BUFFALO, NY — March 5, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Aging (Aging-US) on February 11, 2025, Volume 17, Issue 2, titled “Exposome-wide association study of environmental chemical exposures and epigenetic aging in the national health and nutrition examination survey.”

Identifying therapeutic gene targets is essential for advancing personalized medicine and addressing the genetic basis of diseases. However, traditional experimental methods for discovering these targets are costly and time-consuming. While deep learning has shown promise in identifying biomarker genes, it has struggled to identify therapeutic genes. To address this challenge, researchers have developed an innovative method, the Hypergraph Interactive Transformer, which accurately and quickly identifies therapeutic gene targets using hypergraphs and attention-based learning.

Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), created CHARCHA ( Computer Human Assessment for Recreating Characters with Human Actions), a secure and personalized verification protocol that allows an individual’s likeness to appear in generative video content. The team was inspired to create CHARCHA to respond to ethical issues in generative AI, such as unauthorized deepfakes. The CHARCHA system was inspired by CAPTCHA’s verification legacy. Whereas CAPTCHA uses text or image tests to differentiate between humans and bots, CHARCHA relies on real time physical interactions to differentiate between them. The program asks users to perform a set of randomized physical actions in front of a webcam, such as turning their head from left to right, squinting their eyes, or smiling with teeth. The live verification process, which takes about 90 seconds, analyzes the actions to ensure that the person is present and imitating the proper requests. By ensuring the person is interacting with the system, CHARCHA prevents pre-recorded video or still images from bypassing verification.

A pilot study in a rural Florida community tested an intergenerational program to help older adults adopt mobile health technology using smartwatches and assessed daily brain health behaviors. Despite challenges with digital literacy, 91% of participants engaged with health surveys delivered via the devices. Social contact was positively linked to physical activity, mental engagement and cognitive well-being. The participants, aged 53-84, successfully used the smartwatches regardless of their health literacy or technological skills, highlighting the potential of such programs in supporting aging in place.

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS, President: Dr. Lee Ho Seong) has developed equipment that monitors the quality of hydrogen fuel supplied to vehicles through hydrogen refuelling stations in real-time.

Sweden’s radioactive nuclear waste will be stored in a sealed bedrock repository for 100,000 years. It will be hazardous for a very long time. So how can we ensure that humanity does not forget that it is there? Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have come up with a proposal for how to keep the memory alive over generations.

New research finds mangos may be key to reducing insulin resistance, improving insulin sensitivity in adults who are overweight or obese, according to a newly published study from the Illinois Institute of Technology.