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Which fruit peel helps retain the most soil moisture?

Parashar et al. | Jan 09, 2024

Which fruit peel helps retain the most soil moisture?
Image credit: Anshu A

Here, the authors investigated the ability to use fruit peels to help soil retain moisture, a property that is essential to agriculture. Across a 96-hour observation period, orange, banana, and kiwi peel water emulsions were evaluated for their effects on soil moisture. They found that orange peels retained the most moisture, but banana and kiwi peels also offered improvements over their control sample.

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Assessing and Improving Machine Learning Model Predictions of Polymer Glass Transition Temperatures

Ramprasad et al. | Mar 18, 2020

Assessing and Improving Machine Learning Model Predictions of Polymer Glass Transition Temperatures

In this study, the authors test whether providing a larger dataset of glass transition temperatures (Tg) to train the machine-learning platform Polymer Genome would improve its accuracy. Polymer Genome is a machine learning based data-driven informatics platform for polymer property prediction and Tg is one property needed to design new polymers in silico. They found that training the model with their larger, curated dataset improved the algorithm's Tg, providing valuable improvements to this useful platform.

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Expression of Anti-Neurodegeneration Genes in Mutant Caenorhabditis elegans Using CRISPR-Cas9 Improves Behavior Associated With Alzheimer’s Disease

Mishra et al. | Sep 14, 2019

Expression of Anti-Neurodegeneration Genes in Mutant <em>Caenorhabditis elegans</em> Using CRISPR-Cas9 Improves Behavior Associated With Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer's disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States and is characterized by neurodegeneration. Mishra et al. wanted to understand the role of two transport proteins, LRP1 and AQP4, in the neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease. They used a model organism for Alzheimer's disease, the nematode C. elegans, and genetic engineering to look at whether they would see a decrease in neurodegeneration if they increased the amount of these two transport proteins. They found that the best improvements were caused by increased expression of both transport proteins, with smaller improvements when just one of the proteins is overly expressed. Their work has important implications for how we understand neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease and what we can do to slow or prevent the progression of the disease.

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Reinforcement learning in 2-D space with varying gravitational fields

Rousseau et al. | Jun 07, 2025

Reinforcement learning in 2-D space with varying gravitational fields
Image credit: NASA

In this study the authors looked at the ability to navigate planes in space between randomly placed planets. They used machine and reinforcement learning to run simulations and found that they were able to identify optimal paths for travel. In the future these techniques may allow for safer travel in unknown spaces.

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Validating DTAPs with large language models: A novel approach to drug repurposing

Curtis et al. | Mar 02, 2025

Validating DTAPs with large language models: A novel approach to drug repurposing
Image credit: Growtika

Here, the authors investigated the integration of large language models (LLMs) with drug target affinity predictors (DTAPs) to improve drug repurposing, demonstrating a significant increase in prediction accuracy, particularly with GPT-4, for psychotropic drugs and the sigma-1 receptor. This novel approach offers to potentially accelerate and reduce the cost of drug discovery by efficiently identifying new therapeutic uses for existing drugs.

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Large Language Models are Good Translators

Zeng et al. | Oct 16, 2024

Large Language Models are Good Translators

Machine translation remains a challenging area in artificial intelligence, with neural machine translation (NMT) making significant strides over the past decade but still facing hurdles, particularly in translation quality due to the reliance on expensive bilingual training data. This study explores whether large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4, can be effectively adapted for translation tasks and outperform traditional NMT systems.

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