Microbeads are small plastic spheres less than 0.5 mm in size that are added to personal care and…
Brown bears digging up artificial forests – Technology Org
According to a new study, brown bears foraging for food in the Shiretoko Peninsula of Hokkaido, Japan, have…
Reducing pesticide use while increasing effectiveness
Farming can be a low-margin, high-risk business, subject to weather and climate patterns, insect population cycles, and other unpredictable factors. Farmers need to be savvy managers of the many resources they deal, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides are among their major recurring expenses.
Despite the importance of these chemicals, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to their runoff into waterways and buildup up in the soil.
That could change, thanks to a new approach of feedback-optimized spraying, invented by AgZen, an MIT spinout founded in 2020 by Professor Kripa Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22.
AgZen has developed a system for farming that can monitor exactly how much of the sprayed chemicals adheres to plants, in real time, as the sprayer drives through a field. Built-in software running on a tablet shows the operator exactly how much of each leaf has been covered by the spray.
Over the past decade, AgZen’s founders have developed products and technologies to control the interactions of droplets and sprays with plant surfaces. The Boston-based venture-backed company launched a new commercial product in 2024 and is currently piloting another related product. Field tests of both have shown the products can help farmers spray more efficiently and effectively, using fewer chemicals overall.
“Worldwide, farms spend approximately $60 billion a year on pesticides. Our objective is to reduce the number of pesticides sprayed and lighten the financial burden on farms without sacrificing effective pest management,” Varanasi says.
Getting droplets to stick
While the world pesticide market is growing rapidly, a lot of the pesticides sprayed don’t reach their target. A significant portion bounces off the plant surfaces, lands on the ground, and becomes part of the runoff that flows to streams and rivers, often causing serious pollution. Some of these pesticides can be carried away by wind over very long distances.
“Drift, runoff, and poor application efficiency are well-known, longstanding problems in agriculture, but we can fix this by controlling and monitoring how sprayed droplets interact with leaves,” Varanasi says.
With support from MIT Tata Center and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, Varanasi and his team analyzed how droplets strike plant surfaces, and explored ways to increase application efficiency. This research led them to develop a novel system of nozzles that cloak droplets with compounds that enhance the retention of droplets on the leaves, a product they call EnhanceCoverage.
Field studies across regions — from Massachusetts to California to Italy and France —showed that this droplet-optimization system could allow farmers to cut the amount of chemicals needed by more than half because more of the sprayed substances would stick to the leaves.
Measuring coverage
However, in trying to bring this technology to market, the researchers faced a sticky problem: Nobody knew how well pesticide sprays were adhering to the plants in the first place, so how could AgZen say that the coverage was better with its new EnhanceCoverage system?
“I had grown up spraying with a backpack on a small farm in India, so I knew this was an issue,” Jayaprakash says. “When we spoke to growers, they told me how complicated spraying is when you’re on a large machine. Whenever you spray, there are so many things that can influence how effective your spray is. How fast do you drive the sprayer? What flow rate are you using for the chemicals? What chemical are you using? What’s the age of the plants, what’s the nozzle you’re using, what is the weather at the time? All these things influence agrochemical efficiency.”
Agricultural spraying essentially comes down to dissolving a chemical in water and then spraying droplets onto the plants. “But the interaction between a droplet and the leaf is complex,” Varanasi says. “We were coming in with ways to optimize that, but what the growers told us is, hey, we’ve never even really looked at that in the first place.”
Although farmers have been spraying agricultural chemicals on a large scale for about 80 years, they’ve “been forced to rely on general rules of thumb and pick all these interlinked parameters, based on what’s worked for them in the past. You pick a set of these parameters, you go spray, and you’re basically praying for outcomes in terms of how effective your pest control is,” Varanasi says.
Before AgZen could sell farmers on the new system to improve droplet coverage, the company had to invent a way to measure precisely how much spray was adhering to plants in real-time.
Comparing before and after
The system they came up with, which they tested extensively on farms across the country last year, involves a unit that can be bolted onto the spraying arm of virtually any sprayer. It carries two sensor stacks, one just ahead of the sprayer nozzles and one behind. Then, built-in software running on a tablet shows the operator exactly how much of each leaf has been covered by the spray. It also computes how much those droplets will spread out or evaporate, leading to a precise estimate of the final coverage.
“There’s a lot of physics that governs how droplets spread and evaporate, and this has been incorporated into software that a farmer can use,” Varanasi says. “We bring a lot of our expertise into understanding droplets on leaves. All these factors, like how temperature and humidity influence coverage, have always been nebulous in the spraying world. But now you have something that can be exact in determining how well your sprays are doing.”
“We’re not only measuring coverage, but then we recommend how to act,” says Jayaprakash, who is AgZen’s CEO. “With the information we collect in real-time and by using AI, RealCoverage tells operators how to optimize everything on their sprayer, from which nozzle to use, to how fast to drive, to how many gallons of spray is best for a particular chemical mix on a particular acre of a crop.”
