Will Future Computers Run on Human Brain Cells?

A 'biocomputer' powered by human brain cells could be developed within our lifetime, according to researchers who expect such technology to exponentially expand the capabilities of modern computing and create novel fields of study.

From:  Johns Hopkins University

February 28, 2023 -- The team outlines their plan for "organoid intelligence" today in the journal Frontiers in Science.

"Computing and artificial intelligence have been driving the technology revolution but they are reaching a ceiling," said Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering who is spearheading the work. "Biocomputing is an enormous effort of compacting computational power and increasing its efficiency to push past our current technological limits."

For nearly two decades scientists have used tiny organoids, lab-grown tissue resembling fully grown organs, to experiment on kidneys, lungs, and other organs without resorting to human or animal testing. More recently Hartung and colleagues at Johns Hopkins have been working with brain organoids, orbs the size of a pen dot with neurons and other features that promise to sustain basic functions like learning and remembering.

"This opens up research on how the human brain works," Hartung said. "Because you can start manipulating the system, doing things you cannot ethically do with human brains."

Hartung began to grow and assemble brain cells into functional organoids in 2012 using cells from human skin samples reprogrammed into an embryonic stem cell-like state. Each organoid contains about 50,000 cells, about the size of a fruit fly's nervous system. He now envisions building a futuristic computer with such brain organoids.

Computers that run on this "biological hardware" could in the next decade begin to alleviate energy-consumption demands of supercomputing that are becoming increasingly unsustainable, Hartung said. Even though computers process calculations involving numbers and data faster than humans, brains are much smarter in making complex logical decisions, like telling a dog from a cat.

"The brain is still unmatched by modern computers," Hartung said. "Frontier, the latest supercomputer in Kentucky, is a $600 million, 6,800-square-feet installation. Only in June of last year, it exceeded for the first time the computational capacity of a single human brain -- but using a million times more energy."

It might take decades before organoid intelligence can power a system as smart as a mouse, Hartung said. But by scaling up production of brain organoids and training them with artificial intelligence, he foresees a future where biocomputers support superior computing speed, processing power, data efficiency, and storage capabilities.

"It will take decades before we achieve the goal of something comparable to any type of computer," Hartung said. "But if we don't start creating funding programs for this, it will be much more difficult."

Organoid intelligence could also revolutionize drug testing research for neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegeneration, said Lena Smirnova, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of environmental health and engineering who co-leads the investigations.

"We want to compare brain organoids from typically developed donors versus brain organoids from donors with autism," Smirnova said. "The tools we are developing towards biological computing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in neuronal networks specific for autism, without having to use animals or to access patients, so we can understand the underlying mechanisms of why patients have these cognition issues and impairments."

To assess the ethical implications of working with organoid intelligence, a diverse consortium of scientists, bioethicists, and members of the public have been embedded within the team.

Johns Hopkins authors included: Brian S. Caffo, David H. Gracias, Qi Huang, Itzy E. Morales Pantoja, Bohao Tang, Donald J. Zack, Cynthia A. Berlinicke, J. Lomax Boyd, Timothy DHarris, Erik C. Johnson, Jeffrey Kahn, Barton L. Paulhamus, Jesse Plotkin, Alexander S. Szalay, Joshua T. Vogelstein, and Paul F. Worley.

Other authors included: Brett J. Kagan, of Cortical Labs; Alysson R. Muotri, of the University of California San Diego; and Jens C. Schwamborn of University of Luxembourg.

Will future computers run on human brain cells? Breaking ground on new field of 'organoid intelligence' -- ScienceDaily

  

Excess Weight or Obesity More Deadly than Previously Believed

From:  University of Colorado, Boulder

By Lisa Marshall

February 23, 2023 – Excess weight or obesity boosts risk of death by anywhere from 22% to 91%—significantly more than previously believed—while the mortality risk of being slightly underweight has likely been overestimated, according to new CU Boulder research.

The findings, published Feb. 9 in the journal Population Studies, counter prevailing wisdom that excess weight boosts mortality risk only in extreme cases. 

The statistical analysis of nearly 18,000 people also shines a light on the pitfalls of using body mass index (BMI) to study health outcomes, providing evidence that the go-to metric can potentially bias findings. After accounting for those biases, it estimates that about 1 in 6 U.S. deaths are related to excess weight or obesity.

“Existing studies have likely underestimated the mortality consequences of living in a country where cheap, unhealthy food has grown increasingly accessible, and sedentary lifestyles have become the norm,” said author Ryan Masters, associate professor of sociology at CU Boulder.

“This study and others are beginning to expose the true toll of this public health crisis.” 

Challenging the ‘obesity paradox’

While numerous studies show that heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes (which are often associated with being overweight) elevate mortality risk, very few have shown that groups with higher BMIs have higher mortality rates.

Instead, in what some call the “obesity paradox,” most studies show a U-shaped curve: Those in the “overweight” category (BMI 25–30) surprisingly have the lowest mortality risk. Those in the “obese” category (30–35) have little or no increased risk over the so-called “healthy” category (18.5–25). And both the “underweight” (less than 18.5) and extremely obese (35 and higher) are at increased risk of death.

“The conventional wisdom is that elevated BMI generally does not raise mortality risk until you get to very high levels, and that there are actually some survival benefits to being overweight,” said Masters, a social demographer who has spent his career studying mortality trends. “I have been suspicious of these claims.”

He noted that BMI, which doctors and scientists often use as a health measure, is based on weight and height only and doesn’t account for differences in body composition or how long a person has been overweight. 

