Aurelia Butler

Researchers led by the University of Tsukuba studied the vibrational modes of an intrinsically disordered protein to understand its anomalously strong response at low frequencies. This work may lead to improvements in our knowledge of materials that lack long-range order, which may influence industrial glass manufacturing.
Glassy materials have many surprising properties. Not quite a solid or a liquid, glasses are made of atoms that are frozen in a disordered, non-crystalline state. Over a century ago, physicist Peter Debye proposed a formula for understanding the possible vibrational modes of solids. While mostly successful, this theory does not explain the surprisingly universal vibrations that can be excited in disordered materials — like glass — by electromagnetic radiation in the terahertz range. This deviation has been seen often enough to gets its own name, the “boson peak,” but its origin remains unclear.
Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have conducted a series of experiments to investigate the physics behind the boson peak using the protein lysozyme. “This protein has an intrinsically disordered and fractal structure,” first author of the study Professor Tatsuya Mori says. “We believe that it makes sense to consider the entire system as a single supramolecule.”
Fractals, which are mathematical structures that exhibit self-similarity over a wide range of scales, are common in nature. Think of trees: they appear similar whether you zoom out to look at the branches, as well as when you come close to inspect the twigs. Fractals have the surprising ability to be described by a non-integer number of dimensions. That is, an object with a fractal dimension of 1.5 is halfway between a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional object, which means that its mass increases with its size to the 1.5 power.
On the basis of the results of terahertz spectroscopy, the mass fractal dimension of the lysozyme molecules was found to be around 2.75. This value was also determined to be related to the absorption coefficient of the material.
“The findings suggest that the fractal properties originate from the self-similarity of the structure of the amino acids of the lysozyme proteins,” Professor Mori says. “This research may hold the key to resolving a long-standing puzzle regarding disordered and fractal materials, which can lead to more efficient production of glass or fractal structures.”

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Materials provided by University of Tsukuba. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

The United States has seen a 200% increase in the rate of deaths by opioid overdose in the last 20 years. But many of these deaths were preventable. Naloxone, also called Narcan, is a prescription drug that reverses opioid overdoses, and in more than 40 states — including Pennsylvania — there is a standing order policy, which makes it available to anyone, without an individual prescription from a healthcare provider.
Members of the public can carry naloxone in case they encounter a person experiencing an opioid overdose. But how do you know if someone needs naloxone and how do you administer it? Health care providers are often trained to respond in these types of situations, and prior to the onset of COVID-19, public health organizations were offering in-person trainings to the public.
But how do we get even more people trained and motivated to save lives from opioid overdoses, especially in our current socially distanced world?
A group of interdisciplinary researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Department of Public Heath developed a virtual reality immersive video training aimed at doing just that. Their new study — published recently in Drug and Alcohol Prevention — shows that the VR training is just as effective as an in-person training at giving the public both the knowledge and the confidence they need to administer naloxone and save lives.
“Overdoses aren’t happening in hospitals and doctor’s offices,” says Nicholas Giordano, former Lecturer at Penn’s School of Nursing. “They’re happening in our communities: in parks, libraries, and even in our own homes. It’s crucial that we get the ability to save lives into the hands of the people on the front lines in close proximity to individuals at risk of overdose.”
The researchers adapted a 60 minute in-person training, the educational standard for health care providers, into a 9-minute immersive virtual reality video. Then the interdisciplinary team tested the VR training on members of the public at free naloxone giveaways and training clinics hosted by the Philadelphia Department of Health at local libraries. (The clinics were held in 2019 and early 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic made such events unsafe.)
Roughly a third of the 94 participants received one-on-one in-person instruction on how to administer naloxone, while the others watched the experimental VR training. After the initial training, participants answered questions about the training to determine if they’d learned enough information to safely administer naloxone in the case of an opioid overdose.
Before leaving the library, all participants were given the opportunity to receive whichever training they didn’t receive initially. Since the VR training was still in testing mode, the researchers wanted to ensure that all participants had full access to what they came for: knowledge of how to save lives.
“We were really pleased to discover that our VR training works just as well as an in-person training,” says Natalie Herbert, a 2020 graduate of Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “We weren’t looking to replace the trainings public health organizations are already offering; rather, we were hoping to offer an alternative for folks who can’t get to an in-person training, but still want the knowledge. And we’re excited to be able to do that.”
In addition to continuing to test their VR training, the researchers plan to begin making it available to the general public through partnerships with libraries, public health organizations, and other local stakeholders. With grant support from the Independence Blue Cross Foundation, the team will be disseminating and promoting the VR training throughout the Greater Philadelphia Area. Now, more than ever, the portability and immersive aspects of this VR raining can be leveraged to expand access to overdose training. For more information on how to experience the VR training, which can be used at home through Google Cardboard or other VR viewers, visit their website: https://www.virtualinnovation.org. More

