that weigh as much as 300 pounds to mate in person. Even when a jaguar is transported, there's no guarantee it will get along with its would-be mate, said Adania.
“This is good for genetic diversity, but also towards that larger goal of increasing the number of jaguars,” said Vansandt. "The dream is to increase the numbers to a stable population.”
___ Jeantet reported from Rio de Janeiro. AP reporter David Biller contributed from Rio de Janeiro.
Veterinarians intubate a jaguar in preparation for an artificial insemination procedure at the Mata Ciliar Association conservation center, in Jundiai, Brazil, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. According to the environmental organization, the fertility program intends to develop a reproduction system to be tested on captive jaguars and later bring it to wild felines whose habitats are increasingly under threat from fires and deforestation. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
Brazil Jaguar BreedingA jaguar that was rescued from illegal captivity walks on a tree trunk at the Mata Ciliar Association conservation center, in Jundiai, Brazil, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. The association treats animals that have been victims of fires, environmental disasters or traffickers, and rehabilitates the wild animals in order to release them to their natural habitat. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)More
