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AI job fears linked to lower trust in democracy

“Artificial intelligence is a so-called general-purpose technology that will fundamentally change our economic and social system,” said Andreas Raff.

How can fears about AI replacing jobs impact trust in democracy? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers from Germany and Austria investigated how the perception of AI replacing jobs could erode trust in political attitudes. This study has the potential to help scientists, legislators, and the public better understand the impact of AI beyond professional and personal markets, and how it could impact political societies.

For the study, the researchers conducted two separate surveys designed to obtain public perception regarding AI’s impact on the job market and how this could influence political attitudes. The first survey was comprised of 37,079 respondents with an average age of 48 years with 48 percent men and 52 percent women from 38 European countries and conducted from April to May 2021. The goal of this first survey was to ascertain perceptions of whether AI was considered as job-replacing or job-creating and how this impacts trust in political establishments. The second survey was comprised of 1,202 respondents from the United Kingdom with an average age of 47 years, and the goal of this second survey was to ascertain perceptions regarding identify causes for this relationship.

In the end, the researchers found that respondents who viewed AI more as job-replacing than job-creating also carried a perception of a lack of trust in political establishments. The researchers also found that respondents who were informed that AI will replace jobs caused them to have a distrust in political establishments.

Current and emerging therapeutic landscape for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis

Globally, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is now the most common chronic liver disease, affecting up to one in three people in the general population, with an estimated increase in prevalence of more than 50% in the last three decades. The rise in prevalence of MASLD will result in substantial increases in the number patients with decompensated cirrhosis and those developing liver cancer by 2030. Despite the complex pathobiology of MASLD, two major breakthroughs in phase 3 clinical trials now herald an era of licensed therapies for MASLD.

MIM triggers formin to Arp2/3-based actin assembly in membrane remodeling in Drosophila embryos

Debasmita Mitra, Georgina K. Goddard, Sanjana S, Aparna K, Tom H. Millard, and Richa Rikhy (IISER Pune) show that Drosophila Missing-in-Metastasis (DMIM) (also called MTSS1) promotes Rac1 mediated branched actin network formation and endocytosis to drive rapid, cyclical plasma membrane remodeling during syncytial divisions in Drosophila embryos. Actin-rich villous protrusions in the apical caps in interphase are depleted in metaphase, concurrent with furrow extension between adjacent nuclei. MIM depletion results in a loss of furrow extension and in longer, more abundant apical protrusions containing the formin diaphanous. Branched actin networks promoted by MIM are in balance with bundled actin networks induced by RhoGEF2 and diaphanous. Cyclical recruitment of MIM to the cortex promotes localization of active Rac, the WAVE regulatory complex, and the Arp2/3 complex to drive endocytic membrane remodeling. These findings identify MIM as an integrator of actin and endocytic dynamics that enables rapid membrane remodeling during Drosophila syncytial division cycles.

For decades, memory-like responses in immune cells have remained unexplained

Katherine Y. King & team now identify epigenetic changes in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in a mycobacterial infection model that are retained in downstream macrophages, providing mechanistic mediators of innate immune memory and explaining persistence of central trained immunity.

1Graduate Program in Cancer and Cell Biology.

2Department of Pediatrics, Division of Infectious Disease, Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.

3Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine Center.

4Department of Molecular and Human Genetics.

Moore’s law: the famous rule of computing has reached the end of the road, so what comes next?

That sense of certainty and predictability has now gone, and not because innovation has stopped, but because the physical assumptions that once underpinned it no longer hold.

So what replaces the old model of automatic speed increases? The answer is not a single breakthrough, but several overlapping strategies.

One involves new materials and transistor designs. Engineers are refining how transistors are built to reduce wasted energy and unwanted electrical leakage. These changes deliver smaller, more incremental improvements than in the past, but they help keep power use under control.

A strange in-between state of matter is finally observed

When materials become just one atom thick, melting no longer follows the familiar rules. Instead of jumping straight from solid to liquid, an unusual in-between state emerges, where atomic positions loosen like a liquid but still keep some solid-like order. Scientists at the University of Vienna have now captured this elusive “hexatic” phase in real time by filming an ultra-thin silver iodide crystal as it melted inside a protective graphene sandwich.

NASA Launches Its Most Powerful, Efficient Supercomputer

NASA is announcing the availability of its newest supercomputer, Athena, an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. The newest member of the agency’s High-End Computing Capability project expands the resources available to help scientists and engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in space, aeronautics, and science.

Housed in the agency’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Athena delivers more computing power than any other NASA system, surpassing the capabilities of its predecessors, Aitken and Pleiades, in power and efficiency. The new system, which was rolled out in January to existing users after a beta testing period, delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance – a measurement of the number of calculations it can make per second – while reducing the agency’s supercomputing utility costs.

“Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible,” said Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and lead for the agency’s High-End Computing Capability portfolio at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now with Athena, NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions.”

Astronomers just revealed a stunning new view of the Milky Way in radio colors

A groundbreaking new radio image reveals the Milky Way in more detail than ever before, using low-frequency radio “colors” to map the galaxy’s hidden structures. The image is sharper, deeper, and wider than anything previously released, uncovering both star-forming regions and the remains of ancient stellar explosions. Scientists can now better distinguish where stars are being born versus where they’ve met dramatic ends. The discovery opens powerful new ways to study the life cycle of stars and the shape of our galaxy.

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