Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts many industries and professions in different ways. A recent study looking at taxi drivers in Yokohama, Japan, shows that AI demand forecasting, which is unrelated to autonomous driving, can improve productivity in less-experienced drivers, helping close the skill gaps. This finding challenges the assumption that AI only favors high-skilled workers in technology-dependent industries.

Lynne McLandsborough has been named director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (CAFE) and will also serve as assistant vice chancellor for research and engagement. She brings to her new roles 30 years of experience at UMass Amherst, where she bridged the academic and applied sciences and gained deep expertise in working with the commonwealth’s UMass Extension program, which reaches into every corner of agricultural life in Massachusetts.

Complex illnesses are not caused by one gene but groups of genes. The number of gene combinations is too enormous to analyze comprehensively. New AI model focuses on gene expression changes to identify key genes and their collective influence on disease.

A study in Science Advances that describes a new soft robotic system was co-led by Harvard Professor L. Mahadevan in collaboration with Professor Ho-Young Kim at Seoul National University. Their work paves new directions for future, low-power swarm robotics.

The new robots, called link-bots, are comprised of centimeter-scale, 3D-printed particles strung into V-shaped chains via notched links and are capable of coordinated, life-like movements without any embedded power or control systems. 

Mycorrhizal fungi help regulate Earth’s climate and ecosystems by forming underground networks that provide plants with essential nutrients, while drawing carbon deep into soils. Scientists and conservationists have been racing to find ways to protect these underground fungi, but they keep finding dark taxa – species that are known only by their DNA sequences that can’t be linked to named or described species.

Researchers at Rice have developed a soft robotic arm capable of performing complex tasks such as navigating around an obstacle or hitting a ball, guided and powered remotely by laser beams without any onboard electronics or wiring.