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Endocrine disrupting chemicals cause adverse effects in animals. But limited scientific information exists on potential health problems in humans. Because people are typically exposed to multiple at the same time, assessing public health effects is difficult.

Many chemicals, both natural and man-made, may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones, known as the endocrine system. Called endocrine disruptors, these chemicals are linked with developmental, reproductive, brain, immune, and other problems.

Endocrine disruptors are found in many everyday products, including some plastic bottles and containers, liners of metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, food, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides.

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Creating Smart Home Ecosystems — Enabling Health & Well-Being In Every Home — Viren Shah, VP & Chief Digital Officer, GE Appliances, Haier

Mr. Viren Shah is Vice President & Chief Digital Officer, at GE Appliances (GEA — https://www.geappliances.com/), the American home appliance manufacturer, now a majority owned subsidiary of the Chinese multinational home appliances company, Haier (https://www.haierappliances.com/).

Mr. Shah has been with GEA since October 2,018 in which time he was appointed to lead the business through a digital transformation with a focus on data/intelligence at the center of gravity.

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Most organizations successfully stood up with new ways for employees to work remotely or interact with customers far faster than previously thought possible.

But as we transition from focusing on maintaining business continuity toward driving growth, we should not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

The leaps forward companies made in response to the COVID crisis set them up to benefit from virtuous cycles that complement and reinforce each other to turbocharge growth.

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New research, published in the journal Patterns and led by the University of Glasgow’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience, uses 3D modeling to analyze the way Deep Neural Networks—part of the broader family of machine learning—process , to visualize how their information processing matches that of humans.

It is hoped this new work will pave the way for the creation of more dependable AI technology that will process information like humans and make errors that we can understand and predict.

One of the challenges still facing AI development is how to better understand the process of machine thinking, and whether it matches how humans process information, in order to ensure accuracy. Deep Neural Networks are often presented as the current best of decision-making behavior, achieving or even exceeding human performance in some tasks. However, even deceptively simple visual discrimination tasks can reveal clear inconsistencies and errors from the AI models, when compared to humans.

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😳!

The extracellular matrix (ECM) including three-dimensional (3D) network and bioelectricity can profoundly influence cell development, migration, and functional expression. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Tong Li and a research team in chemistry, nanotechnology, bioelectronics and advanced materials in China, developed an electromechanical coupling bio-nanogenerator abbreviated bio-NG inspired by biophysical cues of the extracellular matrix. The device contained highly discrete piezoelectric fibers to generate piezo potential of up to millivolts to provide in situ electrical stimulation for living cells.

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Circa 2019 o.o

The dream of resurrecting species like the woolly mammoth via genetic engineering is old enough that I remember reading articles about it in school 30 years ago. We may never be able to recover enough pristine genetic material from an intact woolly mammoth to make that approach feasible, but scientists working on the remains of the frozen mammoth known as Yuka have taken an incredible step nonetheless, demonstrating that at least some cell functions can remain intact after nearly 30,000 years.

Yuka, found in 2,010 is a juvenile woolly mammoth, considered to be the most intact and well-preserved mammoth ever found. That was critical to the researchers’ efforts — earlier tests in 2009 with a less-well-preserved but younger specimen at 15,000 years old yielded no positive results at all.

To be clear: The scientists in question were not able to bring Yuka’s cells back to life. After removing 88 nucleus-like structures from Yuka’s cells, they injected these structures into mouse oocytes — eggs — to see if they could be coaxed back into biological activity. While the cells ultimately failed to divide, they did undertake some of the steps required for cell division, such as spindle assembly. This spindle assembly process ensures that chromosomes are properly prepared to divide before the parent cell actually splits.

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Interestingly, the nuclear protein histone H4 was detected, which is reminiscent of the retention of nuclear components in the remains (Fig. 2c). Search against the database of all mammalian species identified other nuclear proteins, such as histones, histone chaperones, proteins implicated in mRNA processing or transport and nuclear membrane proteins (Supplementary Table S2). In addition, we identified two well-characterised epigenetic modifications on histone molecules, methylation of H3K79 and H4K20 (Supplementary Fig. S2A and B), which are involved in transcriptional regulation and genome maintenance18,19. Our high-sensitive proteomic analysis suggests that the remains retain nuclear components.

These findings motivated us to seek cell nuclei from the muscle remains. Although DAPI-positive and autofluorescence-negative nucleus-like structures were rarely found (Supplementary Figs S3 and S4), we chose the autofluorescence-negative structures for the subsequent live-cell imaging of nuclear-transferred embryos since autofluorescence disturbs accurate tracing of fluorescent-tagged proteins. In total, 88 nucleus-like structures were collected from 273.5 mg mammoth tissue in 5 independent experiments (Supplementary Table S7). Our immunostaining protocol developed for single suspended cells from remains (Supplementary Fig. S5) revealed that these structures were positive for lamin B2 and histone H3, both of which were identified by mass spectrometry (Fig. 3a and Supplementary Fig. S6), suggesting that cell nuclei are, at least partially, sustained even in over a 28,000 year period.

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