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An innovative nanoparticle vaccine candidate for the pandemic coronavirus produces virus-neutralizing antibodies in mice at levels ten-times greater than is seen in people who have recovered from COVID-19 infections. Designed by scientists at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, the vaccine candidate has been transferred to two companies for clinical development.
Compared to vaccination with the soluble SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, which is what many leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates are based on, the new nanoparticle vaccine produced ten times more neutralizing antibodies in mice, even at a six-fold lower vaccine dose. The data also show a strong B-cell response after immunization, which can be critical for immune memory and a durable vaccine effect. When administered to a single nonhuman primate, the nanoparticle vaccine produced neutralizing antibodies targeting multiple different sites on the Spike protein. Researchers say this may ensure protection against mutated strains of the virus, should they arise. The Spike protein is part of the coronavirus infectivity machinery.
The findings are published in Cell. The lead authors of this paper are Alexandra Walls, a research scientist in the laboratory of David Veesler, who is an associate professor of biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine; and Brooke Fiala, a research scientist in the laboratory of Neil King, who is an assistant professor of biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine.
The vaccine candidate was developed using structure-based vaccine design techniques invented at UW Medicine. It is a self-assembling protein nanoparticle that displays 60 copies of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein’s receptor-binding domain in a highly immunogenic array. The molecular structure of the vaccine roughly mimics that of a virus, which may account for its enhanced ability to provoke an immune response.
“We hope that our nanoparticle platform may help fight this pandemic that is causing so much damage to our world,” said King, inventor of the computational vaccine design technology at the Institute for Protein Design at UW Medicine. “The potency, stability, and manufacturability of this vaccine candidate differentiate it from many others under investigation.”
Hundreds of candidate vaccines for COVID-19 are in development around the world. Many require large doses, complex manufacturing, and cold-chain shipping and storage. An ultrapotent vaccine that is safe, effective at low doses, simple to produce and stable outside of a freezer could enable vaccination against COVID-19 on a global scale.
“I am delighted that our studies of antibody responses to coronaviruses led to the design of this promising vaccine candidate,” said Veesler, who spearheaded the concept of a multivalent receptor-binding domain-based vaccine.
The lead vaccine candidate from this report is being licensed non-exclusively and royalty-free during the pandemic by the University of Washington. One licensee, Icosavax, Inc., a Seattle biotechnology company co-founded in 2019 by King, is currently advancing studies to support regulatory filings and has initiated the U.S. Food and Drug Administtion’s Good Manufacturing Practice.
To accelerate progress by Icosavax to the clinic, Amgen, Inc. has agreed to manufacture a key intermediate for these initial clinical studies. Another licensee, SK bioscience Co., Ltd., based in South Korea, is also advancing its own studies to support clinical and further development.
The research reported in Cell was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (DP1AI158186, HHSN272201700059C, 3U01AI42001-02S1), National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM120553, R01GM099989), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1156262, OPP1126258, OPP1159947), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (HDTRA1-18-1-0001), Pew Biomedical Scholars Award, Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Fast Grants, Animal Models Contract HHSN272201700036I-75N93020F00001, University of Washington’s Proteomics Resource (UWPR95794), North Carolina Coronavirus Relief Fund, and gifts from Jodi Green and Mike Halperin and from The Audacious Project.

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Materials provided by University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine. Original written by Ian Haydon, UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