An infinite chain of hydrogen atoms is just about the simplest bulk material imaginable — a never-ending single-file line of protons surrounded by electrons. Yet a new computational study combining four cutting-edge methods finds that the modest material boasts fantastic and surprising quantum properties.
By computing the consequences of changing the spacing between the atoms, an international team of researchers from the Flatiron Institute and the Simons Collaboration on the Many Electron Problem found that the hydrogen chain’s properties can be varied in unexpected and drastic ways. That includes the chain transforming from a magnetic insulator into a metal, the researchers report September 14 in Physical Review X.
The computational methods used in the study present a significant step toward custom-designing materials with sought-after properties, such as the possibility of high-temperature superconductivity in which electrons flow freely through a material without losing energy, says the study’s senior author Shiwei Zhang. Zhang is a senior research scientist at the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City.
“The main purpose was to apply our tools to a realistic situation,” Zhang says. “Almost as a side product, we discovered all of this interesting physics of the hydrogen chain. We didn’t think that it would be as rich as it turned out to be.”
Zhang, who is also a chancellor professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, co-led the research with Mario Motta of IBM Quantum. Motta serves as first author of the paper alongside Claudio Genovese of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, Fengjie Ma of Beijing Normal University, Zhi-Hao Cui of the California Institute of Technology, and Randy Sawaya of the University of California, Irvine. Additional co-authors include CCQ co-director Andrew Millis, CCQ Flatiron Research Fellow Hao Shi and CCQ research scientist Miles Stoudenmire.
The paper’s long author list — 17 co-authors in total — is uncommon for the field, Zhang says. Methods are often developed within individual research groups. The new study brings many methods and research groups together to combine forces and tackle a particularly thorny problem. “The next step in the field is to move toward more realistic problems,” says Zhang, “and there is no shortage of these problems that require collaboration.”
While conventional methods can explain the properties of some materials, other materials, such as infinite hydrogen chains, pose a more daunting computational hurdle. That’s because the behavior of the electrons in those materials is heavily influenced by interactions between electrons. As electrons interact, they become quantum-mechanically entangled with one another. Once entangled, the electrons can no longer be treated individually, even when they are physically separate.

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The sheer number of electrons in a bulk material — roughly 100 billion trillion per gram — means that conventional brute force methods can’t even come close to providing a solution. The number of electrons is so large that it’s practically infinite when thinking at the quantum scale.
Thankfully, quantum physicists have developed clever methods of tackling this many-electron problem. The new study combines four such methods: variational Monte Carlo, lattice-regularized diffusion Monte Carlo, auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo, and standard and sliced-basis density-matrix renormalization group. Each of these cutting-edge methods has its strengths and weaknesses. Using them in parallel and in concert provides a fuller picture, Zhang says.
Researchers, including authors of the new study, previously used those methods in 2017 to compute the amount of energy each atom in a hydrogen chain has as a function of the chain’s spacing. This computation, known as the equation of state, doesn’t provide a complete picture of the chain’s properties. By further honing their methods, the researchers did just that.
At large separations, the researchers found that the electrons remain confined to their respective protons. Even at such large distances, the electrons still ‘know’ about each other and become entangled. Because the electrons can’t hop from atom to atom as easily, the chain acts as an electrical insulator.
As the atoms move closer together, the electrons try to form molecules of two hydrogen atoms each. Because the protons are fixed in place, these molecules can’t form. Instead, the electrons ‘wave’ to one another, as Zhang puts it. Electrons will lean toward an adjacent atom. In this phase, if you find an electron leaning toward one of its neighbors, you’ll find that neighboring electron responding in return. This pattern of pairs of electrons leaning toward each other will continue in both directions.

