Category Biology/Biotechnology

Barley seedlings grow on average 50% more when their root system is stimulated electrically through a new cultivation substrate. In a study published in the journal PNAS, researchers from Linköping University have developed an electrically conductive “soil” for soilless cultivation, known as hydroponics.

“The world population is increasing, and we also have climate change. So it’s clear that we won’t be able to cover the food demands of the planet with only the already existing agricultural methods...

Researchers have created an Artificial Intelligence tool that uses sequences of life events—such as health history, education, job and income—to predict everything from a person’s personality to their mortality.

Built using transformer models, which power large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, the new tool, life2vec, is trained on a data set pulled from the entire population of Denmark—6 million people. The data set was made available only to the researchers by the Danish government.

The tool the researchers built based on this complex set of data is capable of predicting the future, including the lifespan of individuals, with an accuracy that exceeds state-of-the-art models...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Danderyd Hospital have followed recipients of the new updated COVID-19 vaccine and analyzed the antibody response to different SARS-CoV-2 variants. The results show a surprisingly strong response to the now dominant and highly mutated omicron variants.

The ongoing COMMUNITY study, which was launched in the spring of 2020 with the regular testing of 2,149 members of the Danderyd Hospital staff, has recently published the results of this autumn’s leg of the study.

Twenty-four participants were recorded in this study, the majority of whom were over 64 and had received four or five previous vaccine doses...

Transistor performs energy-efficient associative learning at room temperature. Taking inspiration from the human brain, researchers have developed a new synaptic transistor capable of higher-level thinking.

Designed by researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the device simultaneously processes and stores information just like the human brain. In new experiments, the researchers demonstrated that the transistor goes beyond simple machine-learning tasks to categorize data and is capable of performing associative learning.

Although previous studies have leveraged similar strategies to develop brain-like computing device...