How to quell a cytokine storm: New ways to dampen an overactive immune system

BRCA—the family of DNA-repair proteins associated with breast, ovarian prostate, and pancreatic cancers—interacts with a multipart, molecular complex that is also responsible for regulating the immune system. When certain players in this pathway go awry, autoimmune disorders, like lupus, can arise. Now, researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, have deciphered the structure of the complex and have found new molecular targets for fighting autoimmunity. Their findings are published this week in Nature.

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Three convolutional neural network models for facial expression recognition in the wild

Two researchers at Shanghai University of Electric Power have recently developed and evaluated new neural network models for facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild. Their study, published in Elsevier's Neurocomputing journal, presents three models of convolutional neural networks (CNNs): a Light-CNN, a dual-branch CNN and a pre-trained CNN.

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Thinning forests, prescribed fire before drought reduced tree loss

Thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns may help preserve trees in future droughts and bark beetle epidemics expected under climate change, suggests a study from the University of California, Davis.

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Italy team cheers robot pulling a passenger plane

This four-legged robot has pull—3 tons of it—and its engineers were proud to show it off on May 23 as rugged and powerful as it is.

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A quicker eye for robotics to help in our cluttered, human environments

In a step toward home-helper robots that can quickly navigate unpredictable and disordered spaces, University of Michigan researchers have developed an algorithm that lets machines perceive their environments orders of magnitude faster than similar previous approaches.

* This article was originally published here