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Moving the hydrogen atoms even closer together, the researchers discovered that the hydrogen chain transformed from an insulator into a metal with electrons moving freely between atoms. Under a simple model of interacting particles known as the one-dimensional Hubbard model, this transition shouldn’t happen, as electrons should electrically repel each other enough to restrict movement. In the 1960s, British physicist Nevill Mott predicted the existence of an insulator-to-metal transition based on a mechanism involving so-called excitons, each consisting of an electron trying to break free of its atom and the hole it leaves behind. Mott proposed an abrupt transition driven by the breakup of these excitons — something the new hydrogen chain study didn’t see.
Instead, the researchers discovered a more nuanced insulator-to-metal transition. As the atoms move closer together, electrons gradually get peeled off the tightly bound inner core around the proton line and become a thin `vapor’ only loosely bound to the line and displaying interesting magnetic structures.
The infinite hydrogen chain will be a key benchmark in the future in the development of computational methods, Zhang says. Scientists can model the chain using their methods and check their results for accuracy and efficiency against the new study.
The new work is a leap forward in the quest to utilize computational methods to model realistic materials, the researchers say. In the 1960s, British physicist Neil Ashcroft proposed that metallic hydrogen, for instance, might be a high-temperature superconductor. While the one-dimensional hydrogen chain doesn’t exist in nature (it would crumple into a three-dimensional structure), the researchers say that the lessons they learned are a crucial step forward in the development of the methods and physical understanding needed to tackle even more realistic materials. More

A team of Army researchers uncovered how the human brain processes bright and contrasting light, which they say is a key to improving robotic sensing and enabling autonomous agents to team with humans.
To enable developments in autonomy, a top Army priority, machine sensing must be resilient across changing environments, researchers said.
“When we develop machine vision algorithms, real-world images are usually compressed to a narrower range, as a cellphone camera does, in a process called tone mapping,” said Andre Harrison, a researcher at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory. “This can contribute to the brittleness of machine vision algorithms because they are based on artificial images that don’t quite match the patterns we see in the real world.”
By developing a new system with 100,000-to-1 display capability, the team discovered the brain’s computations, under more real-world conditions, so they could build biological resilience into sensors, Harrison said.
Current vision algorithms are based on human and animal studies with computer monitors, which have a limited range in luminance of about 100-to-1, the ratio between the brightest and darkest pixels. In the real world, that variation could be a ratio of 100,000-to-1, a condition called high dynamic range, or HDR.
“Changes and significant variations in light can challenge Army systems — drones flying under a forest canopy could be confused by reflectance changes when wind blows through the leaves, or autonomous vehicles driving on rough terrain might not recognize potholes or other obstacles because the lighting conditions are slightly different from those on which their vision algorithms were trained,” said Army researcher Dr. Chou Po Hung.