“It’s a reflection of stature at a point in time. That’s it,” said Masters, noting that Tom Cruise (at 5 feet 7 inches and an extremely muscular 201 pounds at one point), had a BMI of 31.5, famously putting him in the category of “obese.” “It isn’t fully capturing all of the nuances and different sizes and shapes the body comes in.”

Duration matters

To see what happened when those nuances were considered, Masters mined the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1988 to 2015, looking at data from 17,784 people, including 4,468 deaths.

He discovered that a full 20% of the sample characterized as “healthy” weight had been in the overweight or obese category in the decade prior. When set apart, this group had a substantially worse health profile than those in the category whose weight had been stable. 

Masters pointed out that a lifetime carrying excess weight can lead to illnesses that, paradoxically, lead to rapid weight loss. If BMI data is captured during this time, it can skew study results. 

“I would argue that we have been artificially inflating the mortality risk in the low-BMI category by including those who had been high BMI and had just lost weight recently,” he said.

Meanwhile, 37% of those characterized as overweight and 60% of those with obese BMI had been at lower BMIs in the decade prior. Notably, those who had only recently gained weight had better health profiles.

“The health and mortality consequences of high BMI are not like a light switch,” said Masters. “There’s an expanding body of work suggesting that the consequences are duration-dependent.” 

By including people who had spent most of their life at low-BMI weight in the high-BMI categories, previous studies have inadvertently made high BMI look less risky than it is, he said.

When he looked at differences in fat distribution within BMI categories, he also found that variations made a huge difference in reported health outcomes.

Exposing a public health problem

Collectively, the findings confirm that studies have been “significantly affected” by BMI-related bias.

When re-crunching the numbers without these biases, he found not a U-shape but a straight upward line, with those with low BMI (18.5–22.5) having the lowest mortality risk.

Contrary to previous research, the study found no significant mortality risk increases for the “underweight” category.

While previous research estimated 2 to 3% of U.S. adult deaths were due to high BMI, his study pegs the toll at eight times that.

Masters said he hopes the research will alert scientists to be “extremely cautious” when making conclusions based on BMI. But he also hopes the work will draw attention to what he sees not as a problem for individuals alone to solve but rather a public health crisis fueled by an unhealthy or “obesogenic” environment in the U.S. 

“For groups born in the 1970s or 1980s who have lived their whole lives in this obesogenic environment, the prospects of healthy aging into older adulthood does not look good right now,” he said. “I hope this work can influence higher-level discussions about what we as a society can do about it.”

Excess weight, obesity more deadly than previously believed | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder

 

Wikipedia Talks About Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is used on a number of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. This may be directly involved with creation of text content, or in support roles related to evaluating article quality, adding metadata, or generating images. As with any machine-generated content, care must be used when employing AI at scale or in applying it where the community consensus is to exercise more caution.

When exploring AI techniques and systems, the community consensus is to prefer human decisions over machine-generated outcomes until the implications are better understood.

Applications

AI-related efforts on Wikipedia include but are not limited to:

Revision scoring

The Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) was started in 2015 as a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, and provides a revision score against machine learning models that have been trained in order to report article quality or vandalism. This is used in tools such as CluebotNG to help immediately revert vandalism, or in evaluation tools like the Program and Events Dashboard to measure the outcomes of classwork, edit-a-thons, or organized editing campaigns.

Text translation

Guidance can be found at Help:Translation#English Wikipedia policy requirements. There is a Content Translation Tool used across Wikimedia projects that can use the output of machine translation from one Wikipedia article to another, using services like Google Translate. However, on the English Wikipedia, it currently states that "machine translation is disabled for all users and this tool is limited to extended confirmed editors." As a result, only manual translation on the English Wikipedia is supported by the tool, though some users have used translation to Simple English as a workaround. Relatedly, there is a section of the Help:Translation page with the broad advice: "avoid machine translations." However, this guidance was last edited in 2016, and the state of the art for machine translation has advanced significantly since then, meriting a re-examination of that advice.

Article text generation

Main page: Wikipedia:Large language models, a draft proposal for a Wikipedia guideline on the use of language models

The explosion of interest in ChatGPT in 2022 has led to increased curiosity in using generative AI to help compose Wikipedia articles. The status of machine-generated text from tools such as ChatGPT is generally accepted to be public domain, so the copyright issues are not a blocker to using the generated text from a legal standpoint. These issues are generally governed by Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia#Converting and adding open license text to Wikipedia, which advises to make sure content is adjusted for style and that reliable sources are used. Conversations on the Village Pump and in some test articles (i.e. Artwork title) have noted positive aspects of machine generated text, but a serious warning that content must be checked for facts and accuracy and never used straight from ChatGPT.

A good general page looking at the issues can be found at: Wikipedia:Using neural network language models on Wikipedia. Some user experiences can be found here:

• Talk:Artwork title
• User:JPxG/LLM demonstration
• User:Fuzheado/ChatGPT
• User:DraconicDark/ChatGPT
• User:BrokenSegue - Wikidata:Wwwyzzerdd and Psychiq Wikidata game that uses distilBERT and ML, analyzing Wikipedia categories.

Other

]

Image metadata – There have been efforts from GLAM institutions and at the WMF to help supplement image keyword data with machine learning efforts. Among them include:

• Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale March 4, 2019, https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2019/wikipedia-art-and-ai

Image generation

• c:Commons:AI generated media

Link for this discussion:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Artificial_intelligence

  

Custom, 3D Printed Heart Replicas Look and Pump Just Like the Real Thing

The soft robotic models are patient-specific and could help clinicians zero in on the best implant for an individual.:

From:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

February 22, 2023 -- Engineers developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patient's heart. These models could help doctors tailor treatments, such as aortic valves, to an individual patient.

