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Researchers discover how plants produce a novel anti-stress molecule

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Researchers discover how plants produce a novel anti-stress molecule


Researchers discover how plants produce a novel anti-stress molecule
The study involved measuring DMSP concentrations in leaf samples of Spartina anglica growing in the saltmarsh at Stiffkey, Norfolk, UK. Credit: Ben Miller

New research identifies for the first time the genes that help plants grow under stressful conditions—with implications for producing more sustainable food crops in the face of global climate change.

Led by the University of East Anglia (UEA), the study reveals the genes that enable plants to make a novel anti-stress molecule called dimethylsulfoniopropionate, or DMSP. It shows that most plants make DMSP, but that high-level DMSP production allows plants to grow at the coast, for example in salty conditions.

The research also shows that plants can be grown under other stressful conditions, such as drought, when either they are supplemented with DMSP or plants are created that make their own DMSP. Such an approach may be of particular benefit in nitrogen-poor soils to improve agricultural productivity.

This is the first study to describe the genes that plants use to produce DMSP, identify why plants make this molecule, and discover that DMSP can be used to improve the stress tolerance of plants. The findings are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Prof. Jon Todd, of UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, said, “Excitingly, our study shows that most plants make the anti-stress compound DMSP, but that the saltmarsh grass Spartina is special due to the high levels it accumulates. This is important because Spartina saltmarshes are global hotspots for DMSP production and for generation of the climate-cooling gas dimethylsulfide through the action of microbes that breakdown DMSP.”

Lead author Dr. Ben Miller, also from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, added, “This discovery provides fundamental understanding about how plants tolerate stress and offers promising avenues for improving the tolerance of crops to salinity and drought, which is important for enhancing agricultural sustainability in the face of global climate change.”

The research team included scientists from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, School of Chemistry, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, and Ocean University of China.

They studied a species of saltmarsh cordgrass—Spartina anglica—that produces high levels of DMSP and compared its genes with those from other plants that produce the molecule, though mainly at low concentrations.

Many of these low DMSP-accumulating species are crop plants that cover large areas in the UK, such as barley and wheat.

The researchers identified three enzymes involved in the high-level production of DMSP in Spartina anglica. DMSP plays crucial roles in stress protection and is integral to global carbon and sulfur cycling, as well as the production of climate-active gases.

Saltmarsh ecosystems, particularly those dominated by Spartina cordgrass, are hotspots for DMSP production due to these plants being able to synthesize unusually high concentrations of the compound.

More information:
Elucidation of Spartina dimethylsulfoniopropionate synthesis genes enables engineering of stress tolerant plants, Nature Communications (2024).

Citation:
Researchers discover how plants produce a novel anti-stress molecule (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-anti-stress-molecule.html

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US weighs Google breakup in landmark trial

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US weighs Google breakup in landmark trial


The US Department of Justice has said it would demand that Google make profound changes to how it does business
The US Department of Justice has said it would demand that Google make profound changes to how it does business.

The US Department of Justice said on Tuesday it would demand that Google make profound changes to how it does business and even consider the possibility of a breakup, after the tech juggernaut was found to be running an illegal monopoly.

Determining how to address Google’s wrongs is the next stage of a landmark antitrust trial that saw the company in August judged a monopolist by US District Court Judge Amit Mehta.

An order to break up Google or require deep changes on how it does business marks a profound change by the US government’s competition enforcers that have largely left tech giants alone since failing to break up Microsoft two decades ago.

Google dismissed the idea as “radical.”

The government told the judge in a court filing that it was considering options that included “structural” changes which could see them asking for a divestment of its smartphone Android operating system or its Chrome browser.

The Department of Justice also said it could ask for the prohibition of Google’s default agreements with third parties that sees it pay tens of billions of dollars every year to Apple.

Requiring Google to make its search data available to rivals was also on the table, it said.

This case, focusing on Google’s search engine dominance, is part of a broader legal offensive against the company’s alleged antitrust violations in the United States.

Google faces additional challenges from the DOJ regarding its advertising technology and recently lost a jury trial to Fortnite-maker Epic Games over its Google Play store practices.

The DOJ’s remedy proposals are part of a “high-level framework” outlining how it envisions implementing the court’s verdict.

A more detailed request will be submitted in November, followed by arguments from both sides in a special hearing scheduled for April.

90 percent of US online search

Google, in a blog post, criticized the government’s proposed remedies as “radical” and expressed concern that the DOJ’s requests “go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”

Regardless of Judge Mehta’s eventual decision, Google is expected to appeal, potentially prolonging the process for years and possibly reaching the US Supreme Court.

