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    Toxin-producing Yeast Strains in Gut Fuel IBD

    March 18, 2022, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Opportunistic “high-damaging” Candida albicans strain in the colon mucosa of IBD patient secretes the toxin candidalysin (red dots) during the transition from a benign commensal to a pathogenic state and aggravates intestinal inflammation. Credit: Shutterstock

    Individual Candida albicans yeast strains in the human gut are as different from each other as the humans that carry them, and some C. albicans strains may damage the gut of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), according to a new study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine. The findings suggest a possible way to tailor treatments to individual patients in the future.

    The researchers, who report their findings March 16 in Nature, used an array of techniques to study strains, or genetic variants, of Candida f...

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    New Acoustic Fabric Converts Audible Sounds into Electrical Signals

    March 18, 2022, Categories  Technology/Electronics

    Caption:An MIT team has designed an “acoustic fabric,” woven with a fiber that is designed from a “piezoelectric” material that produces an electrical signal when bent or mechanically deformed, providing a means for the fabric to convert sound vibrations into electrical signals.
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    Researchers have developed a new acoustic fabric converts audible sounds into electrical signals. They designed a fabric that works like a microphone, converting sound first into mechanical vibrations, then into electrical signals, similarly to how our ears hear.

    Having trouble hearing? Just turn up your shirt. That’s the idea behind a new “acoustic fabric” developed by engineers at MIT and collaborators at Rhode Island School of Design.

    All fabrics vibrate in response to audible sounds, th...

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    NASA rolls out its Mega Moon Rocket—here’s what you need to know

    March 18, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This handout illustration courtesy of NASA released on October 22, 2020 shows Nasa’s new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), in its Block 1 crew vehicle configuration that will send astronauts to the Moon on the Artemis missions.

    NASA’s massive new rocket is poised to make its first journey to a launchpad on Thursday ahead of a battery of tests that will clear it to blast off to the Moon this summer.

    It will leave the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at 5:00 pm Eastern Time (2100 GMT) and begin its glacially slow, 11-hour crawl on a transporter to the hallowed Launch Complex 39B, four miles (6.5 kilometers) away.

    Here’s what you need to know.
    Huge rocket, huge cost

    With the Orion crew capsule fixed on top, the Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1 stands 322 feet...

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    When it comes to AI, can we Ditch the Datasets?

    March 16, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    MIT researchers have demonstrated the use of a generative machine-learning model to create synthetic data, based on real data, that can be used to train another model for image classification. This image shows examples of the generative model’s transformation methods. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Huge amounts of data are needed to train machine-learning models to perform image classification tasks, such as identifying damage in satellite photos following a natural disaster. However, these data are not always easy to come by. Datasets may cost millions of dollars to generate, if usable data exist in the first place, and even the best datasets often contain biases that negatively impact a model’s performance.

    To circumvent some of the problems presented by datasets, M...

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