No two hearts beat alike. The size and shape of the heart can vary from one person to the next. These differences can be particularly pronounced for people living with heart disease, as their hearts and major vessels work harder to overcome any compromised function.

MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients' specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. The team has developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patient's heart. They can then control the replica's action to mimic that patient's blood-pumping ability.

The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient's heart into a three-dimensional computer model, which the researchers can then 3D print using a polymer-based ink. The result is a soft, flexible shell in the exact shape of the patient's own heart. The team can also use this approach to print a patient's aorta -- the major artery that carries blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.

To mimic the heart's pumping action, the team has fabricated sleeves similar to blood pressure cuffs that wrap around a printed heart and aorta. The underside of each sleeve resembles precisely patterned bubble wrap. When the sleeve is connected to a pneumatic system, researchers can tune the outflowing air to rhythmically inflate the sleeve's bubbles and contract the heart, mimicking its pumping action.

The researchers can also inflate a separate sleeve surrounding a printed aorta to constrict the vessel. This constriction, they say, can be tuned to mimic aortic stenosis -- a condition in which the aortic valve narrows, causing the heart to work harder to force blood through the body.

Doctors commonly treat aortic stenosis by surgically implanting a synthetic valve designed to widen the aorta's natural valve. In the future, the team says that doctors could potentially use their new procedure to first print a patient's heart and aorta, then implant a variety of valves into the printed model to see which design results in the best function and fit for that particular patient. The heart replicas could also be used by research labs and the medical device industry as realistic platforms for testing therapies for various types of heart disease.

"All hearts are different," says Luca Rosalia, a graduate student in the MIT-Harvard Program in Health Sciences and Technology. "There are massive variations, especially when patients are sick. The advantage of our system is that we can recreate not just the form of a patient's heart, but also its function in both physiology and disease."

Rosalia and his colleagues report their results in a study appearing today in Science Robotics. MIT co-authors include Caglar Ozturk, Debkalpa Goswami, Jean Bonnemain, Sophie Wang, and Ellen Roche, along with Benjamin Bonner of Massachusetts General Hospital, James Weaver of Harvard University, and Christopher Nguyen, Rishi Puri, and Samir Kapadia at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Print and pump

In January 2020, team members, led by mechanical engineering professor Ellen Roche, developed a "biorobotic hybrid heart" -- a general replica of a heart, made from synthetic muscle containing small, inflatable cylinders, which they could control to mimic the contractions of a real beating heart.

Shortly after those efforts, the Covid-19 pandemic forced Roche's lab, along with most others on campus, to temporarily close. Undeterred, Rosalia continued tweaking the heart-pumping design at home.

"I recreated the whole system in my dorm room that March," Rosalia recalls.

Months later, the lab reopened, and the team continued where it left off, working to improve the control of the heart-pumping sleeve, which they tested in animal and computational models. They then expanded their approach to develop sleeves and heart replicas that are specific to individual patients. For this, they turned to 3D printing.

"There is a lot of interest in the medical field in using 3D printing technology to accurately recreate patient anatomy for use in preprocedural planning and training," notes Wang, who is a vascular surgery resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

An inclusive design

In the new study, the team took advantage of 3D printing to produce custom replicas of actual patients' hearts. They used a polymer-based ink that, once printed and cured, can squeeze and stretch, similarly to a real beating heart.

As their source material, the researchers used medical scans of 15 patients diagnosed with aortic stenosis. The team converted each patient's images into a three-dimensional computer model of the patient's left ventricle (the main pumping chamber of the heart) and aorta. They fed this model into a 3D printer to generate a soft, anatomically accurate shell of both the ventricle and vessel.

The team also fabricated sleeves to wrap around the printed forms. They tailored each sleeve's pockets such that, when wrapped around their respective forms and connected to a small air pumping system, the sleeves could be tuned separately to realistically contract and constrict the printed models.

The researchers showed that for each model heart, they could accurately recreate the same heart-pumping pressures and flows that were previously measured in each respective patient.

"Being able to match the patients' flows and pressures was very encouraging," Roche says. "We're not only printing the heart's anatomy, but also replicating its mechanics and physiology. That's the part that we get excited about."

Going a step further, the team aimed to replicate some of the interventions that a handful of the patients underwent, to see whether the printed heart and vessel responded in the same way. Some patients had received valve implants designed to widen the aorta. Roche and her colleagues implanted similar valves in the printed aortas modeled after each patient. When they activated the printed heart to pump, they observed that the implanted valve produced similarly improved flows as in actual patients following their surgical implants.

Finally, the team used an actuated printed heart to compare implants of different sizes, to see which would result in the best fit and flow -- something they envision clinicians could potentially do for their patients in the future.

"Patients would get their imaging done, which they do anyway, and we would use that to make this system, ideally within the day," says co-author Nyugen. "Once it's up and running, clinicians could test different valve types and sizes and see which works best, then use that to implant."

Ultimately, Roche says the patient-specific replicas could help develop and identify ideal treatments for individuals with unique and challenging cardiac geometries.

"Designing inclusively for a large range of anatomies, and testing interventions across this range, may increase the addressable target population for minimally invasive procedures," Roche says.

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Heart Lung Blood Institute.

Custom, 3D-printed heart replicas look and pump just like the real thing: The soft robotic models are patient-specific and could help clinicians zero in on the best implant for an individual. -- ScienceDaily

Getting Good Sleep Could Add Years to Your Life

Having five low-risk sleep habits may have long-term benefits:

From:  American College of Cardiology

February 24, 2023 -- Getting good sleep can play a role in supporting your heart and overall health -- and maybe even how long you live -- according to new research being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together With the World Congress of Cardiology. The study found that young people who have more beneficial sleep habits are incrementally less likely to die early. Moreover, the data suggest that about 8% of deaths from any cause could be attributed to poor sleep patterns.

