This study examined the relationship between the slope of a terrain and vegetation, measured by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). It was hypothesized that lower slope ranges would be more supportive of vegetation growth than higher slope ranges. Analysis showed that no slope (even as extreme as 85–90°) prohibits the growth of vegetation completely; even the steepest slopes examined contain plant life. Knowing that steep slopes can still support plant life, agriculturalists can begin to explore and start planting additional crops and plants at these extreme slopes.
The disinterested willingness a person has for helping others is known as altruism. But is this willingness to help others dependent on external factors that make you more or less inclined to be generous? We hypothesized that generosity in adolescents would depend on external factors and that these factors would change the amount of help given. To evaluate altruism and generosity, we conducted non-anonymous and anonymous variations of the dictator game and ultimatum game experiments and explored the role of anonymity, fairness, and reciprocity in high school students.
One-third of the world's people do not have access to clean drinking water. Nadella and Nadella tackle this issue by testing a low-cost filtration system for removing heavy metal and bacteria from water.
In this study, the authors investigate whether phototaxis and odortaxis in Drosophila melanogaster occurs through linear summation of cues including light and attractive odorants.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, with approximately 300,000 diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023. It ranks second in cancer-related deaths for women, after lung cancer with nearly 50,000 deaths. Scientists have identified important genetic mutations in genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 that lead to the development of breast cancer, but previous studies were limited as they focused on specific populations. To overcome limitations, diverse populations and powerful statistical methods like genome-wide association studies and whole-genome sequencing are needed. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can be used in oncology and breast cancer research to overcome these limitations of specificity as it can analyze datasets of diagnosed patients by providing interpretable explanations for identified patterns and predictions. This project aims to achieve technological and medicinal goals by using advanced algorithms to identify breast cancer subtypes for faster diagnoses. Multiple methods were utilized to develop an efficient algorithm. We hypothesized that an XAI approach would be best as it can assign scores to genes, specifically with a 90% success rate. To test that, we ran multiple trials utilizing XAI methods through the identification of class-specific and patient-specific key genes. We found that the study demonstrated a pipeline that combines multiple XAI techniques to identify potential biomarker genes for breast cancer with a 95% success rate.
During transfer of organs from a donor to a patient, the organs deteriorate in part due to damage by free radicals. Application of antioxidant solutions could extend organ preservation times. The authors found that vitamin E and butylated hydroxytoluene seemed to be most effective in arresting cell damage of a bovine lung.
Clean drinking water is an essential component to maintaining public health. The authors of this study tested the bacterial load of water from three different disinfection and filtration systems in order to determine which system might be superior.
Middle school math forms the basis for advanced mathematical courses leading up to the university level. Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to power next-generation educational technologies, acting as digital tutors to students. The main objective of this study was to determine whether LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama 2 can serve as reliable middle school math tutoring assistants on three tutoring tasks: hint generation, comprehensive solution, and exercise creation.
As the world moves towards more eco-friendly methods for chemical synthesis, there's a strong interest in employing enzymes in chemical synthetic processes. Here, the authors explore how the activity of enzymes such as trypsin, lipase and nattokinase is affected by the electronic effects of the substrate they are acting on.