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The research team sought to understand how the brain automatically takes the 100,000-to-1 input from the real world and compresses it to a narrower range, which enables humans to interpret shape. The team studied early visual processing under HDR, examining how simple features like HDR luminance and edges interact, as a way to uncover the underlying brain mechanisms.
“The brain has more than 30 visual areas, and we still have only a rudimentary understanding of how these areas process the eye’s image into an understanding of 3D shape,” Hung said. “Our results with HDR luminance studies, based on human behavior and scalp recordings, show just how little we truly know about how to bridge the gap from laboratory to real-world environments. But, these findings break us out of that box, showing that our previous assumptions from standard computer monitors have limited ability to generalize to the real world, and they reveal principles that can guide our modeling toward the correct mechanisms.”
The Journal of Vision published the team’s research findings, Abrupt darkening under high dynamic range (HDR) luminance invokes facilitation for high contrast targets and grouping by luminance similarity.
Researchers said the discovery of how light and contrast edges interact in the brain’s visual representation will help improve the effectiveness of algorithms for reconstructing the true 3D world under real-world luminance, by correcting for ambiguities that are unavoidable when estimating 3D shape from 2D information.
“Through millions of years of evolution, our brains have evolved effective shortcuts for reconstructing 3D from 2D information,” Hung said. “It’s a decades-old problem that continues to challenge machine vision scientists, even with the recent advances in AI.”
In addition to vision for autonomy, this discovery will also be helpful to develop other AI-enabled devices such as radar and remote speech understanding that depend on sensing across wide dynamic ranges.
With their results, the researchers are working with partners in academia to develop computational models, specifically with spiking neurons that may have advantages for both HDR computation and for more power-efficient vision processing — both important considerations for low-powered drones.
“The issue of dynamic range is not just a sensing problem,” Hung said. “It may also be a more general problem in brain computation because individual neurons have tens of thousands of inputs. How do you build algorithms and architectures that can listen to the right inputs across different contexts? We hope that, by working on this problem at a sensory level, we can confirm that we are on the right track, so that we can have the right tools when we build more complex AIs.” More

Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have discovered a new way to manufacture human red blood cells (RBCs) that cuts the culture time by half compared to existing methods and uses novel sorting and purification methods that are faster, more precise and less costly.
Blood transfusions save millions of lives every year, but over half the world’s countries do not have sufficient blood supply to meet their needs. The ability to manufacture RBCs on demand, especially the universal donor blood (O+), would significantly benefit those in need of transfusion for conditions like leukemia by circumventing the need for large volume blood draws and difficult cell isolation processes.
Easier and faster manufacturing of RBCs would also have a significant impact on blood banks worldwide and reduce dependence on donor blood which has a higher risk of infection. It is also critical for disease research such as malaria which affects over 220 million people annually, and can even enable new and improved cell therapies.
However, manufacturing RBCs is time-consuming and creates undesirable by-products, with current purification methods being costly and not optimal for large scale therapeutic applications. SMART’s researchers have thus designed an optimised intermediary cryogenic storage protocol that reduces the cell culture time to 11 days post-thaw, eliminating the need for continuous 23-day blood manufacturing. This is aided by complementary technologies the team developed for highly efficient, low-cost RBC purification and more targeted sorting.
In a paper titled “Microfluidic label-free bioprocessing of human reticulocytes from erythroid culture” recently published in the journal Lab on a Chip, the researchers explain the huge technical advancements they have made towards improving RBC manufacturing. The study was carried out by researchers from two of SMART’s Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs) — Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalised-Medicine (CAMP) — co-led by Principal Investigators Jongyoon Han, a Professor at MIT, and Peter Preiser, a Professor at NTU. The team also included AMR and CAMP IRG faculty appointed at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
“Traditional methods for producing human RBCs usually require 23 days for the cells to grow, expand exponentially and finally mature into RBCs,” says Dr Kerwin Kwek, lead author of the paper and Senior Postdoctoral Associate at SMART CAMP. “Our optimised protocol stores the cultured cells in liquid nitrogen on what would normally be Day 12 in the typical process, and upon demand thaws the cells and produces the RBCs within 11 days.”
The researchers also developed novel purification and sorting methods by modifying existing Dean Flow Fractionation (DFF) and Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD); developing a trapezoidal cross-section design and microfluidic chip for DFF sorting, and a unique sorting system achieved with an inverse L-shape pillar structure for DLD sorting.
SMART’s new sorting and purification techniques using the modified DFF and DLD methods leverage the RBC’s size and deformability for purification instead of spherical size. As most human cells are deformable, this technique can have wide biological and clinical applications such as cancer cell and immune cell sorting and diagnostics.
On testing the purified RBCs, they were found to retain their cellular functionality, as demonstrated by high malaria parasite infectivity which requires highly pure and healthy cells for infection. This confirms SMART’s new RBC sorting and purifying technologies are ideal for investigating malaria pathology.
Compared with conventional cell purification by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), SMART’s enhanced DFF and DLD methods offer comparable purity while processing at least twice as many cells per second at less than a third of the cost. In scale-up manufacturing processes, DFF is more optimal for its high volumetric throughput, whereas in cases where cell purity is pivotal, DLD’s high precision feature is most advantageous.
“Our novel sorting and purification methods result in significantly faster cell processing time and can be easily integrated into current cell manufacturing processes. The process also does not require a trained technician to perform sample handling procedures and is scalable for industrial production,” Dr Kwek continues.
The results of their research would give scientists faster access to final cell products that are fully functional with high purity at a reduced cost of production. More