A research team from Osaka University has developed an innovative new animal-borne data-collection system that, guided by artificial intelligence (AI), has led to the witnessing of previously unreported foraging behaviors in seabirds.
Bio-logging is a technique involving the mounting of small lightweight video cameras and/or other data-gathering devices onto the bodies of wild animals. The systems then allow researchers to observe various aspects of that animal’s life, such as its behaviors and social interactions, with minimal disturbance.
However, the considerable battery life required for these high-cost bio-logging systems has proven limiting so far. “Since bio-loggers attached to small animals have to be small and lightweight, they have short runtimes and it was therefore difficult to record interesting infrequent behaviors,” explains study corresponding author Takuya Maekawa.
“We have developed a new AI-equipped bio-logging device that allows us to automatically detect and record the specific target behaviors of interest based on data from low-cost sensors such as accelerometers and geographic positioning systems (GPS).” The low-cost sensors then limit the use of the high-cost sensors, such as video cameras, to just the periods of time when they are most likely to capture the specific target behavior.
The use of these systems in combination with machine learning techniques can focus data collection with the expensive sensors directly onto interesting but infrequent behaviors, greatly increasing the likelihood that those behaviors will be detected.
The new AI-assisted video camera system was tested on black-tailed gulls and streaked shearwaters in their natural environment on islands off the coast of Japan. “The new method improved the detection of foraging behaviors in the black-tailed gulls 15-fold compared with the random sampling method,” says lead author Joseph Korpela. “In the streaked shearwaters, we applied a GPS-based AI-equipped system to detect specific local flight activities of these birds. The GPS-based system had a precision of 0.59 — far higher than the 0.07 of a periodic sampling method involving switching the camera on every 30 minutes.”
There are many potential applications for the use of AI-equipped bio-loggers in the future, not least the further development of the systems themselves. “These systems have a huge range of possible applications including detection of poaching activity using anti-poaching tags,” says Maekawa. “We also anticipate that this work will be used to reveal the interactions between human society and wild animals that transmit epidemics such as coronavirus.”

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

Intelligent cameras are the next milestone in image and video processing A team of researchers at the Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has developed an intelligent camera that achieves not only high spatial and temporal but also spectral resolution. The camera has a wide range of applications that can improve environmental protection and resource conservation measures as well as autonomous driving or modern agriculture. The findings of the research have been publishedas an open access publication.
‘Research up to now has mainly focused on increasing spatial and temporal resolution, which means the number of megapixels or images per second,’ explains lecturer Dr. Jürgen Seiler. ‘Spectral resolution — the wavelength and thus the perception of colours — has largely been adjusted to match human sight during the development of cameras, which merely corresponds to measuring the colours red, green, and blue. However, much more information is hidden in the light spectrum that can be used for a wide range of tasks. For example, we know that some animals use additional light spectra for hunting and searching for food.’
Three resolutions in one camera
Seiler, who is an electrical engineer, has therefore developed a high-resolution multi-spectral camera that enhances human perception with his team at the Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing (LMS) led by Prof. Dr. Kaup at FAU. It combines all three resolutions — spatial, temporal and spectral — in a cost-efficient solution. ‘Up to now, there were only extremely expensive and complex methods for measuring the ultraviolet or infrared ranges of light or individual spectral bands for special industrial applications,’ says Seiler. ‘We looked for a cost-efficient model and we were able to develop a very cost-effective multi-spectral camera.’
The researchers connected several inexpensive standard cameras with various spectral filters to form a multi-spectral camera array. ‘We then calculated an image in order to combine the various spectral information from each sensor,’ explains Nils Genser, research associate at LMS. ‘This new concept enables us to precisely determine the materials of each object captured using just one single image.’
At the same time, the new camera is greatly superior to existing systems in terms of its spatial, temporal and spectral resolution. As the surroundings are recorded by several ‘eyes’ as is the case with human sight, the system also provides a precise indication of depth. This means that the system not only precisely determines the colour and certain material properties of objects it captures, but also the distance between them and the camera.
Ideal for autonomous driving and environmental technology
Autonomous driving is a potential application for these new intelligent cameras. ‘A whole range of solutions to various problems has now opened up thanks to our new technology,’ says Seiler. ‘In the infrared range, for example, we can differentiate between real people and signposts using the thermal signature. For night driving, we can detect animals crossing the road with sufficient warning.’
The high-resolution multi-spectral cameras could also be used for protecting the environment and conserving resources. ‘Several plastics differ significantly from each other in various ranges of the spectrum, which is something the new intelligent camera can reliably detect,’ Genser emphasises. ‘Large amounts of plastics are simply burned instead of separated for recycling as they have a similar appearance. We can now separate them reliably.’

