Korea University researchers advance orthodontics with AI-assisted growth prediction
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 9-Nov-2025 16:11 ET (9-Nov-2025 21:11 GMT/UTC)
For children who need braces or jaw correction, timing is everything. If treatment starts before or after a growth spurt, it can be far less effective. But doctors have long struggled to predict exactly when those spurts will happen. Now, a team of South Korean researchers has created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can read simple neck X-rays and spot the signs of rapid growth. The technology could give orthodontists a powerful new way to plan care with precision.
Air pollution is dramatically reshaping tropical rainfall patterns. In a new study, scientists found that increasing aerosol concentrations over the Maritime Continent strengthens oceanic rainfall while suppressing and delaying land rain peaks to midnight. This newly identified shift, revealed through high-resolution modeling and satellite data, has major implications for forecasting and climate prediction in Southeast Asia.
Conventionally, deep neural networks (DNNs), including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are trained using backpropagation—a standard algorithm in AI learning. However, backpropagation suffers from several limitations, such as high computational cost and overfitting. Researchers have now developed a new training approach called the Visual Forward–Forward Network (VFF-Net), which overcomes these challenges. By eliminating the need for backpropagation, VFF-Net enables more efficient, less resource-intensive training while maintaining high accuracy and robustness.
The research shows that prenatal exposure to fine particles (PM2.5) is associated with slower brain maturation during the first month of life. Myelination is a key process in brain maturation, in which myelin coats neuronal connections and makes them more efficient for transmitting information. Newborns of mothers exposed to higher levels of fine airborne particles during pregnancy show slower myelination at this very early stage of life. Both a slowdown and an excessive acceleration of brain maturation can be harmful for the child.
New research has found cover crops that are viable in Washington’s normal “off season” don’t hurt the soil and can be sold as a biofuel source.
After harvest, farmland often sits fallow and unused until growers seed in the next crop. Soil can erode, weeds can take root, and farmers don’t make any money during that time. Cover crops can eliminate or reduce some of those issues, but many farmers have concerns about their effects on soil quality, a reduced growing window for their primary crop, and the inability to sell the cover crop.
In a paper recently published in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy, a team led by Washington State University scientists looked at four cover crops grown for multiple years in western and central Washington fields. Two showed promising results.
Griffith researchers built and tested a digital archaeology framework to learn more about the ancient humans who created one of the oldest forms of rock art, finger fluting.
Finger flutings are marks drawn by fingers through a soft mineral film called moonmilk on cave walls.
Experiments were conducted - both with adult participants in a tactile setup and using VR headsets in a custom-built program - to explore whether image-recognition methods could learn enough from finger-fluting images made by modern people to identify the sex of the person who created them.