Technology that can help interpret inaudible calls from laboratory mice has been developed in a bid to improve research.

The computer tool can reveal valuable insights into rodents' communication patterns and is more reliable than existing methods, which rely on human interpretation.

The system analyses audio recordings of ultrasonic vocalisations - beyond the range of human hearing.

Researchers say it could support research involving mice, which play a crucial role in testing new therapies for human diseases.

Monitoring rodent communications can reveal important information about how diseases progress, particularly for neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and autism.

Experts previously categorised mouse communications into nine call types by manually deciphering visual representations of the soundwaves, known as spectrograms.

The main risks to bees include wide-spread pesticide use in agriculture, parasites, disease and climate change, and crucially - the loss of valuable biodiversity which poses a further threat to bees and other wild pollinators.

One way to help boost their numbers is by planting the correct wildflowers, providing a better habitat for pollinators to disperse, nest and breed.

However, it is unclear which plant species are the most preferred between different pollinators, including bees, and how this might change over time and in different environmental conditions.

Historically, scientists used light microscopy to identify individual bee-collected pollen grains, which was a time-consuming and impractical method.

To obtain a more accurate understanding without the need for laborious manual inspection of pollen, scientists have developed a rapid analysis method called 'Reverse Metagenomics' (RevMet) that can identify the plants that individual bees visit using the MinION, a portable DNA sequencer from Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

The portability of the equipment involved means that this type of analysis could be performed on-site where bees are collected and sampled - vastly increasing our understanding of where bees look for pollen on a national scale.

NOAA-NASA's Suomi NPP satellite captured this image using NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application on Aug. 08, 2019 and it shows Supertyphoon Lekima heading towards the coast of China as Typhoon Krosa brings up the rear moving slowly towards Japan.

Typhoon Krosa is currently located 167 nautical miles southwest of Iwo To, Japan.

It is slowly tracking northeastward at one knot over the past six hours making it quasi-stationary as it intensified and maintained its 14 nautical mile eye.

Krosa's winds are steady at approximately 100 knots (115 mph) which on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale would make this storm just over the Category 3 designation.

Like Lekima, Krosa is able to intensify due to low vertical wind shear and warm sea surface temperatures in the area of 30 degrees C (86 degrees F) both of which are favorable to typhoon development and intensification.

For the time being, Krosa will remain quasi-stationary and continue to intensify for the next 12 hours.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured this infrared image of Supertyphoon Lekima as it tracked 214 nautical miles southwest of Okinawa, Japan.

Tropical cyclone warning signal 1 is in force for the Luzon provinces of Batanes and Babuyan group of islands.

The storm has tracked north-northwest at 10 knots over the past six hours.

Satellite imagery shows this system continues to rapidly intensify as evidenced by tightly compact central convection which includes an eight nautical mile-sized eye with a tight pinhole in the eye which is an indication of a strong storm.

The supertyphoon is currently producing winds in excess of 130 knots (149 mph).

On the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale that would be a Category 4 hurricane.

Cybersecurity researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Technion Institute of Technology have discovered critical vulnerabilities in the Siemens S7 Simatic programmable logic controller (PLC), one of the world's most secure PLCs that are used to run industrial processes.

Prof. Avishai Wool and M.Sc student Uriel Malin of TAU's School of Electrical Engineering worked together with Prof. Eli Biham and Dr. Sara Bitan of the Technion to disrupt the PLC's functions and gain control of its operations.

The team is slated to present their findings at Black Hat USA week in Las Vegas this month, revealing the security weaknesses they found in the newest generation of the Siemens systems and how they reverse-engineered the proprietary cryptographic protocol in the S7.

"The station was able to remotely start and stop the PLC via the commandeered Siemens communications architecture, potentially wreaking havoc on an industrial process," Prof.

"We were then able to wrest the controls from the TIA and surreptitiously download rogue command logic to the S7-1500 PLC."