The tool was developed to prove how much AgZen’s EnhanceCoverage nozzle system (which will be launched in 2025) improves coverage. But it turns out that monitoring and optimizing droplet coverage on leaves in real-time with this system can itself yield major improvements.
“We worked with large commercial farms last year in specialty and row crops,” Jayaprakash says. “When we saved our pilot customers up to 50 percent of their chemical cost at a large scale, they were very surprised.” He says the tool has reduced chemical costs and volume in fallow field burndowns, weed control in soybeans, defoliation in cotton, and fungicide and insecticide sprays in vegetables and fruits. Along with data from commercial farms, field trials conducted by three leading agricultural universities have also validated these results.
“Across the board, we were able to save between 30 and 50 percent on chemical costs and increase crop yields by enabling better pest control,” Jayaprakash says. “By focusing on the droplet-leaf interface, our product can help any foliage spray throughout the year, whereas most technological advancements in this space recently have been focused on reducing herbicide use alone.” The company now intends to lease the system across thousands of acres this year.
And these efficiency gains can lead to significant returns at scale, he emphasizes: In the U.S., farmers currently spend $16 billion a year on chemicals, to protect about $200 billion of crop yields.
The company launched its first product, the coverage optimization system called RealCoverage, this year, reaching a wide variety of farms with different crops and in different climates. “We’re going from proof-of-concept with pilots in large farms to a truly massive scale on a commercial basis with our lease-to-own program,” Jayaprakash says.
“We’ve also been tapped by the USDA to help them evaluate practices to minimize pesticides in watersheds,” Varanasi says, noting that RealCoverage can also be useful for regulators, chemical companies, and agricultural equipment manufacturers.
Once AgZen has proven the effectiveness of using coverage as a decision metric, and after the RealCoverage optimization system is widely in practice, the company will next roll out its second product, EnhanceCoverage, designed to maximize droplet adhesion. Because that system will require replacing all the nozzles on a sprayer, the researchers are doing pilots this year but will wait for a full rollout in 2025, after farmers have gained experience and confidence with their initial product.
“There is so much wastage,” Varanasi says. “Yet farmers must spray to protect crops, and there is a lot of environmental impact from this. So, after all this work over the years, learning about how droplets stick to surfaces and so on, now the culmination of it in all these products for me is amazing, to see all this come alive, to see that we’ll finally be able to solve the problem we set out to solve and help farmers.”
Headpix Review: The Best AI Headshots for Professionals?
In today’s digital world, there’s no question that first impressions matter, especially for business professionals. Whether you want to land new clients or attract a new job, a professional, high-quality headshot has never been more important! As someone testing the best AI headshot generators, I recently…
How Global Dealmakers are Leveraging AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI), including generative AI (GenAI), is rapidly revolutionizing business processes and challenging traditional operational models across industries. The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry is no exception. Large language models (LLM) and GenAI are particularly well-suited to support industries reliant on processing and analyzing vast…
A Silent Evolution in AI: The Rise of Compound AI Systems Beyond Traditional AI Models
As we navigate the recent artificial intelligence (AI) developments, a subtle but significant transition is underway, moving from the reliance on standalone AI models like large language models (LLMs) to the more nuanced and collaborative compound AI systems like AlphaGeometry and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system….
Overwatch Actress Anjali Bhimani Talks Symmetra, D&D, and Making Art For Herself
From theater productions on and off Broadway to TV shows like Ms. Marvel, actress Anjali Bhimani has done a bit of everything, but readers of Game Informer most likely recognize her work voice acting in video games. She’s best known as Symmetra in Overwatch, which is a game role many young voice actors would strive their entire careers to get. Bhimani lucked out; it was the first time she ever acted in a game.
“All I knew is I’m doing the new game for Blizzard,” Bhimani says. “And I knew that Blizzard was, you know, no slouch. They’ve done a lot of really cool things before, so chances were this was gonna be really cool. But I had no idea. I don’t think anyone really did.”
Symmetra in Overwatch
While Symmetra was originally crafted by a room of writers, Bhimani does say there was an element of collaboration between her and the creative team as they figured out Symmetra’s voice. She likened it to her time in theater – the early sessions spent building the character were like a rehearsal period. Months later, when the game launched, it was like opening night.
The rest is history. Overwatch became a huge success, thanks in large part to its colorful cast of now-iconic characters voiced by excellent voice talent. Bhimani found a lot of success in this niche, but why did it take her two decades to enter the scene in the first place?
“I was a gamer from a very early age,” she recalls. “And then there was a period of time that I refer to as ‘the dark days of gaming’ when I was like, ‘I should be more serious and not into games.’ I don’t know why I ever did that.”
Overwatch’s reception from its newfound massive community encouraged Bhimani to engage with the medium in earnest again. Since then, she’s been able to appear in all sorts of games, including Apex Legends (where she plays Rampart) and NPCs in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Starfield, and Diablo IV.