The science community has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with such a flurry of research studies that it is hard for anyone to digest them all, underscoring a long-standing need to make scientific publication more accessible, transparent and accountable, two artificial intelligence experts assert in a data science journal.
The rush to publish results has resulted in missteps, say Ganesh Mani, an investor, technology entrepreneur and adjunct faculty member in Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research, and Tom Hope, a post-doctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI. In an opinion article in today’s issue of the journal Patterns, they argue that new policies and technologies are needed to ensure relevant, reliable information is properly recognized.
Those potential solutions include ways to combine human expertise with AI as one way to keep pace with a knowledge base that is expanding geometrically. AI might be used to summarize and collect research on a topic, while humans serve to curate the findings, for instance.
“Given the ever-increasing research volume, it will be hard for humans alone to keep pace,” they write.
In the case of COVID-19 and other new diseases, “you have a tendency to rush things because the clinicians are asking for guidance in treating their patients,” Mani said. Scientists certainly have responded — by mid-August, more than 8,000 preprints of scientific papers related to the novel coronavirus had been posted in online medical, biology and chemistry archives. Even more papers had been posted on such topics as quarantine-induced depression and the impact on climate change from decreased transportation emissions.
At the same time, the average time to perform peer review and publish new articles has shrunk; in the case of virology, the average dropped from 117 to 60 days.

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This surge of information is what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic” — an overabundance of information, ranging from accurate to demonstrably false. Not surprisingly, problems such as the hydroxycholoroquine controversy have erupted as research has been rushed to publication and subsequently withdrawn.
“We’re going to have that same conversation with vaccines,” Mani predicted. “We’re going to have a lot of debates.”
Problems in scientific publication are nothing new, he said. As a grad student 30 years ago, he proposed an electronic archive for scientific literature that would better organize research and make it easier to find relevant information. Many ideas continue to circulate about how to improve scientific review and publication, but COVID-19 has exacerbated the situation.
Some of the speed bumps and guard rails that Mani and Hope propose are new policies. For instance, scientists usually emphasize experiments and therapies that work; highlighting negative results, on the other hand, is important for clinicians and discourages other scientists from going down the same blind alleys. Identifying the best reviewers, sharing review comments and linking papers to related papers, retraction sites or legal rulings are among other ideas they explore.
Greater use of AI to digest and consolidate research is a major focus. Previous attempts to use AI to do so have failed in part because of the often figurative and sometimes ambiguous language used by humans, Mani noted. It may be necessary to write two versions of research papers — one written in a way that draws the attention of people and another written in a boring, uniform style that is more understandable to machines.
Mani said he and Hope have no illusions that their paper will settle the debate about improving scientific literature, but hope that it will spur changes in time for the next global crisis.
“Putting such infrastructure in place will help society with the next strategic surprise or grand challenge, which is likely to be equally, if not more, knowledge intensive,” they concluded.