“We saw a clear dose-response relationship, so the more beneficial factors someone has in terms of having higher quality of sleep, they also have a stepwise lowering of all cause and cardiovascular mortality,” said Frank Qian, MD, an internal medicine resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess

Medical Center, clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study. “I think these findings emphasize that just getting enough hours of sleep isn’t sufficient. You really have to have restful sleep and not have much trouble falling and staying asleep.”

For their analysis, Qian and team included data from 172,321 people (average age 50 and 54% women) who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 2013 and 2018. This survey is fielded each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics to help gauge the health of the U.S. population and includes questions about sleep and sleep habits. Qian said this is the first study to his knowledge to use a nationally representative population to look at how several sleep behaviors, and not just sleep duration, might influence life expectancy.

About two-thirds of study participants self-reported as being White, 14.5% Hispanic, 12.6% Black and 5.5% Asian. Because researchers were able to link participants to the National Death Index records (through December 31, 2019), they could examine the association between individual and combined sleep factors and all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Participants were followed for a median of 4.3 years during which time 8,681 individuals died. Of these deaths, 2,610 deaths (30%) were from cardiovascular disease, 2,052 (24%) were from cancer and 4,019 (46%) were due to other causes.

Researchers assessed ?ve different factors of quality sleep using a low-risk sleep score they created based on answers collected as part of the survey. Factors included: 1) ideal sleep duration of seven to eight hours a night; 2) difficulty falling asleep no more than two times a week; 3) trouble staying asleep no more than two times a week; 4) not using any sleep medication; and 5) feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week. Each factor was assigned zero or one point for each, for a maximum of five points, which indicated the highest quality sleep.

“If people have all these ideal sleep behaviors, they are more likely to live longer,” Qian said. “So, if we can improve sleep overall, and identifying sleep disorders is especially important, we may be able to prevent some of this premature mortality.”

For the analysis, researchers controlled for other factors that may have heightened the risk of dying, including lower socioeconomic status, smoking and alcohol consumption and other medical conditions. Compared to individuals who had zero to one favorable sleep factors, those who had all five were 30% less likely to die for any reason, 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, 19% less likely to die from cancer, and 40% less likely to die of causes other than heart disease or cancer. Qian said these other deaths are likely due to accidents, infections or neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease, but more research is needed.

Among men and women who reported having all five quality sleep measures (a score of five), life expectancy was 4.7 years greater for men and 2.4 years greater for women compared with those who had none or only one of the five favorable elements of low-risk sleep. More research is needed to determine why men with all five low-risk sleep factors had double the increase in life expectancy compared with women who had the same quality sleep.

“Even from a young age, if people can develop these good sleep habits of getting enough sleep, making sure they are sleeping without too many distractions and have good sleep hygiene overall, it can greatly benefit their overall long-term health,” Qian said, adding that for the present analysis they estimated gains in life expectancy starting at age 30, but the model can be used to predict gains at older ages too. “It’s important for younger people to understand that a lot of health behaviors are cumulative over time. Just like we like to say, ‘it’s never too late to exercise or stop smoking,’ it’s also never too early. And we should be talking about and assessing sleep more often.”

These sleep habits can be easily asked about during clinical encounters, and the researchers hope patients and clinicians will start talking about sleep as part of their overall health assessment and disease management planning.  

One limitation of the study is that sleep habits were self-reported and not objectively measured or verified. In addition, no information was available about the types of sleep aid or medicine used or how often or long participants used them. Future research is needed to understand how these gains in life expectancy might continue as people age, as well as further explore the sex differences that were observed.

Previous studies have shown that getting too little or too much sleep can negatively affect the heart. It’s also been widely reported that sleep apnea, a sleep disorder that causes someone to pause or stop breathing while asleep, can lead to a number of heart conditions, including high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation and heart attacks.

Getting good sleep could add years to your life: Having five low-risk sleep habits may have long-term benefits -- ScienceDaily

James Webb Spots Super Old Massive Galaxies that Should not Exist

A team of international researchers have identified six candidate galaxies that existed roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang and are about as big as the modern Milky Way Galaxy -- a feat that scientists didn't think was possible.

From:  University of Colorado at Boulder

February 22, 2023 -- In a new study, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered several mysterious objects hiding in images from the James Webb Space Telescope: six potential galaxies that emerged so early in the universe’s history and are so massive they should not be possible under current cosmological theory.

Each of the candidate galaxies may have existed at the dawn of the universe roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago. They’re also gigantic, containing almost as many stars as the modern-day Milky Way Galaxy.

“It’s bananas,” said Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form.”
        
Nelson and her colleagues, including first author Ivo Labbé of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, published their results Feb. 22 in the journal Nature.

The latest finds aren’t the earliest galaxies observed by James Webb, which launched in December 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space. Last year, another team of scientists spotted four galaxies that likely coalesced from gas around 350 million years after the Big Bang. Those objects, however, were downright shrimpy compared to the new galaxies, containing many times less mass from stars.

The researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as big as they look, and date as far back in time. Their preliminary observations, however, offer a tantalizing taste of how James Webb could rewrite astronomy textbooks.

“Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting,” Nelson said.

Fuzzy dots

There’s a lot of excitement going around: Last year, Nelson and her colleagues, who hail from the United States, Australia, Denmark and Spain, formed an ad hoc team to investigate the data James Webb was sending back to Earth. 

Their recent findings stem from the telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. These images look deep into a patch of sky close to the Big Dipper—a relatively boring, at least at first glance, region of space that the Hubble Space Telescope first observed in the 1990s.

