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    New link between Personality and Risk of Early Death

    February 20, 2021, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Dr Páraic Ó Súilleabháin, from the Department of Psychology and Health Research Institute at University of Limerick, who was principal investigator on the study

    Ground-breaking research led by University of Limerick has revealed for the first time that the immune system directly links personality to long-term risk of death. The study sheds new light on why people who are more conscientious tend to live longer.

    Results from the new international study published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity have found that the immune system plays a previously unknown role in the link between personality traits and long-term risk of death.

    “Personality is known to be associated with long-term risk of death, it is a well replicated finding observed across numerous research studies...

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    A System that Automatically Generates Comic Books from Movies and other Videos

    February 20, 2021, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    A system that automatically generates comic books from movies and other videos
    The overall pipeline of the researchers’ system. (a): Keyframe Extraction and Stylization. (b): Automatic Multi-Page Layout Framework, red, purple and green dotted boxes mean different groups. (c): Balloon Generation and Placement. In step (a), we perform keyframe selection and stylization to get the stylized keyframes of the input video frames. In step (b), we first obtain four layout parameters of the frames including region of interest, importance rank, semantic relation, and allocate the frames across different pages. Then, we perform the layout algorithm in [2] for multi-page layout. In step (c), we designed an emotion-aware model for balloon generation and placement. Credit: Yang et al.

    Over the past few years, computer scientists have created numerous computational techniques ...

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    Never-before-seen Antibody Binding, informing Liver Cancer, antibody design

    February 19, 2021, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    A structural snapshot of a phosphohistidine analogue (ball and stick model) nestled at the interface between different areas (green, brown) of a phosphohistidine antibody. Such structures provide insights into the molecular properties of the antibodies, which makes them useful for revealing elusive phosphohistidine-containing proteins in cells.
    Credit: Salk Institute

    Xray crystallography and recombinant antibodies uncover workings of an elusive molecule central to human health. In structural biology, some molecules are so unusual they can only be captured with a unique set of tools...

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    This Robot Doesn’t Need any Electronics

    February 19, 2021, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Image
    The robot’s walking process is driven by a series of valves. 

    Walking quadruped is controlled and powered by Pressurized Air. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have created a four-legged soft robot that doesn’t need any electronics to work. The robot only needs a constant source of pressurized air for all its functions, including its controls and locomotion systems.

    The team, led by Michael T. Tolley, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, details its findings in the Feb. 17, 2021 issue of the journal Science Robotics.

    “This work represents a fundamental yet significant step towards fully-autonomous, electronicsfree walking robots,” said Dylan Drotman, a Ph.D...

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