New Programming Tool Turns Sketches, Handwriting into Code

Programming tool turns handwriting into computer code
Programming tool turns handwriting into computer code / Cornell University

Cornell University researchers have created an interface that allows users to handwrite and sketch within computer code — a challenge to conventional coding, which typically relies on typing.

The pen-based interface, called Notate, lets users of computational, digital notebooks open drawing canvases and handwrite diagrams within lines of traditional, digitized computer code.

Powered by a deep learning model, the interface bridges handwritten and textual programming contexts: notation in the handwritten diagram can reference textual code and vice versa. For instance, Notate recognizes handwritten programming symbols, like “n,” and then links them up to their typewritten equivalents.

“A system like this w...

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Hubble Glimpses a Glittering Gathering of Stars

This glittering gathering of stars is Pismis 26, a globular star cluster located about 23,000 light-years away. Many thousands of stars gleam brightly against the black backdrop of the image, with some brighter red and blue stars located along the outskirts of the cluster. The Armenian astronomer Paris Pismis first discovered the cluster in 1959 at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico, granting it the dual name Tonantzintla 2.

Pismis 26 is located in the constellation Scorpius near the galactic bulge, which is an area near the center of our galaxy that holds a dense, spheroidal grouping of stars that surrounds a black hole...

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Chemotherapy could Increase Disease Susceptibility in Future Generations

An illustration of a cancer cell surrounded by healthy cells.
An illustration of a cancer cell among healthy cells. Image by CIPhotos on iStock.

A common chemotherapy drug could carry a toxic inheritance for children and grandchildren of adolescent cancer survivors, Washington State University-led research indicates. The study, published online in iScience, found that male rats who received the drug ifosfamide during adolescence had offspring and grand-offspring with increased incidence of disease. While other research has shown that cancer treatments can increase patients’ chance of developing disease later in life, this is one of the first-known studies showing that susceptibility can be passed down to a third generation of unexposed offspring.

“The findings suggest that if a patient receives chemotherapy, and then later has children, that t...

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Powerful New Tool to Advance Genomics, Disease Research

Powerful new tool to advance genomics, disease research
Image: Intrinsic cleavage biases affect single-cell ATAC-seq data analysis. Visualization of intrinsic cleavage bias effect in different cell clusters derived from scATAC-seq data for different biological samples and different experimental platforms: human hematopoietic cells (ac), mixed human cell lines (df), mouse primitive gut tube (gi), and 10× Single-Cell Multiome data for mouse embryonic brain (jl), human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) (mo), and human lymph node (pr). ad, gjmp UMAP visualization where cells are colored by cell type/labels/clusters. behknq Same UMAP visualization but cells are colored by cell bias score (CBS). cfil, or CBS distributions of cells from different cell types/batches/clusters...
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