Discovering a drug, material, or anything new requires finding and understanding molecules. It's a time- and labor-intensive process, which can be helped along by a chemist's expertise, but it can only go so quickly, be so efficient, and there's no guarantee for success. Connor Coley is looking to change that dynamic. The Henri Slezynger (1957) Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering is developing computational tools that would be able to predict molecular behavior and learn from the successes and mistakes. It's an intuitive approach and one that still has obstacles, but Coley says that this autonomous platform holds enormous potential for remaking the discovery process.

Butt rot (BR) damages associated with Norway spruce (Picea abies [L.] Karst.) account for considerable economic losses in timber production across the northern hemisphere. While information on BR damages is critical for optimal decision-making in forest management, the maps of BR damages are typically lacking in forest information systems. We predicted timber volume damaged by BR at the stand-level in Norway using harvester information of 186,026 stems (clear-cuts), remotely sensed, and environmental data (e.g. climate and terrain characteristics). We utilized random forest (RF) models with two sets of predictor variables: (1) predictor variables available after harvest (theoretical case) and (2) predictor variables available prior to harvest (mapping case). We found that forest attributes characterizing the maturity of forest, such as remote sensing-based height, harvested timber volume and quadratic mean diameter at breast height, were among the most important predictor variables. Remotely sensed predictor variables obtained from airborne laser scanning data and Sentinel-2 imagery were more important than the environmental variables. The theoretical case with a leave-stand-out cross-validation achieved an RMSE of 11.4 $m^3ha^{-1}$ (pseudo $R^2$: 0.66) whereas the mapping case resulted in a pseudo $R^2$ of 0.60. When the spatially distinct k-means clusters of harvested forest stands were used as units in the cross-validation, the RMSE value and pseudo $R^2$ associated with the mapping case were 15.6 $m^3ha^{-1}$ and 0.37, respectively. This indicates that the knowledge about the BR status of spatially close stands is of high importance for obtaining satisfactory error rates in the mapping of BR damages.

MONTREAL and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, July 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rithmik Solutions, whose mission is building the world's most advanced and reliable analytics for mobile mining equipment, today announced the closing of a US$1.2M investment led by Chrysalix Venture Capital and joined by Fonds Ecofuel. The funding will accelerate the commercialization of the company's flagship product, Rithmik Asset Health Analyzer (AHA), which has been in development for the past three years and is currently undergoing real-time onsite trials in Alberta, Quebec and Zambia. Rithmik AHA applies a multi-tiered machine learning approach to increase mobile equipment uptime while reducing maintenance costs and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Mining companies typically spend anywhere from 20%-50% of their annual operating budgets on equipment maintenance, and lost production from unplanned downtime has an even bigger financial impact. "We were impressed by the Rithmik team's deep technical experience in the space of mobile mining equipment data, across equipment types and OEM brands, and that experience has strongly resonated with their early customers," said Alicia Lenis, Vice President at Chrysalix Venture Capital, an industrial innovation fund.

Almost 200 years ago, the renowned U.S. naturalist John James Audubon hid a decaying pig carcass under a pile of brush to test vultures' sense of smell. When the birds overlooked the pig—while one flocked to a nearly odorless stuffed deer skin—he took it as proof that they rely on vision, not smell, to find their food. His experiment cemented a commonly held idea. Despite later evidence that vultures and a few specialized avian hunters use odors after all, the dogma that most birds aren't attuned to smell endured. Now, that dogma is being eroded by findings on birds' behavior and molecular hardware, two of which were published just last month. One showed storks home in on the smell of freshly mowed grass; another documented scores of functional olfactory receptors in multiple bird species. Researchers are realizing, says evolutionary biologist Scott Edwards of Harvard University, that “olfaction has a lot of impact on different aspects of bird biology.” Forty years ago, when ethologist Floriano Papi proposed that homing pigeons find their way back to a roost by sniffing out its chemical signature, his colleagues scoffed at the idea. They pointed out that birds have several other keen senses to guide them, including sight and, in the case of pigeons and some other species, a magnetic sense. “By then, biological textbooks already stated unequivocally that birds have little to no sense of smell, and many people still believe it—even scientists,” says Danielle Whittaker, a chemical ecologist at Michigan State University. Still, contrary evidence was already accumulating. In the 1960s, ornithologist Kenneth Stager found vultures were attracted to boxes with a carcass hidden inside and fans that vented the odors—as long as this bait wasn't too decomposed, as was likely the case in Audubon's experiment. Researchers also found that albatrosses, shearwaters, and some other seabirds find their fish prey by detecting a chemical released by the plankton the fish eat. But these birds, forced to navigate many kilometers across a featureless sea, seemed exceptional. In 2008, “You were part of the dark side if you talked about birds using olfaction,” recalls Martin Wikelski, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. That year, though, a graduate student at his institute, molecular ecologist Silke Steiger, analyzed nine bird genomes from across the avian family tree and uncovered many genes for olfactory receptors—proteins in the nasal passages that bind to odors and relay a signal to the brain. In species that don't rely much on smell (humans are an example), these genes often mutate and become nonfunctional. But the researchers confirmed that many of the birds' olfactory genes were intact. What's more, they found that the number of these genes correlated with the size of a bird species' olfactory bulb, the brain's smell center—further evidence that the receptors were functional. The genomes in that study were incomplete, however. Last month, Christopher Balakrishnan, an evolutionary biologist at East Carolina University, and graduate student Robert Driver examined some of the best available bird genomes and for some species found many more olfactory genes. Their analysis of genomes from a hummingbird, emu, chicken, zebra finch, and a tropical fruit eater called a manakin revealed scores of new olfactory receptors, they reported on 28 June in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology . That the emu has so many of these genes excites Whittaker, because this bird sits near the base of the bird family tree. “This result suggests that the ancestor to all birds must have had a very diverse set of olfactory receptor genes as well,” she says. Smell must have been important to birds from the beginning, and comparisons of their olfactory receptor genes today confirm it remains so. Balakrishnan and Driver found that one diverse set of receptors unique to birds has split into multiple types specific to different bird lineages. That suggests these genes evolved rapidly as the birds diversified. Natural selection may have honed the genes to perform crucial tasks. Wikelski and colleagues saw bird smell in action after they were inspired by a question from a curious primary school student. During an outreach program at a school in Radolfzell, Germany, the student asked the scientists how the local population of European white storks found their way to freshly cut meadows, where their insect and rodent prey were most exposed. To find out, Wikelski piloted his plane in circles to observe a flock of 70 storks on sunny spring and summer days. Even when the storks couldn't see or hear the mowing, he and his colleagues noted, they homed in on mowed fields upwind of them, as if drawn to the smell of the cut grass. To confirm the suspicion, the team sprayed cut-grass smell—a mix of three volatile chemicals—onto fields that hadn't been mowed recently. The storks came flocking, the team reported on 18 June in Scientific Reports . The work “shows very clearly that these birds rely exclusively on their sense of smell to make foraging decisions,” Whittaker says. Other bird species may also respond to “calls” from injured plants, recent evidence shows. Two European birds, the great tit and the blue tit, locate insects that are attacking pine trees by detecting the volatile chemicals the stressed trees release, ecologist Elina Mäntylä of the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and colleagues reported in the September 2020 issue of Ecology and Evolution . All these results show bird olfaction “should not be ignored,” Mäntylä says. Driver adds that they might also point to a new form of natural pest control, in which farmers or foresters could treat threatened flora with chemicals that entice birds to come and gobble up invasive insects. Other studies suggest olfaction might guide social interactions between birds. Whittaker's team has focused on preen oil, which birds secrete from a gland at the base of the tail and rub onto their feathers. The oil's chemical composition reveals the bird's species, sex, aggressiveness, and reproductive state. Females produce much more of these odorous chemicals, Whittaker and her colleagues reported in January in the Journal of Chemical Ecology , suggesting they depend more on odors to communicate, lacking the flashy feathers and songs that males rely on. Use of these cues is “likely widespread,” says Steiger, now at the German chemical company BASF SE, “but simply not yet investigated well enough.” That's changing fast, as studies of bird olfaction expand into new species. Published papers on the topic have doubled every decade since 1992, reaching 80 this past year. The field is, belatedly, putting Audubon's misconception to rest and acknowledging that birds—champions of flight, vision, and song—have another power as well.