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

When atoms get extremely close, they develop intriguing interactions that could be harnessed to create new generations of computing and other technologies. These interactions in the realm of quantum physics have proven difficult to study experimentally due the basic limitations of optical microscopes.
Now a team of Princeton researchers, led by Jeff Thompson, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, has developed a new way to control and measure atoms that are so close together no optical lens can distinguish them.
Described in an article published Oct. 30 in the journal Science, their method excites closely-spaced erbium atoms in a crystal using a finely tuned laser in a nanometer-scale optical circuit. The researchers take advantage of the fact that each atom responds to slightly different frequencies, or colors, of laser light, allowing the researchers to resolve and control multiple atoms, without relying on their spatial information.
In a conventional microscope, the space between two atoms effectively disappears when their separation is below a key distance called the diffraction limit, which is roughly equal to the light’s wavelength. This is analogous to two distant stars that appear as a single point of light in the night sky. However, this is also the scale at which atoms start to interact and give rise to rich and interesting quantum mechanical behavior.
“We always wonder, at the most fundamental level — inside solids, inside crystals — what do atoms actually do? How do they interact?” said physicist Andrei Faraon, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “This [paper] opens the window to study atoms that are in very, very close proximity.”
Studying atoms and their interactions at tiny distances allows scientists to explore and control a quantum property known as spin. As a form of momentum, spin is usually described as being either up or down (or both, but that’s another story). When the distance between two atoms grows vanishingly small — mere billionths of a meter — the spin of one exerts influence over the spin of the other, and vice versa. As spins interact in this realm, they can become entangled, a term scientists use to describe two or more particles that are inextricably linked. Entangled particles behave as if they share one existence, no matter how far apart they later become. Entanglement is the essential phenomenon that separates quantum mechanics from the classical world, and it’s at the center of the vision for quantum technologies. The new Princeton device is a stepping stone for scientists to study these spin interactions with unprecedented clarity.

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One important feature of the new Princeton device is its potential to address hundreds of atoms at a time, providing a rich quantum laboratory in which to gather empirical data. It’s a boon for physicists who hope to unlock reality’s deepest mysteries, including the spooky nature of entanglement.
Such inquiry is not merely esoteric. Over the past three decades, engineers have sought to use quantum phenomena to create complex technologies for information processing and communication, from the logical building blocks of emerging quantum computers, capable of solving otherwise impossible problems, to ultrasecure communication methods that can link machines into an unhackable quantum Internet. To develop these systems further, scientists will need to entangle particles reliably and exploit their entanglement to encode and process information.
Thompson’s team saw an opportunity in erbium. Traditionally used in lasers and magnets, erbium was not widely explored for use in quantum systems because it is difficult to observe, according to the researchers. The team made a breakthrough in 2018, developing a way to enhance the light emitted by these atoms, and to detect that signal extremely efficiently. Now they’ve shown they can do it all en masse.
When the laser illuminates the atoms, it excites them just enough for them to emit a faint light at a unique frequency, but delicately enough to preserve and read out the atoms’ spins. These frequencies change ever so subtly according to the atoms’ different states, so that “up” has one frequency and “down” has another, and each individual atom has its own pair of frequencies.
“If you have an ensemble of these qubits, they all emit light at very slightly different frequencies. And so by tuning the laser carefully to the frequency of one or the frequency of the other, we can address them, even though we have no ability to spatially resolve them,” Thompson said. “Each atom sees all of the light, but they only listen to the frequency they’re tuned to.”
The light’s frequency is then a perfect proxy for the spin. Switching the spins up and down gives researchers a way to make calculations. It’s akin to transistors that are either on or off in a classical computer, giving rise to the zeroes and ones of our digital world.

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To form the basis of a useful quantum processor, these qubits will need to go a step further.
“The strength of the interaction is related to the distance between the two spins,” said Songtao Chen, a postdoctoral researcher in Thompson’s lab and one of the paper’s two lead authors. “We want to make them close so we can have this mutual interaction, and use this interaction to create a quantum logic gate.”
A quantum logic gate requires two or more entangled qubits, making it capable of performing uniquely quantum operations, such as computing the folding patterns of proteins or routing information on the quantum internet.
Thompson, who holds a leadership position at the U.S. Department of Energy’s new $115M quantum science initiative, is on a mission to bring these qubits to heel. Within the materials thrust of the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage, he leads the sub- qubits for computing and networking.
His erbium system, a new kind of qubit that is especially useful in networking applications, can operate using the existing telecommunications infrastructure, sending signals in the form of encoded light over silicon devices and optical fibers. These two properties give erbium an industrial edge over today’s most advanced solid-state qubits, which transmit information through visible light wavelengths that don’t work well with optical-fiber communication networks.
Still, to operate at scale, the erbium system will need to be further engineered.
While the team can control and measure the spin state of its qubits no matter how close they get, and use optical structures to produce high-fidelity measurement, they can’t yet arrange the qubits as needed to form two-qubit gates. To do that, engineers will need to find a different material to host the erbium atoms. The study was designed with this future improvement in mind.
“One of the major advantages of the way we have done this experiment is that it has nothing to do with what host the erbium sits in,” said Mouktik Raha, a sixth-year graduate student in electrical engineering and one of the paper’s two lead authors. “As long as you can put erbium inside it and it doesn’t jitter around, you’re good to go.”
Christopher M. Phenicie and Salim Ourari, both electrical engineering graduate students, also contributed to the paper. The work was carried out in conjunction with the Princeton Quantum Initiative, and funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Princeton Center for Complex Materials, the Young Investigator Program of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. More