The trial, which concluded last year, scrutinized Google’s confidential agreements with smartphone manufacturers, including Apple.

These deals involve substantial payments to secure Google’s search engine as the default option on browsers, iPhones and other devices.

The judge determined that this arrangement provided Google with unparalleled access to user data, enabling it to develop its search engine into a globally dominant platform.

From this position, Google expanded its tech empire to include the Chrome browser, Maps and the Android smartphone operating system.

According to the judgment, Google controlled 90 percent of the US online search market in 2020, with an even higher share, 95 percent, on mobile devices.

The filing came just a day after a US court on Monday ordered Google to open its Android smartphone operating system to rival app stores, the result of the company’s defeat in the Epic Games case.

Google is appealing the order, which could reshape the mobile app landscape in the coming years.

© 2024 AFP

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US weighs Google breakup in landmark trial (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-google-breakup-landmark-trial.html

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Nobel-winning physicist ‘unnerved’ by AI technology he helped create

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Nobel-winning physicist ‘unnerved’ by AI technology he helped create


John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton (top L), joined co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for a better understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems
John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton (top L), joined co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for a better understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems.

A US scientist who won the 2024 Nobel physics prize for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence said Tuesday he found recent advances in the technology “very unnerving” and warned of possible catastrophe if not kept in check.

John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton, joined co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems to prevent them from spiraling out of control.

Addressing a gathering at the New Jersey university via video link from Britain, the 91-year-old said that over the course of his life he had watched the rise of two powerful but potentially hazardous technologies—biological engineering and nuclear physics.

“One is accustomed to having technologies which are not singularly only good or only bad, but have capabilities in both directions,” he said.

“And as a physicist, I’m very unnerved by something which has no control, something which I don’t understand well enough so that I can understand what are the limits which one could drive that technology.”

“That’s the question AI is pushing,” he continued, adding that despite modern AI systems appearing to be “absolute marvels,” there is a lack of understanding about how they function, which he described as “very, very unnerving.”

“That’s why I myself, and I think Geoffrey Hinton also, would strongly advocate understanding as an essential need of the field, which is going to develop some abilities that are beyond the abilities you can imagine at present.”

Hopfield was honored for devising the “Hopfield network”—a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories.

His model was improved upon by British-Canadian Hinton, often dubbed the “Godfather of AI,” whose “Boltzmann machine” introduced the element of randomness, paving the way for modern AI applications such as image generators.

John Hopfield was honored for devising the 'Hopfield network' — a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories
John Hopfield was honored for devising the ‘Hopfield network’ — a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories.

Hinton himself emerged last year as a poster child for AI doomsayers, a theme he returned to during a news conference held by the University of Toronto where he serves as a professor emeritus.

“If you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you wonder whether when AI gets smarter than us, it’s going to take over control,” the 76-year-old told reporters.

Civilizational downfall

With the meteoric rise of AI capabilities—and the fierce race it has sparked among companies—the technology has faced criticism for evolving faster than scientists can fully comprehend.

“You don’t know that the collective properties you began with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and you don’t therefore know whether some spontaneous but unwanted thing is lying hidden in the works,” stressed Hopefield.

He evoked the example of “ice-nine”—a fictional, artificially engineered crystal in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel “Cat’s Cradle” developed to help soldiers deal with muddy conditions but which inadvertently freezes the world’s oceans solid, causing the downfall of civilization.

“I’m worried about anything that says… ‘I’m faster than you are, I’m bigger than you are… can you peacefully inhabit with me?’ I don’t know, I worry.”

Hinton said it was impossible to know how to escape catastrophic scenarios at present, “that’s why we urgently need more research.”

“I’m advocating that our best young researchers, or many of them, should work on AI safety, and governments should force the large companies to provide the computational facilities that they need to do that,” he added.

© 2024 AFP

Citation:
Nobel-winning physicist ‘unnerved’ by AI technology he helped create (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-nobel-physicist-unnerved-ai-technology.html

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Insects from the bodies of illegally hunted rhinoceroses may provide valuable forensic information

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Insects from the bodies of illegally hunted rhinoceroses may provide valuable forensic information


rhinoceros
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

New research in Medical and Veterinary Entomology reveals that when rhinoceroses are found dead after being illegally killed by poachers, analyzing insects on the decomposing body aids in estimating the time since death. This information has been used by investigators and officials to construct cases against suspected perpetrators.

