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PITTSBURGH Babies whose births were depicted in Bollywood films from the 1950s and 60s were more often than not boys; in today s films, boy and girl newborns are about evenly split. In the 50s and 60s, dowries were socially acceptable; today, not so much. And Bollywood s conception of beauty has remained consistent through the years: beautiful women have fair skin.
Fans and critics of Bollywood the popular name for a $2.1 billion film industry centered in Mumbai, India might have some inkling of all this, particularly as movies often reflect changes in the culture. But these insights came via an automated computer analysis designed by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists.
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A team of researchers concludes that a game-theory approach may offer new insights into both the spread and disruption of viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2. Its work, described in the journal
Royal Society Interface, applies a signaling game to an analysis of cellular processes in illuminating molecular behavior. We need new models and technologies at many levels in order to understand how to tame viral pandemics, explains Bud Mishra, a professor at NYU s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and one of the paper s authors. At the biomolecular level, we explain how cellularization may be understood in ways that stymie disease and encourage healthy functioning.
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Torino, February 24, 2021 - The eukaryotic cell is the basic unit of animals and plants. At the microscope, it looks highly structured and subdivided in many membrane-bound compartments. Each compartment has a specific function, and its membrane is populated by specific molecules. How does the cell preserve this amazing internal order, and (in the absence of pathologies) does not degrade into a shapeless bunch of molecules? Such degradation is countered by a continuous process of molecule sorting by which similar molecules are collected and dispatched to the right destinations, similarly to what happens when a house is kept clean and tidy by daily chores. It s still mysterious, however, how a living cell may achieve this task without a supervisor directing it.
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BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - Travel bans have been key to efforts by many countries to control the spread of COVID-19. But new research aimed at providing a decision support system to Italian policy makers, recently published in the
Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggests that reducing individual activity (i.e., social distancing, closure of non-essential business, etc.) is far superior in controlling the dissemination of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The research, which has implications for the United States and other countries, found that limiting personal mobility through travel restrictions and similar tactics is effective only