The increase in online education has allowed a new type of teacher to emerge ¬ — an artificial one. But just how accepting students are of an artificial instructor remains to be seen.
That’s why researchers at the University of Central Florida’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media are working to examine student perceptions of artificial intelligence-based teachers.
Some of their findings, published recently in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, indicate that for students to accept an AI teaching assistant, it needs to be effective and easy to talk to.
The hope is that by understanding how students relate to AI-teachers, engineers and computer scientists can design them to easily integrate into the education experience, says Jihyun Kim, an associate professor in the school and lead author of the study.
“To use machine teachers effectively, we need to understand students’ perceptions toward machine teachers, their learning experiences with them and more,” Kim says. “This line of research is needed to design effective machine teachers that can actually facilitate positive learning experiences.”
AI teaching assistants can help ease a teacher’s workload, such as by responding to commonly asked questions by students. These questions, which often appear each semester and become numerous in online classes with hundreds of students, can become a large task for a teacher. The quick delivery of answers also helps students.
An example of an AI teaching assistant is one named Jill Watson that was created by a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jill was fed the thousands of questions and answers commonly asked in the researcher’s online class that he’d taught over the years. With some additional learning and tweaks, Jill was eventually able to answer the students’ commonly asked questions accurately without any human assistance as if she was one of the researcher’s human teaching assistants.
For the UCF study, the researchers asked respondents to read a news article about an AI teaching assistant used in higher education, and then they surveyed the students’ perceptions of the technology.
The finding that an AI-based teaching assistant that students were most likely to accept was one that was useful and was easy to communicate with points to the importance of having an effective AI-system, Kim says.
“I hope our research findings help us find an effective way to incorporate AI agents into education,” she says. “By adopting an AI agent as an assistant for a simple and repetitive task, teachers would be able to spend more time doing things such as meeting with students and developing teaching strategies that will ultimately help student learning in meaningful ways.”

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Materials provided by University of Central Florida. Original written by Robert Wells. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

COPD is a common respiratory condition and one of the top causes of hospital admissions each year, particularly during winter months. In the UK it accounts for over 140,000 hospital admissions and one million bed days at a major cost to the NHS.
At a time when fewer people are able to access face-to-face consultations with their GPs and elderly patients with conditions such as COPD need are shielding, these are very encouraging findings for the future of digital health services.
In this new study, 41 patients admitted to hospital with severe exacerbations of COPD were allocated into two groups, with one group receiving their regular treatments and the second group of patients set up with access to the MyCOPD app as well as receiving treatment as usual.
MyCOPD gives patients access to a broad range of services wherever they are in the world, without the need to travel to clinics or join waiting lists. These services include receiving education from medical experts, information on how factors such as pollen, pollution and the weather in their area could affect their condition and videos that demonstrate how to use inhalers correctly. Users also complete daily diaries of their symptoms and medication, which allows the app to help them identify when they are deteriorating and provide advice on appropriate courses of action.
The results of this latest trial, published in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine, showed that over the course of three months, the number of further exacerbations within the group using the app was nearly half that for those who just received treatment as usual (18 compared to 34). Incorrect use of inhalers also reduced by around 80% for MyCOPD users, compared to a fall of around 30% for the control group.
Significantly, the average age of participants using the app was over 65 and despite not being regular web users, all were able to adapt to the technology.
MyCOPD, developed and hosted by my mhealth, is one of the largest apps of its kind and one of a small number of digital health apps with NICE approval. The Department for Health and Social Care highlighted it in their 2019 review into digital healthcare because of its potential to deliver better outcomes for patients and improve NHS productivity. Now this latest peer reviewed trial provides further evidence of its benefits.
Professor Tom Wilkinson of the University of Southampton who developed the app and led the trial said, “COPD has a significant impact on peoples’ daily lives so we wanted to develop a means of healthcare that is like having an expert in your pocket; giving you advice whenever you need it.
“The transition towards digital healthcare has been taking place for some time but has accelerated since the outbreak of COVID-19. Patients with conditions such as COPD can be particularly vulnerable now so it is important that we have evidence of the effectiveness of these technologies.
“Hopefully the success of this will lead to further use and the development of similar products that allow patients to manage other conditions to further improve their wellbeing and reduce the burden on the NHS.”

