Toggle light / dark theme

It’s not just salespeople, traders, compliance professionals and people formatting pitchbooks who risk losing their banking jobs to technology. It turns out that private equity professionals do too. A new study by a professor at one of France’s top finance universities explains how.

Professor Thomas Åstebro at Paris-based HEC says private equity firms are using artificial intelligence (AI) to push the limits of human cognition and to support decision-making. Åstebro says t he sorts of people employed by private equity funds is changing as a result.

Åstebro looked at the use of AI systems across various private equity and venture capital firms. He found that funds that have embraced AI are using decision support systems (DSS) across the investment decision-making process, including to source potential targets for investments before rivals.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have outlined details of an optical antenna they claim could provide almost limitless bandwidth.

They suggest the key to the breakthrough is a method of being able to take full advantage of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) properties of a coherent light source, thus enabling multiplexing, or simultaneous transmission.

According to Boubacar Kante, the principal investigator of the Berkeley project “it is the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed.” He is an associate professor in the university’s Electronic Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, and the initial results of the work have just been published in Nature Physics.

The groups also explained why in previous studies by other scientists, the chromatin appeared to fill the cell nuclei. “When scientists plate cells on a glass slide in order to study them under a microscope, they change their volume and physically flatten them. This may perturb some of the forces governing chromatin arrangement and reduce the distance between the upper part of the nucleus to its base,” Safran explains.


If you open a biology textbook and run through the images depicting how DNA is organized in the cell’s nucleus, chances are you’ll start feeling hungry; the chains of DNA would seem like a bowl of ramen: long strings floating in liquid. However, according to two new studies—one experimental and the other theoretical—that are the outcome of the collaboration between the groups of Prof. Talila Volk of the Molecular Genetics Department and Prof. Sam Safran of the Chemical and Biological Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, this image should be reconsidered. Clarifying it is essential since DNA’s spatial arrangement in the nucleus can affect the expression of genes contained within the DNA molecule, and hence the proteins found in the cell.

This story began when Volk was studying how mechanical forces influence cell nuclei in the muscle and found evidence that muscle contractions had an immediate effect on gene expression patterns. “We couldn’t explore this further because existing methods relied on imaging of chemically preserved cells, so they failed to capture what happens in the cell nuclei of an actual working muscle,” she says.

To address this issue, Dr. Dana Lorber, a research associate in Volk’s group, led the design of a device that makes it possible to study muscle nuclei in live fruit fly larvae. The device holds the tiny, translucent larva within a groove that allows it to contract and relax its muscles but keeps its movement constrained so that it can be scanned by a fluorescence microscope. Using the device, the researchers obtained images of the internal, linearly-organized complexes of DNA and its proteins (known as chromatin), surrounded by the membrane of the muscle nuclei.

In fact, these antibodies could even fight off a virus engineered, on purpose, to be highly resistant to neutralization. This virus contained 20 mutations that are known to prevent SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from binding to it. Antibodies from people who were only vaccinated or only had prior COVID infections were essentially useless against this mutant virus. But antibodies in people with the “hybrid immunity” could neutralize it.


That’s how one scientist describes the findings of a series of studies looking at the antibodies created by individuals who were infected by the virus and then had an mRNA vaccine.