Pollination by animals contributes to a third of global food production, but little research has been done into the extent to which the identity of pollinators, pollen and crop varieties influence fruit quality when it comes to the nutritional, sensory and commercial value of crops. Pollinators influence the quality of crops through their movement patterns on the plantations and through the plant variety they visit. In an article published in Trends in Plant Science, researchers from the University of Göttingen argue that the blanket promotion of pollinators has so far been too much of a priority – at the expense of plant quality, which could be improved by taking into account the species-specific behaviour of pollinators and the distribution patterns of crop varieties in the field.

In recent years, the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has increasingly demonstrated their potential in medical data mining. However, the diversity and heterogeneity nature of medical images and radiology reports can pose significant challenges to the universality of data mining methods.

To address these challenges, a team led by Dr. Xin Zhang from the Institute of Medical Research, Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, systematically evaluated the performance of Gemini and GPT-series models across various medical tasks. Their findings validate the application potential of multimodal large models in the medical domain.

They proposed a program logic that can formally verify obstruction-freedom of practical implementations, as well as verify linearizability(a safety property), at the same time.

The 42-month project, which received nearly $1 million in funding, is a joint effort between the Texas Transportation Institute and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) exploring more efficient methods of anchoring steel reinforcement in bridge structure joints to enhance structural performance and accelerate construction timelines.

Engineers at Princeton showed that some types of soil bacteria can influence a plant’s balance of growth and defense. The bacteria produce an enzyme that can lower a plant’s immune activity and allow its roots to grow longer than they would otherwise.