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

Researchers from Boston University, Rutgers University, University of Washington, Cornell University, and University of Pennsylvania published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that proposes that preserving psychological ownership in the technology-driven evolution of consumption underway should be a priority for marketers and firm strategy.
Why does — and what happens when — nothing feels like it is MINE?
Technological innovations are rapidly changing the consumption of goods and services. Consumption is evolving in modern capitalist societies from a model in which people legally own private material goods to access-based models in which people purchase temporary rights to experiential goods owned by and shared with others. For example, many urban consumers have replaced car ownership with car and ride sharing services. Physical pictures occupying frames, wallets, and albums have been replaced with digital photographs that can be viewed at any time and songs, books, movies, or magazines can be pulled down from the cloud. Half the world population now buys, sells, generates, and consumes goods and information online through connected devices, generating vast quantities of personal data about their consumption patterns and private lives.
The researchers say that technological innovations such as digitization, platform markets, and the exponential expansion of the generation and collection of personal data are driving an evolution in consumption along two major dimensions. The first dimension is from a model of legal ownership, where consumers purchase and consume their own private goods, to a model of legal access, in which consumers purchase temporary access rights to goods and services owned and used by others. The second dimension is from consuming solid material goods to liquid experiential goods. The benefits of these consumption changes, from convenience to lower economic cost to greater sustainability to better preference matching, makes legal ownership of many physical private goods undesirable and unnecessary. But their commensurate reduction in psychological ownership — the feeling that a thing is “MINE” — may have profoundly negative consequences for consumers and firms.
Morewedge explains that “Psychological ownership is not legal ownership, but is, in many ways, a valuable asset for consumers and firms. It satisfies important consumer motives and is value-enhancing. The feeling that a good is MINE enhances how much we like the good, strengthens our attachment to it, and increases how much we think it is worth.” Downstream consequences to firms include increased consumer demand for goods and services offered by the firm, willingness to pay for goods, word of mouth, and loyalty.
The researchers propose that the consumption changes underway can have three effects on psychological ownership — threaten it, cause it to transfer to other targets, and create new opportunities to preserve it. Fractional ownership models and the impermanence and intangibility of access-based experiential goods stunt the development of psychological ownership for streamed, rented, and cloud-based goods. In many cases, this results in a loss of psychological ownership, but sometimes it will transfer to the brands (e.g., Disney, Uber, MyChart) and devices through which goods and services are accessed (e.g., smartphones) or transfer to the community of consumers who use them (e.g., Facebook groups, followers, and forums). The greater choice and new channels for self-expression provided by this evolution of consumption, however, also offer new opportunities for consumers to feel as much psychological ownership for these access-based experiential goods and services they consume as they would for privately owned material goods.
These consumption changes and their effects on psychological ownership appear in a framework that is examined across three macro marketing trends: (1) the growth of the sharing economy; (2) the digitization of goods and service; and (3) the expansion of personal data. Exemplary cases explored include ride sharing, the digitization of music, and the expansion of health and wellness data. Each case illustrates why each of these trends is eroding psychological ownership, how it is being transformed, and new opportunities being created for firms to recapture and preserve it — whether in goods and services, intermediary devices like a phone, or at the brand level.
This psychological ownership framework generates future research opportunities and actionable marketing strategies for firms seeking to preserve the value-enhancing consequences of psychological ownership and navigate cases where it is a liability. It highlights many ways in which psychological ownership will continue to be a valuable lens through which to view, understand, forecast, and manage the consumer experience.

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Materials provided by American Marketing Association. Original written by Matt Weingarden. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Researchers have created fundamental electronic building blocks out of tiny structures known as quantum dots and used them to assemble functional logic circuits. More