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DENA HEADLEE: The continued spread of worldwide
hunger and the cost of food are expected to increase in the
coming years. Researchers are working hard to find ways to
increase crop yields. A National Science Foundation-funded team
of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has found a
way to harness Mother Nature. They discovered a set of gene
variations that can boost fruit production in the tomato plant
by as much as 100 percent. Team leader Zachary Lippman says this
genetic toolkit will enable plant breeders to combine
different gene variants among the set by customizing and
creating the perfect plant structure for particular
varieties and growing conditions. By fine-tuning the
balance between florigen and anti-florigen, hormones that
control vegetative growth and flowering in tomatoes, breeders
will have a powerful new toolkit for achieving previously
unattainable increases in plant production. Today, approximately
10 million children have difficulties learning to read.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University are hoping their new
computer model will help someday. The team has identified
what different regions of the brain are doing when people
read. They performed functional magnetic resonance imaging scans
of eight people as they read. Studying the scan cubic
millimeter by cubic millimeter over a full chapter of reading
resulted in the first integrated computational model of reading.
The model identified which parts of the brain are responsible for
analyzing sentences, determining the meaning of words and
understanding the relationships between characters. Exactly how
the brain creates this neural encoding is still a mystery, the
team says, but the model is the beginning of understanding what
the brain is doing when a person reads. While it still needs fine
tuning, the team thinks the model might someday be useful in
studying and diagnosing reading disorders, such as dyslexia, or
to track the recovery of patients whose speech was
impaired by a stroke. More than 1.6 million people in the U.S.
have some type of limb loss issue. While powered lower limb
prosthetics hold promise for improving the mobility of
amputees, errors in the technology may also cause some
users to stumble and fall. National Science
Foundation-funded researchers at North Carolina State University
are working to find ways to make a more reliable prosthesis. The
team is developing technology that translates electrical
signals in human muscles into user intent that further
controls powered prosthetic limbs; such as decoding muscle
signals to tell a prosthetic leg that it needs to walk forward or
step up onto a staircase. The team had study subjects use a
customized prosthetic device that was programmed to make
decoding errors and monitored their movement in the lab. They
found that while some unnoticeable errors occurred,
the critical errors were characterized by large
"mechanical work change," meaning prosthetic limb thought
it had to do significantly more or less work than the user
intended. The result was an unstable prosthesis that caused
the user to lose their balance or fall. The team hopes to find
ways to limit the mechanical work change, making the
prosthetics more efficient, reliable, and safe to use. In
2012, Costa Rica was pummeled by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake, one
of the strongest ever to hit the Central American nation. Without
enough advance warning, natural disasters like this can be
devastating. A National Science Foundation-funded international
team of scientists lead by the University of South Florida has
found a way to help better forecast the size of future
disasters like this. The team found that subtle shifts in the
earth's offshore plates can be a harbinger of the size of the
earthquake or tsunamis. The geological phenomenon called
"slow slip events," identified just 15 years ago, is a useful
tool in spotting the precursors for major earthquakes and the
resulting tsunamis. Slow slip events are caused by motion on
faults but unlike earthquakes, they release their energy
slowly, over weeks or months. These events can't be felt or
even recorded by conventional seismographs. USF geologist Tim
Dixon and his team used high precision GPS to measure the
slight shifts on a fault line in Costa Rica. The GPS recorded
numerous slow slip events in the decade leading up to the 2012
earthquake. The team says these slow slip events may have
released much of the stress and strain that would normally
occur, resulting only in a small tsunami following the quake. The
team believes that better monitoring of these small events
can lead to better understanding of maximum size and risk
associated with future earthquakes and tsunamis.
For more information about these stories, visit us at NSF.gov.
This is NSF Science Now, I'm Dena Headlee.
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