Photographs of boiling surface taken using a scanning electron microscope: indium tin oxide (upper left), copper oxide nanoleaf (upper right), zinc oxide nanowires (lower left), and porosity of silicon dioxide nanoparticles obtained layer by layer. Quality coating deposit (bottom right).Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Boiling is not just for warming a supper. It’s also to …

Chemical elements make up pretty much everything in the physical world. As of 2016, we know of 118 elements, all of which can be found categorized in the famous periodic table that hangs in every chemistry lab and classroom. Each element in the periodic table appears as a one-, two-letter abbreviation (e.g. O for oxygen, Al for aluminum) along with its atomic number, which shows how many protons there are in the element's nucleus. The number of protons is enormously important, as it also determines how many electrons orbit the nucleus, which essentially makes the element what it is and gives it its chemical properties.

Chemical reactions and phase transformations underpin phenomena ranging from cosmological processes, to the emergence of life on Earth, to modern technologies and are therefore of tremendous interest for both basic and applied sciences. Here I provide a review of recent advancements in the intersection between computational mathematics, material science & chemical engineering. Fast Fourier Transforms were used to label the data in an automated & reliable manner. Deep learning was used to map breeches in lattice periodicity to atomic defects in Mo-doped WS2 -- effectively identifying atomic defects in the data. A Gaussian Mixture Model was then used to probabilistically cluster defects.

The sorting of robotic recycling employs artificial intelligence and robotic materials so that people do not have to sort plastics. These firms use modern cameras and technology to sort recycling robots and minimise health concerns associated with human labour. Cameras and high-tech computing devices that are designed to sniff certain products will lead the arms of robots to their destination through conveyor belts. Enormous hands, with arms connecting sensors, can pull out the otherwise waste cans and put them into their conveyor belt with glass, plastic containers and other recyclables. Recycling robots continue to help people, but firms have discovered that they would work twice as effective as people.

Verve Ventures and Swisscom Ventures co-led the investment round and featured further support from ecoRobotix's previous investors, such as CapAgro, 4FO Ventures, and BASF Venture Capital. The ARA was developed in Y-parc, Yverdon-les-Bains, with the use of the state-of-the-art resources of Y-Start, an incubator for innovative new technologies. Lightweight and low cost, the ARA provides a more efficient plant-protection system for food producers than the current methods of weed spraying, using high speed cameras and machine learning to selectively spray weeds with a small dose of herbicide, accurate to areas as small as 3 8 cm. "ecoRobotix solutions not only assist producers in reducing their use of plant protection products by up to 95%, but also in lowering their operating costs. This enables the production of high-quality crops and non-contaminated food at affordable prices. Our health matters, from field to fork!" said Dominique Megret, Head of Swisscom Ventures.

In recent years, supply chains have become substantially more challenging to manage. Longer and increasingly interlinked physical flows reflect the rising complexity of product portfolios. Market volatility, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has elevated the need for agility and flexibility. And increased attention on the environmental impact of supply chains is triggering regionalization and the optimization of flows. As a result, companies and stakeholders have become more focused on supply-chain resilience.