Nelson was peering at a postage stamp-sized section of one image when she spotted something strange: a few “fuzzy dots” of light that looked way too bright to be real. 

“They were so red and so bright,” Nelson said. “We weren’t expecting to see them.”

She explained that in astronomy, red light usually equals old light. The universe, Nelson said, has been expanding since the dawn of time. As it expands, galaxies and other celestial objects move farther apart, and the light they emit stretches out—think of it like the cosmic equivalent of saltwater taffy. The more the light stretches, the redder it looks to human instruments. (Light from objects coming closer to Earth, in contrast, looks bluer).

The team ran calculations and discovered that their old galaxies were also huge, harboring tens to hundreds of billions of sun-sized stars worth of mass, on par with the Milky Way.

These primordial galaxies, however, probably didn’t have much in common with our own.  

 “The Milky Way forms about one to two new star every year,” Nelson said. “Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe.”

Nelson and her colleagues want to use James Webb to collect a lot more information about these mysterious objects, but they’ve seen enough already to pique their curiosity. For a start, calculations suggest there shouldn’t have been enough normal matter—the kind that makes up planets and human bodies—at that time to form so many stars so quickly.

“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” Nelson said.

Seeing back in time

For Nelson, the new findings are a culmination of a journey that began when she was in elementary school. When she was 10, she wrote a report about Hubble, a telescope that launched in 1990 and is still active today. Nelson was hooked.

“It takes time for light to go from a galaxy to us, which means that you're looking back in time when you're looking at these objects,” she said. “I found that concept so mind blowing that I decided at that instant that this was what I wanted to do with my life.”

The fast pace of discovery with James Webb is a lot like those early days of Hubble, Nelson said. At the time, many scientists believed that galaxies didn’t begin forming until billions of years after the Big Bang. But researchers soon discovered that the early universe was much more complex and exciting than they could have imagined. 

“Even though we learned our lesson already from Hubble, we still didn’t expect James Webb to see such mature galaxies existing so far back in time,” Nelson said. “I’m so excited.”

Other co-authors on the new study include Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University; Katherine Suess of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Joel Leja, Elijah Matthews and Bingjie Wang of the Pennsylvania State University; Gabriel Brammer and Katherine Whitaker of the University of Coppenhagen; and Mauro Stefanon of the University of Valencia.

      James Webb spots super old, massive galaxies that shouldn't exist -- ScienceDaily

 

Vivek Ramaswamy at Age 37

Vivek G. Ramaswamy (born August 9, 1985) is an American entrepreneur, author, and conservative political activist.

After working as an investment partner, he founded the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences in 2014. Since 2020, he has been writing and speaking out against stakeholder capitalism, big tech censorship, and critical race theory.  He left Roivant in 2021 and published Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam in August 2021. In 2022, he co-founded Strive Asset Management, an investment firm opposed to environmental, social, and corporate governance, where he currently serves as the Executive Chairman, and published Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence in September.

Ramaswamy was dubbed "The C.E.O. of Anti-Woke, Inc." in a 2022 New Yorker profile, and has been described as "one of the intellectual godfathers of the anti-woke movement" by Politico in 2023.  On February 21, 2023 Ramaswamy announced his decision to run in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Early life and education

Ramaswamy was born in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there.  His parents immigrated from Vadakkencherry, Palakkad, Kerala, India.  His father graduated from a regional engineering college in Kerala, and worked for General Electric as an engineer and patent attorney, while his mother graduated from Mysore Medical College and worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.  Ramaswamy has argued that American-style capitalism provides an antidote to the caste system in India by offering lower-caste citizens more economic opportunities.

Ramaswamy graduated from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati in 2003.  In high school, he was class valedictorian, a nationally ranked junior tennis player, and an accomplished pianist.

In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in biology.  He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras.  His thesis was awarded the Bowdoin Prize for Natural Sciences, and a precis was published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe in 2007.  In 2013, Ramaswamy received a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Business career

In 2007, Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, a technology company that provided software and networking resources to university entrepreneurs.  The company was acquired in 2009 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  Ramaswamy worked at QVT Financial from 2007 to 2014, where he was a partner and co-managed the firm's biotech portfolio, while simultaneously attending Yale Law School from 2010-2013.

Roivant Sciences

In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, a company that focuses on applying technology to drug development, for which he served as CEO until 2021. Ramaswamy appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development.  In 2020, Ramaswamy co-founded Chapter Medicare, the only consumer-first Medicare navigation platform.

In early 2021, Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO of Roivant Sciences to publish Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam, which debuted at #2 on The New York Times bestseller list.

Strive Asset Management

Ramaswamy is currently co-founder and executive chairman of Strive Asset Management, an Ohio-based asset management firm that was backed financially by Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance, among others.  Strive was established to offer an alternative to larger asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, which Ramaswamy has criticized for engaging in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities, and mixing business with politics to the alleged detriment of shareholders.

Strive's total assets under management surpassed $500 million on November 11, 2022, three months after the launch of its first fund.  In January 2023, Strive launched a proxy advisory service to compete with such mainstream firms as Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services.  Ramaswamy has been described by Axios and Bloomberg as "the leading anti-ESG crusader."

Nonprofit work

Ramaswamy has served on the boards of directors of The Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization that aims to "foster excellence in philanthropy, protect philanthropic freedom and help donors advance liberty, opportunity and personal responsibility." He also has served on the board of directors for The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FreOpp), a nonprofit think tank focused on expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it.  In 2021, he became a member of the Board of Trustees of St. Xavier High School.