The researchers hid the rogue code so that a process engineer could not see it.

NEW YORK, NY (August 8, 2019): The 20th International Conference on Alzheimer's Drug Discovery, a two-day interdisciplinary forum to be held September 16-17, 2019 in Jersey City, NJ, will bring together 20 top researchers to present a diversity of approaches and the latest on innovative treatments and diagnostics for Alzheimer's disease, related dementias and cognitive aging.

The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF)-funded investigators and other guest speakers will share findings on both novel and repurposed drug programs and biomarkers at various stages of the pipeline.

The program will focus on four major topics that include: Small molecule approaches for Alzheimer's disease; Novel approaches for frontotemporal dementia; Clinical trials in Alzheimer's disease; Novel biomarker approaches.

"This year's conference is particularly significant," said Dr. Howard Fillit, ADDF's Founding Executive Director and Chief Science Officer.

"Research advances are rapidly bringing drug discovery closer to important and practical applications.

Several presentations will address new directions in academic and startup drug development programs, targeting a wide variety of areas including vascular pathology, calcium regulation, neuroprotection and inflammation."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - In 1919, America had a problem with dynamite.

Several people were killed and more were injured.

The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment.

In the wake of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton this week, Roth said his research suggests that the government needs to regulate the most deadly guns and make it harder for the public to buy them - just as it did with dynamite.

But what is different now is the lethal power of guns and the ease with which large-capacity semiautomatic rifles can be modified to fire extremely quickly.

What is different now is that a single individual can have enough lethal power to kill scores of people.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Aug. 8, 2019--IDEMIA Identity & Security USA has licensed an advanced optical array developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The portable technology can be used to help identify individuals in challenging outdoor conditions.

The invention overcomes effects such as low contrast, distance and glare typical when photographing subjects through windshields.

This technology, as applied by IDEMIA, has the potential to expedite vehicles at critical checkpoints.

"The technique takes advantage of light field imaging techniques and a computational neural network to address challenges in identity verification, including motion blur, poor lighting conditions, head pose and surface reflection," said project lead and co-inventor Hector Santos-Villalobos.

Other ORNL inventors include Justin Baba, Philip Bingham, David Bolme, Matthew Eicholtz, Regina Ferrell and Christi Johnson.

A team of environmental scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and China has for the first time used a dynamic, two-step process to completely degrade a common flame-retardant chemical, rendering the persistent global pollutant nontoxic.

This new process breaks down tetrabromobisohenol A (TBBPA) to harmless carbon dioxide and water.

The discovery highlights the potential of using a special material, sulfidated nanoscale zerovalent iron (S-nZVI), in water treatment systems and in the natural environment to break down not only TBBPA but other organic refractory compounds that are difficult to degrade, says Jun Wu, a visiting Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst's Stockbridge College of Agriculture and lead author of the paper published in Environmental Science & Technology.

"This is the first research about this dynamic, oxic/anoxic process," Wu says.

"Usually, reduction or oxidation alone is used to remove TBBPA, facilitated by S-nZVI.

Wu emphasizes that "the technique is technically simple and environmentally friendly.

An international collaboration of researchers from the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR) in Japan and Gladstone Institutes in the USA have generated 3D blastocyst-like structures from stem cells.

After many more cell divisions, the embryo turns into a blastocyst that is implanted in the womb where it differentiates and grows into a fetus.

Inside are pluripotent cells--cells that can become any type of cell in the body, but not the placenta--while the outer shell is made from trophoblasts--cells that eventually form the placenta.

For several years, scientists have been able to convert somatic cells--like skin cells--into pluripotent cells.

In an earlier study conducted at Gladstone, authors Cody Kime and Kiichiro Tomoda were able to convert pluripotent mouse cells from an implanted-like state to a pre-implanted state.

As Kime explains, "over seven years ago, our reprogramming experiments suggested that we had found a way to increase cell potency beyond pluripotency, which was unlikely and had not been seen before.