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Dowsett’s algorithm was recently published in npj Breast Cancer, a Nature Partner Journal supported by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. It is intended to help physicians triage postmenopausal women with ER+ HER2–breast cancers, which represent around 70% of breast cancer cases.1 During the pandemic, many within this patient group were prescribed neoadjuvant endocrine therapy (NeoET), rather than surgery, as a disease management strategy.


Analysis of biomarkers in biopsies helps identify breast cancer patients in need of urgent surgery or chemotherapy during COVID-19 pandemic.

Astronomers analyzing 3D maps of the shapes and sizes of nearby molecular clouds have discovered a gigantic cavity in space.

The sphere-shaped void, described today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, spans about 150 parsecs — nearly 500 light years — and is located on the sky among the constellations Perseus and Taurus. The research team, which is based at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, believes the cavity was formed by ancient supernovae that went off some 10 million years ago.

The mysterious cavity is surrounded by the Perseus and Taurus molecular clouds — regions in space where stars form.

Reservoir computing is already one of the most advanced and most powerful types of artificial intelligence that scientists have at their disposal – and now a new study outlines how to make it up to a million times faster on certain tasks.

That’s an exciting development when it comes to tackling the most complex computational challenges, from predicting the way the weather is going to turn, to modeling the flow of fluids through a particular space.

Such problems are what this type of resource-intensive computing was developed to take on; now, the latest innovations are going to make it even more useful. The team behind this new study is calling it the next generation of reservoir computing.

Using specialized nanoparticles embedded in plant leaves, MIT engineers have created a novel light-emitting plant that can be charged by an LED. In this image, the green parts are the nanoparticles that have been aggregated on the surface of spongy mesophyll tissue within the plant leaves. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers.

Using nanoparticles that store and gradually release light, engineers create light-emitting plants that can be charged repeatedly.

Using specialized nanoparticles embedded in plant leaves, MIT.

Researchers at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia have recently developed an innovative system for human-swarm interactions that allows users to directly control the movements of a team of drones in complex environments. This system, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv is based on an interface that recognizes human gestures and adapts the drones’ trajectories accordingly.

Quadcopters, drones with four rotors that can fly for long periods of time, could have numerous valuable applications. For instance, they could be used to capture images or videos in natural or remote environments, can aid search-and– and help to deliver goods to specific locations.

So far, however, drones have rarely been deployed for these applications and have instead been primarily used for entertainment purposes. One of the reasons for this is that complex missions in unknown environments require users operating the drones to have a basic understanding of sophisticated algorithms and interfaces.

Disaster sciences, digital twins & artificial intelligence — craig fugate, chief emergency management officer, one concern.


Mr. Craig Fugate is the former Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA — an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, whose primary purpose is to coordinate the response to disasters that have occurred in the United States and that overwhelm the resources of local and state authorities.)

Mr. Fugate is currently the Chief Emergency Management Officer of One Concern, (a Resilience-as-a-Service solutions company that brings disaster science together with machine learning for better decision making).

Physicists with the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms have just announced new success with a particular style of quantum computer —a “programmable quantum simulator”. In this architecture, they take supercold rubidium atoms and use optical tweezers (beams of light) to arrange the atoms into shapes.

As the Harvard Gazette writes …

This new system allows the atoms to be assembled in two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers. This increases the achievable system size from 51 to 256 qubits. Using the tweezers, researchers can arrange the atoms in defect-free patterns and create programmable shapes like square, honeycomb, or triangular lattices to engineer different interactions between the qubits.