Books

• — (August 17, 2021). Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam. New York, NY: Center Street. ISBN 978-1-5460-9078-6. OCLC 1237631944.

Woke, Inc. debuted at #2 on the New York Times Best Sellers list on September 5, 2021.  A critique of "stakeholder capitalism," it argues that corporations' "woke" efforts to advance social causes "robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity."  Reviewers cited Ramaswamy's "spot-on analyses of corrosive corporate duplicity" and "important points about the misguided nature of ESG investing [and] the folly of attempting to inject politics into business."  Russell Greene, writing on Real Clear Markets, applauded the book’s timeliness and said that "the problems Ramaswamy describes are real and likely to get worse," while also arguing that the author "[did] not permit his ample experience to inform his theory," leading him to present "a vision for business that overlooks how corporations, and corporate law, actually work." Joe Berkowitz, on Fast Company, observes that Ramaswamy "often seems more concerned with so-called wokeness itself than with woke corporations."  The book significantly raised Ramaswamy's profile, leading to frequent talk show appearances, especially on Fox News.

• — (September 13, 2022). Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence. New York, NY: Center Street. ISBN 978-1-5460-02963. OCLC 1546002960.

In Nation of Victims, Ramaswamy critiques what he sees as the victimhood culture that is at the heart of America’s decline. Using examples from history, and incorporating themes from Western philosophy and Eastern theology, Ramaswamy suggests that the disappearance of excellence and exceptionalism, which he identifies as being at the heart of American identity, has left a deep moral and cultural vacuum in the nation. In his review for The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan says that Nation of Victims makes a "passionate, persuasive case" for "closing off victimhood as a path to success." Comparing it to the work of Shelby Steele and John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, Varadarajan writes

Nation of Victims—always vigorous, in places uncompromising—offers a surprisingly wistful, even docile, solution to America’s problem of victimhood. We’re locked in a "grievance-fueled race to the bottom," where the very language we use—including basic words like "woman" and "equality"—have [sic] paralyzed dialogue across partisan lines. How do we emerge from this civic hell of mutual incomprehension? Mr. Ramaswamy’s answer is that we must "find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim." That sounds like a very fine idea.

Political involvement

Main article: Vivek Ramaswamy 2024 presidential campaign

Ramaswamy has proposed repealing a law which makes Presidents spend all the money congress appropriates. He rejects the Diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental, social, and governance movements.

In 2022, Ramaswamy considered a candidacy in the 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio.  In 2023, it was reported that Ramaswamy might run for President of the United States in the 2024 election.  According to a profile in Politico, Ramaswamy was inspired by Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, and wants to run "with an entrepreneurial spirit, unorthodox ideas, and few expectations" in the hopes of building "a major following that will carry him to the presidency.

Ramaswamy announced that he would run in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight on February 21, 2023.  Ramaswamy is a self-described conservative.

Personal life

Ramaswamy met his wife Apoorva T. Ramaswamy, an Assistant Professor and clinician at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, when they lived near each other at Yale University, where they were studying law and medicine, respectively.  Together, they have two sons.  Ramaswamy is Hindu.

Vivek Ramaswamy - Wikipedia

Two Out of Three Corporate Frauds Go Undetected, Research Finds

Study says that at least 10% of U.S. companies involved in fraudulent activity

From: Rotman at University of Toronto

February 17, 2023 -- Toronto - To professor Alexander Dyck, corporate fraud is like an iceberg: a small number is visible, but much more lurks below the surface.

How much more, he wondered? And, at what cost to investors?

Prof. Dyck and his team found that under typical surveillance, about three percent of U.S. companies are found doing something funny with their books in any given year. They determined that number by looking at financial misrepresentations exposed by auditors, enforcement releases by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), financial restatements, and full legal prosecutions by the SEC against insider trading, all between 1997 and 2005.

However, the freefall and unexpected collapse of auditing firm Arthur Andersen, starting in 2001, due to its involvement in the Enron accounting scandal, gave Prof. Dyck, from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and other researchers the chance to see how much fraud was detected during a period of heightened scrutiny. It represented “a huge opportunity,” that rarely comes along, said Prof. Dyck, putting 20 percent of all U.S. publicly traded companies – the slice that had been working with Andersen and were forced to find new auditors -- under a higher-powered microscope due to their previous association with the disgraced accounting firm.

Those companies did not show a greater propensity to fraud compared to other companies in the 1998 to 2000 period. But that changed once the spotlight was turned on beginning Nov. 30, 2001 – the date when Andersen client Enron began filing for bankruptcy – until the end of 2003, the period the researchers looked at. The new auditors, as well as regulators, investors and news media were all looking much more closely at the ex-Andersen companies.

“What we found was that there was three times as much detected fraud in the companies that were subjected to this special treatment, as a former Andersen firm, compared to those that weren’t,” said Prof. Dyck, who holds the Manulife Financial Chair in Financial Services and is the Director of the Capital Markets Institute at the Rotman School.

The researchers used the finding to infer that the real number of companies involved in fraud is at least 10 percent. That squares with previous research that has pegged the true incidence of corporate fraud between 10 and 18 percent. While the researchers were looking at U.S. companies, Prof. Dyck speculated that the ratio of undetected-to-detected fraud is not significantly different in Canada.

Given those numbers, the researchers estimated that fraud destroys about 1.6 percent of a company’s equity value, mostly due to diminished reputation among those in the know, representing about $830 billion in current U.S. dollars.

The figures also help to quantify the value of regulatory intervention, such as through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or SOX, introduced in 2002 in response to Enron and other financial scandals. Its not hard to come up with the compliance costs of SOX. What their study shows is that the legislation would satisfy a cost benefit analysis, even if it only reduced corporate fraud by 10 percent of its current level.