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Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Byron Spice. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Netflix is often criticized as a Hollywood-style entertainment behemoth crushing all competition and diminishing local content, but an academic says that’s a simplistic view. A media studies expert said there is a lot of misunderstanding about the world’s biggest internet-distributed video service which has proved a game-changer for entertainment. Media studies expert Professor Amanda Lotz, from QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, said there is a lot of misunderstanding about the world’s biggest internet-distributed video service.
“Netflix must be examined as a zebra among horses,” said Professor Lotz who is in the middle of a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project — Internet-distributed television: Cultural, industrial and policy dynamics. She recently published an article in the International Journal of Cultural Studies — ‘In Between the Global and the Local: Mapping the Geographies of Netflix as a Multinational Service.’
“Few recognize the extent to which Netflix has metamorphosed into a global television service. Unlike services that distribute only US-produced content, Netflix has funded the development of a growing library of series produced in more than 27 countries, across six continents, including Australia.
“Netflix has regional offices now in Singapore, Amsterdam, and São Paulo. Last year it opened its Australian headquarters in Sydney.”
Along with QUT’s Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham and Dr Ramon Lobato, Senior Research Fellow, RMIT, Professor Lotz is investigating the impact of global subscription video-on-demand platforms on national television markets.
“Internet-distributed video services such as Netflix, have completely transformed the entertainment landscape and the competitive field in which free-to-air television operates, as well as turned the definition of ‘pay TV’ on its head,” Professor Lotz said.

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“But the Netflix model has been the real gamechanger. Previously, the core business of channels like the BBC, ABC or NBC that commission and pay the lion’s share of production fees for series has been nation bound, even if those shows would someday be available to audiences in many countries.
“Netflix’s propensity to commission series in multiple countries, and then make them available to the full 150-some million subscribers simultaneously, is unprecedented and something no television channel could do.
“A local example of this is Hannah Gadsby: Nanettewhich has given the Australian comedian a new global profile. She now has a second Netflix show — Hannah Gadsby: Douglas.
“And although many believe Netflix competes with the likes of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Stan and Disney+, none of these services show evidence of supporting multinational production at a scale comparable to Netflix.
“Our research project has compiled a database of series commissioned by Netflix (in whole or part) and their country of origin. We have found more than half of the titles are produced outside the US and initial analysis of Netflix original films suggests a similar pattern.”
However, Professor Lotz said Netflix could never develop the depth of content necessary to replace national providers, especially public service broadcasters central to cultural storytelling.

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“It is difficult to appreciate whether some of Netflix’s peculiarity results from its global reach, business model, or distribution technology, but these are crucial questions to ask. And do these characteristics lead to the availability of stories, characters, and places not readily available? If so, this is a notable benefit to audiences,” she said.
“We should also ask how these characteristics affect opportunities available for writers, producers, and actors who might be rethinking the kind of stories that must be told to sell internationally.
“Appealing to audiences outside a commissioning channel’s country is increasingly necessary. Even if Netflix is unlikely to eliminate national providers, it is reconfiguring the competitive landscape.”
Professor Lotz also posted a blog series, Netflix 30 Q&A, in recent months that examines the differences of the SVOD business and how it allows Netflix different program strategies than linear, ad-supported channels.
“The long term and global rights the company seeks in its commissions have required significant changes in the remuneration norms for those who make its series, and it remains unclear whether the new norms amount to lower pay,” she said.
“National broadcasters worry about keeping up with the escalating fees Netflix can support for its prestige series’ and complain of an unfair playing field where Netflix isn’t subject to the same local content rules and other requirements.
“But business and cultural analysts must stop trying to shoehorn Netflix into the same category as linear channels and streaming services aimed at pushing US content abroad. Over its 23-year-existence, Netflix has evolved repeatedly. Perhaps this steady change fuels its misperception.” More