Jan. 21, 2021 , 2:10 PM
For 7 years as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Robert Tjian helped steer hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists probing provocative ideas that might transform biology and biomedicine. So the biochemist was intrigued a couple of years ago when his graduate student David McSwiggen uncovered data likely to fuel excitement about a process called phase separation, already one of the hottest concepts in cell biology.
Phase separation advocates hold that proteins and other molecules self-organize into denser structures inside cells, like oil drops forming in water. That spontaneous sorting, proponents assert, serves as a previously unrecognized mechanism for arranging the cell’s contents and mustering the molecules necessary to trigger key cellular events. McSwiggen had found hints that phase separation helps herpesviruses replicate inside infected cells, adding to claims that the process plays a role in functions as diverse as switching
Artificial intelligence (AI) used by governments and the corporate sector to detect and extinguish online extreme speech often misses important cultural nuance, but bringing in independent factcheckers as intermediaries could help step up the fight against online vitriol, according to Sahana Udupa, professor of media anthropology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.
Factcheckers who operate independently of large media corporations or social media companies can shape and use AI to go beyond keywords to help locate context-specific patterns, according to Prof. Udupa. This is because they are trained to pick up disinformation and extreme speech is a very close cousin of that, she says.
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January 18, 2021
PARIS (AFP) – Prehistoric dire wolves made famous by the TV series
Game of Thrones prowled the Earth for thousands of years before being wiped out at the end of the Ice Age.
Known as
canis dirus – ‘fearsome dog’ – they hunted down and feasted on large mammals, so when species such as giant bison went extinct dire wolves lacked prey, contributing to their decline.
But a study published last Wednesday in
Nature points to another reason the top predators may have died out around 12,000 years ago after lording over the food chain for nearly a quarter of a millennium – their inability to breed with other wolf species.