The results should capture the attention of anyone with responsibility for corporate oversight and research, Prof. Dyck says: “I spend a lot of time running a program for directors of public corporations and I tout this evidence when I say, ‘Do I think you guys should be spending time worrying about these things? Yes. The problem is bigger than you might think.’”

The research was co-authored with Adair Morse of the University of California at Berkeley and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago. It appears in the Review of Accounting Studies.

Prof. Dyck will present his research during an event hosted by the Capital Markets Institute on February 23, which will also include a discussion with representatives from academia, the plaintiff’s bar, regulators, and accountants. Further details are online.

Bringing together high-impact faculty research and thought leadership on one searchable platform, the new Rotman Insights Hub offers articles, podcasts, opinions, books and videos representing the latest in management thinking and providing insights into the key issues facing business and society.

Visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/insightshub.

The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca

Two out of three corporate frauds go undetected, research finds | Study says that at least 10% of U.S. companies involved in fraudulent activity - Rotman School of Management (utoronto.ca) 

Electronic Metadevices Break Barriers to Ultra Fast Communications

EPFL researchers have come up with a new approach to electronics that involves engineering metastructures at the sub-wavelength scale. It could launch the next generation of ultra-fast devices for exchanging massive amounts of data, with applications in 6G communications and beyond.

From:  Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

February 17, 2023 -- Until now, the ability to make electronic devices faster has come down to a simple principle: scaling down transistors and other components. But this approach is reaching its limit, as the benefits of shrinking are counterbalanced by detrimental effects like resistance and decreased output power.

Elison Matioli of the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Lab (POWERlab) in EPFL's School of Engineering explains that further miniaturization is therefore not a viable solution to better electronics performance. "New papers come out describing smaller and smaller devices, but in the case of materials made from gallium nitride, the best devices in terms of frequency were already published a few years back," he says. "After that, there is really nothing better, because as device size is reduced, we face fundamental limitations. This is true regardless of the material used."

In response to this challenge, Matioli and PhD student Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo came up with a new approach to electronics that could overcome these limitations and enable a new class of terahertz devices. Instead of shrinking their device, they rearranged it, notably by etching patterned contacts called metastructures at sub-wavelength distances onto a semiconductor made of gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride. These metastructures allow the electrical fields inside the device to be controlled, yielding extraordinary properties that do not occur in nature.

Crucially, the device can operate at electromagnetic frequencies in the terahertz range (between 0.3-30 THz) -- significantly faster than the gigahertz waves used in today's electronics. They can therefore carry much greater quantities of information for a given signal or period, giving them great potential for applications in 6G communications and beyond.

"We found that manipulating radiofrequency fields at microscopic scales can significantly boost the performance of electronic devices, without relying on aggressive downscaling," explains Samizadeh Nikoo, who is the first author of an article on the breakthrough recently published in the journal Nature.

Record high frequencies, record low resistance

Because terahertz frequencies are too fast for current electronics to manage, and too slow for optics applications, this range is often referred to as the 'terahertz gap'. Using sub-wavelength metastructures to modulate terahertz waves is a technique that comes from the world of optics. But the POWERlab's method allows for an unprecedented degree of electronic control, unlike the optics approach of shining an external beam of light onto an existing pattern.

"In our electronics-based approach, the ability to control induced radiofrequencies comes from the combination of the sub-wavelength patterned contacts, plus the control of the electronic channel with applied voltage. This means that we can change the collective effect inside the metadevice by inducing electrons (or not)," says Matioli.

While the most advanced devices on the market today can achieve frequencies of up to 2 THz, the POWERlab's metadevices can reach 20 THz. Similarly, today's devices operating near the terahertz range tend to break down at voltages below 2 volts, while the metadevices can support over 20 volts. This enables the transmission and modulation of terahertz signals with much greater power and frequency than is currently possible.

Integrated solutions

As Samizadeh Nikoo explains, modulating terahertz waves is crucial for the future of telecommunications, as the increasing data requirements of technologies like autonomous vehicles and 6G mobile communications are fast reaching the limits of today's devices. The electronic metadevices developed in the POWERlab could form the basis for integrated terahertz electronics by producing compact, high-frequency chips that can already be used with smartphones, for example.

"This new technology could change the future of ultra-high-speed communications, as it is compatible with existing processes in semiconductor manufacturing. We have demonstrated data transmission of up to 100 gigabits per second at terahertz frequencies, which is already 10 times higher than what we have today with 5G," Samizadeh Nikoo says.

To fully realize the potential of the approach, Matioli says the next step is to develop other electronics components ready for integration into terahertz circuits.

"Integrated terahertz electronics are the next frontier for a connected future. But our electronic metadevices are just one component. We need to develop other integrated terahertz components to fully realize the potential of this technology. That is our vision and goal."

      Electronic metadevices break barriers to ultra-fast communications -- ScienceDaily

How a Record-Breaking Copper Catalyst Converts CO2 into Liquid Fuels

Researchers have made real-time movies of copper nanoparticles as they evolve to convert carbon dioxide and water into renewable fuels and chemicals. Their new insights could help advance the next generation of solar fuels.

From:  DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

February 16, 2023 -- Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to transform carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.

Now, a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has gained new insight by capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles (copper particles engineered at the scale of a billionth of a meter) as they convert CO₂ and water into renewable fuels and chemicals: ethylene, ethanol, and propanol, among others. The work was reported in the journal Nature last week.

"This is very exciting. After decades of work, we're finally able to show -- with undeniable proof -- how copper electrocatalysts excel in CO₂ reduction," said Peidong Yang, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences and Chemical Sciences Divisions who led the study. Yang is also a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. "Knowing how copper is such an excellent electrocatalyst brings us steps closer to turning CO₂ into new, renewable solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis."

