Latest News Releases27 April

Decision making problems involving multiple agents are often solved using policy iteration, in which a given policy generates a better one. However, the required amount of computation is often prohibitively large. In a new study, a computer scientist takes things to the next level with an approach where decisions are made sequentially and the computations grow only linearly with agents, drastically reducing its complexity and opening doors to a revolution in studying multiagent systems.

A team of the University of Michigan (U-M), spearheaded by Nigel Michki, a graduate student, and Assistant Professor Dawen Cai in the departments of Biophysics (LS&A) and Cell and Developmental Biology at the Medical School, identified many genes that are important in fruit flies' neuron development, and that had never been described before in that context.

Having grown up poor in a rural village in Zimbabwe, Wilson Majee saw firsthand as a child the lack of educational opportunities that were easily accessible and how that impacted the youth in his village.

In a randomized, double-blind trial of patients with acute undifferentiated agitation in the emergency department, droperidol was more effective for sedation and was associated with fewer episodes of respiratory depression than lorazepam or either dose of ziprasidone.

Researchers at Gladstone Institutes established a detailed atlas of the CD4+ T cells in individuals with HIV not on antiretroviral treatment, using a technology called CyTOF/PP-SLIDE, which they have honed over the years. The atlas is now published in the scientific journal Cell Reports.

Industrial fleets from countries around the world have been increasingly fishing in African waters, but with climate change and increasing pollution threatening Africa's fish stocks, there is a growing concern of the sustainability of these marine fisheries if they continue to be exploited by foreign countries.

A promising new concept presented by an interdisciplinary research team paves the way for major advances in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Their new technique could significantly simplify hyperpolarized MRI. The proposal involves the hyperpolarization of the metabolic product fumarate using parahydrogen and the subsequent purification of the metabolite.

Skoltech researchers used Google Trends' Big Data ensuing from human interactions with the Internet to develop a new methodology - a tool and a data source - for analyzing and researching the growth of startups.

Researchers have spent more than three decades developing and studying miniature biosensors that can identify single molecules. To boost the accuracy and speed of these measurements, scientists must find ways to better understand how molecules interact with these sensors. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) have now developed a new approach.

To understand how seed microbiomes are assembled, a group of researchers at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) examined the relative effects of growth environment and plant genotype on the seed microbiome of canola, a globally important crop grown in diverse environments.