The study included 19 rhinoceroses that were illegally killed and dehorned in the Republic of South Africa between 2014 and 2021. Scientists collected 74 samples of insect evidence from these rhinoceros remains, from which an accurate estimate of their time of death was calculated. The specimens included 18 species from 12 families belonging to three insect orders.

“This has implications across both the science of forensic entomology and forensic wildlife, and especially highlights the opportunities for improving the global understanding of the procedures related to criminal wildlife cases,” said co–corresponding author Ian R. Dadour, Ph.D., of Source Certain and Murdoch University, in Australia. “Over the last 30 years, the results of this new activity combined with ranger teams and satellite tracking have led to a rebound in rhinoceros populations.”

More information:
Post-mortem Interval determinations using insects collected from illegally hunted and dehorned rhinoceros in the Republic of South Africa from 2014 to 2021, Medical and Veterinary Entomology (2024). DOI: 10.1111/mve.12760. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mve.12760

Citation:
Insects from the bodies of illegally hunted rhinoceroses may provide valuable forensic information (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-insects-bodies-illegally-rhinoceroses-valuable.html

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Electricity-free circuit helps free up space for robots to ‘think,’ say scientists

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Electricity-free circuit helps free up space for robots to ‘think,’ say scientists


robot
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Engineers have worked out how to give robots complex instructions without electricity for the first time, which could free up more space in the robotic ‘brain’ for them to ‘think.’

Mimicking how some parts of the human body work, researchers from King’s College London have transmitted a series of commands to devices with a new kind of compact circuit, using variations in pressure from a fluid inside it.

They say this world first opens up the possibility of a new generation of robots, whose bodies could operate independently of their built-in control center, with this space potentially being used instead for more complex AI-powered software.

“Delegating tasks to different parts of the body frees up computational space for robots to ‘think,’ allowing future generations of robots to be more aware of their social context or even more dexterous. This opens the door for a new kind of robotics in places like social care and manufacturing,” said Dr. Antonio Forte, Senior Lecturer in Engineering at King’s College London and senior author of the study.

The findings, published in Advanced Science could also enable the creation of robots able to operate in situations where electricity-powered devices cannot work, such as exploration in irradiated areas like Chernobyl which destroy circuits, and in electricity sensitive environments like MRI rooms.

The researchers also hope that these robots could eventually be used in low-income countries which do not have reliable access to electricity.

Dr. Forte said, “Put simply, robots are split into two parts: the brain and the body. An AI brain can help run the traffic system of a city, but many robots still struggle to open a door—why is that?

“Software has advanced rapidly in recent years, but hardware has not kept up. By creating a hardware system independent from the software running it, we can offload a lot of the computational load onto the hardware, in the same way your brain doesn’t need to tell your heart to beat.”

Currently, all robots rely on electricity and computer chips to function. A robotic ‘brain’ of algorithms and software translates information to the body or hardware through an encoder, which then performs an action.

In ‘soft robotics,’ a field which creates devices like robotic muscles out of soft materials, this is particularly an issue as it introduces hard electronic encoders and puts strain on the software for the material to act in a complex way, e.g. grabbing a door handle.

To circumvent this, the team developed a reconfigurable circuit with an adjustable valve to be placed within a robot’s hardware. This valve acts like a transistor in a normal circuit and engineers can send signals directly to hardware using pressure, mimicking binary code, allowing the robot to perform complex maneuvers without the need for electricity or instruction from the central brain. This allows for a greater level of control than current fluid-based circuits.

By offloading the work of the software onto the hardware, the new circuit frees up computational space for future robotic systems to be more adaptive, complex, and useful.

As a next step, the researchers now hope to scale up their circuits from experimental hoppers and pipettes and embed them in larger robots, from crawlers used to monitor power plants to wheeled robots with entirely soft engines.

Mostafa Mousa, Post-graduate Researcher at King’s College London and author, said, “Ultimately, without investment in embodied intelligence, robots will plateau. Soon, if we do not offload the computational load that modern day robots take on, algorithmic improvements will have little impact on their performance. Our work is just a first step on this path, but the future holds smarter robots with smarter bodies.”

More information:
Frequency-controlled fluidic oscillators for soft robots, Advanced Science (2024). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202408879

Citation:
Electricity-free circuit helps free up space for robots to ‘think,’ say scientists (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-electricity-free-circuit-space-robots.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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