The work was made possible by combining a new imaging technique called operando 4D electrochemical liquid-cell STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) with a soft X-ray probe to investigate the same sample environment: copper nanoparticles in liquid. First author Yao Yang, a UC Berkeley Miller postdoctoral fellow, conceived the groundbreaking approach under the guidance of Peidong Yang while working toward his Ph.D. in chemistry at Cornell University.

Scientists who study artificial photosynthesis materials and reactions have wanted to combine the power of an electron probe with X-rays, but the two techniques typically can't be performed by the same instrument.

Electron microscopes (such as STEM or TEM) use beams of electrons and excel at characterizing the atomic structure in parts of a material. In recent years, 4D STEM (or "2D raster of 2D diffraction patterns using scanning transmission electron microscopy") instruments, such as those at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, have pushed the boundaries of electron microscopy even further, enabling scientists to map out atomic or molecular regions in a variety of materials, from hard metallic glass to soft, flexible films.

On the other hand, soft (or lower-energy) X-rays are useful for identifying and tracking chemical reactions in real time in an operando, or real-world, environment.

But now, scientists can have the best of both worlds. At the heart of the new technique is an electrochemical "liquid cell" sample holder with remarkable versatility. A thousand times thinner than a human hair, the device is compatible with both STEM and X-ray instruments.

The electrochemical liquid cell's ultrathin design allows reliable imaging of delicate samples while protecting them from electron beam damage. A special electrode custom-designed by co-author Cheng Wang, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source, enabled the team to conduct X-ray experiments with the electrochemical liquid cell. Combining the two allows researchers to comprehensively characterize electrochemical reactions in real time and at the nanoscale.

Getting granular

During 4D-STEM experiments, Yao Yang and team used the new electrochemical liquid cell to observe copper nanoparticles (ranging in size from 7 nanometers to 18 nanometers) evolve into active nanograins during CO₂ electrolysis -- a process that uses electricity to drive a reaction on the surface of an electrocatalyst.

The experiments revealed a surprise: copper nanoparticles combined into larger metallic copper "nanograins" within seconds of the electrochemical reaction.

To learn more, the team turned to Wang, who pioneered a technique known as "resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSoXS) for soft materials," at the Advanced Light Source more than 10 years ago.

With help from Wang, the research team used the same electrochemical liquid cell, but this time during RSoXS experiments, to determine whether copper nanograins facilitate CO₂ reduction. Soft X-rays are ideal for studying how copper electrocatalysts evolve during CO₂ reduction, Wang explained. By using RSoXS, researchers can monitor multiple reactions between thousands of nanoparticles in real time, and accurately identify chemical reactants and products.

The RSoXS experiments at the Advanced Light Source -- along with additional evidence gathered at Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) -- proved that metallic copper nanograins serve as active sites for CO₂ reduction. (Metallic copper, also known as copper(0), is a form of the element copper.)

During CO₂ electrolysis, the copper nanoparticles change their structure during a process called "electrochemical scrambling." The copper nanoparticles' surface layer of oxide degrades, creating open sites on the copper surface for CO₂ molecules to attach, explained Peidong Yang. And as CO₂ "docks" or binds to the copper nanograin surface, electrons are then transferred to CO₂, causing a reaction that simultaneously produces ethylene, ethanol, and propanol along with other multicarbon products.

"The copper nanograins essentially turn into little chemical manufacturing factories," Yao Yang said.

Further experiments at the Molecular Foundry, the Advanced Light Source, and CHESS revealed that size matters. All of the 7-nanometer copper nanoparticles participated in CO₂ reduction, whereas the larger nanoparticles did not. In addition, the team learned that only metallic copper can efficiently reduce CO₂ into multicarbon products. The findings have implications for "rationally designing efficient CO₂ electrocatalysts," Peidong Yang said.

The new study also validated Peidong Yang's findings from 2017: That the 7-nanometer-sized copper nanoparticles require low inputs of energy to start CO₂ reduction. As an electrocatalyst, the 7-nanometer copper nanoparticles required a record-low driving force that is about 300 millivolts less than typical bulk copper electrocatalysts. The best-performing catalysts that produce multicarbon products from CO₂ typically operate at high driving force of 1 volt.

The copper nanograins could potentially boost the energy efficiency and productivity of some catalysts designed for artificial photosynthesis, a field of research that aims to produce solar fuels from sunlight, water, and CO₂. Currently, researchers within the Department of Energy-funded Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA) plan to use the copper nanograin catalysts in the design of future solar fuel devices.

"The technique's ability to record real-time movies of a chemical process opens up exciting opportunities to study many other electrochemical energy conversion processes. It's a huge breakthrough, and it would not have been possible without Yao and his pioneering work," Peidong Yang said.

Researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University contributed to the work. Other authors on the paper include co-first authors Sheena Louisa and Sunmoon Yu, former UC Berkeley Ph.D. students in Peidong Yang's group, along with Jianbo Jin, Inwhan Roh, Chubai Chen, Maria V. Fonseca Guzman, Julian Feijóo, Peng-Cheng Chen, Hongsen Wang, Christopher Pollock, Xin Huang, Yu-Tsuan Shao, Cheng Wang, David A. Muller, and Héctor D. Abruña.

Parts of the experiments were performed by Yao Yang at Cornell under the supervision of Héctor Abruña, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and David A. Muller, professor of engineering.

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The Molecular Foundry and Advanced Light Source are user facilities at Berkeley Lab.

    How a record-breaking copper catalyst converts CO2 into liquid fuels -- ScienceDaily