Scientists Characterize the Imbalanced Gut Bacteria of Patients with Myocardial Infarction, Angina and Heart Failure

In two publications in Nature Medicine, a European-Israeli team of researchers show how major disturbances occur in the gut microbiome of patients suffering from heart disease. Given this latest evidence from microbiome research, one of the senior lead researchers, Professor Oluf Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen, calls for stronger and more focused public health initiatives to prevent or delay these common diseases that are a leading cause of premature death worldwide through plant-based and energy-controlled diet, avoidance of smoking and compliance with daily exercise.

The human gut contains trillions of bacteria, collectively called the gut microbiome, which may have positive and negative effects on human health...

Read More

Can Machine-Learning Models Overcome Biased Datasets?

Caption:If researchers are training a model to classify cars in images, they want the model to learn what different cars look like. But if every Ford Thunderbird in the training dataset is shown from the front, when the trained model is given an image of a Ford Thunderbird shot from the side, it may misclassify it, even if it was trained on millions of car photos.
Credits:Image courtesy of the researchers

Researchers have applied the tools of neuroscience to study when and how an artificial neural network can overcome bias in a dataset. They found that data diversity, not dataset size, is key and that the emergence of certain types of neurons during training plays a major role in how well a neural network is able to overcome dataset bias.

Artificial intelligence systems may be able t...

Read More

Astronomers discover Widest Separation of Brown Dwarf Pair to date

AN ARTIST’S RENDITION OF A BINARY SYSTEM OF BROWN DWARFS LIKE CWISE J014611.20-050850.0AB.
Credit: William Pendrill

A team of astronomers has discovered a rare pair of brown dwarfs that has the widest separation of any brown dwarf binary system found to date. “Because of their small size, brown dwarf binary systems are usually very close together,” said Emma Softich, an undergraduate astrophysics student at the Arizona State University (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration and lead author of the study. “Finding such a widely separated pair is very exciting.”

The gravitational force between a pair of brown dwarfs is lower than for a pair of stars with the same separation, so wide brown dwarf binaries are more likely to break up over time, making this pair of brown dwarfs an ex...

Read More

Graphene and an Intense Laser open the door to the extreme

 

A research team has developed a large-area suspended graphene and irradiated the thinnest graphene target with an ultra-intense laser to realize high-energy ion acceleration. Their findings will be applied to the development of compact, efficient ion accelerators used for cancer treatment, nuclear fusion and so on.

Laser-driven ion acceleration has been studied to develop a compact and efficient plasma-based accelerator, which is applicable to cancer therapy, nuclear fusion, and high energy physics...

Read More