A new study by the Oregon State University College of Engineering shows that machine learning techniques can offer powerful new tools for advancing personalized medicine, care that optimizes outcomes for individual patients based on unique aspects of their biology and disease features.

The research with machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence in which computer systems use algorithms and statistical models to look for trends in data, tackles long-unsolvable problems in biological systems at the cellular level, said Oregon State’s Brian D. Wood, who conducted the study with then OSU Ph.D. student Ehsan Taghizadeh and Helen M. Byrne of the University of Oxford.

“Those systems tend to have high complexity — first because of the vast number of individual ce...

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have uncovered a process in the swirling masses of plasma surrounding black holes and neutron stars that can cause previously unexplained emissions of light and heat. The process, known as magnetic reconnection, also jettisons huge plumes of plasma billions of miles in length. These findings can increase basic understanding of fundamental astrophysical processes throughout the universe.

Plasma, known as the fourth state of matter, comprises free-floating electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions, and makes up 99 percent of the visible universe...

Now a European research team consisting of scientists from France, Germany and Denmark has shown the different ways that common medicines apparently affect gut bacteria. The work is published in the journal Nature.

“It has already been substantiated in various clinical trials that different kinds of food can both positively and negatively regulate the gut’s ‘chemical factory’...

Engineers have reached a theoretical limit for efficiently converting analog data into digital bits in an emerging computer technology. The digital design of our everyday computers is good for reading email and gaming, but today’s problem-solving computers are working with vast amounts of data...