Bhimani volunteers to roll during an episode of Candela Obscura
This re-entry into the world of games wasn’t limited to the screen, however. After encountering Critical Role stars Matt Mercer and Marisha Ray at an Overwatch meetup, Bhimani professed her love for Dungeons & Dragons, which she’d played as a child. She did a rundown of her history for me, as well.
“My brother, in one of his many moments of genius, gifted me a basic set when I was eight, and I fell in love with it,” she tells me. “So I did the first, like, solo adventure in the book. And I was like, ‘Wait, that’s it? I need more. I want to do more.’ So I bogarted his second edition books, devoured them, [and] started playing with friends in school. And that was pretty much that; it was it off to the races, you know? We would play as often as we could.”
Post-high school it was harder for her to find a group, especially in an era where the game wasn’t as mainstream as it is now. But upon meeting and befriending Mercer and Ray, Bhimani had found a group to play with again, eventually collaborating with them years later. Her return to tabletop RPGs was just like her return to video games in two ways: she returned as a performer, doing actual play one-shots and miniseries, and now that she was back, she wondered why she ever stopped playing in the first place.
After a few years playing at tables for both Critical Role and Dimension 20, two of the biggest D&D shows out there, Bhimani and some colleagues made the move to start their own show: DesiQuest. It’s a simple concept: a story set in a South Asian-inspired fantasy world told by an entirely South Asian cast. Bhimani says she first heard the pitch from Jasmine Bhullar, a dungeon master in the space, years before the project was formally in the works.
“When I first met Jasmine, we were doing a one-shot for Critical Role, and she said, […] ‘You know, getting to play with another Indian person is so rare. I really wish that we could sit at the table with all Indian people and do something like that.’ I was like, ‘Dude, sign me up.'” Unfortunately, the pandemic hit, and the project was put on hold. A few years later, she was contacted by producers Sandeep Parikh and Anand Shah to see if she would be interested in joining the project. “They were starting to pitch it to me,” Bhimani laughs. “And I was like, ‘Oh, I said yes to this years ago before you got involved, like yeah, let’s go.'”
All of these recent projects create a bit of a theme with Bhimani’s recent career, and it’s one she’s well aware of. She says in recent years, she’s learned to ask herself, “Hey, are you creating art just because it’s what other people want, or are you creating what you want to be creating?”
“It’s a weird conundrum to be,” she continues. “There’s this weird paradox. Because on one hand, you have to create things that you want to create, regardless of what other people think. But on the other hand, you also want to create things that people are actually going to see and take in and enjoy.
“I think the inspiration to create something is so pure, and [you should find] a way to make sure that, while you are making it for other people, you are not molding it into a shape just because you think that’s what they want to see.”
WWE 2K24 Review – Another Strong Push – Game Informer
WWE 2K24 leverages WrestleMania’s impending 40-year milestone to celebrate the event, and it proves to be a party worth attending. Enjoyable additions and smart improvements bolster its steadily improving formula, making it the strongest in-ring outing since the series’ return.
2K24’s control scheme remains largely unchanged from 2K23 but boasts neat new mechanics, such as the trading blows mini-game. This gamification of the back-and-forth “boo/yay” punch trope adds a fun wrinkle to combat. Other well-worn in-ring moments to receive attention include setting up big dives onto a mob of opponents; I rarely use it, but it’s nice to have. That sentiment applies to the game’s new match types: Casket, Ambulance, and Special Guest Referee. I’m generally lukewarm on these stipulations in real life and I won’t be rushing to play them often here, but they’re replicated well. I especially like how Special Referee sports a meter that limits ref shenanigans to keep it from being totally one-sided should you face a crooked official. It also fosters strategic cheating for the player in stripes.
A staggering roster of over 200 Superstars out of the box varies from pretty good to spot-on in the looker department. I also appreciate smaller presentational touches, such as having real-life referees like Charles Robinson and Jessika Carr appear for the first time. Regardless of whose boots you wear, playing 2K24 remains a largely good hands-on experience, even if some moves could stand to be less mechanically dense. Forgetting all of the offensive options at your disposal is easy, but a robust tutorial helps simplify this learning curve. Existing match stipulations remain entertaining whether playing alone or online, though the latter destination is, at publishing, a tricky proposition thanks to spotty connections.
[embedded content]
Showcase mode allows players to relive iconic bouts throughout the first 39 WrestleManias. Taking into account wrestlers who can’t appear due to current employment in rival organizations or for being generally problematic, it’s a strong curation of matches. Corey Graves’ commentary during transitions to real footage adds a nice touch compared to last year’s silent cutscenes. I also love that button prompts for objectives now appear on-screen, reducing trips to the menu screen to figure out how to execute a specific maneuver. Showcases’ wacky finale isn’t quite as memorable as last year’s big twist, but the mode is an overall improvement over 2K23’s rendition and a great celebration of WrestleMania that inspires me to rewatch my favorite matches from the event.
The dual story-driven journeys of MyRise present more narrative forks stemming from pivotal decision-making moments. Whether you play an indie legend navigating the mainstream waters of WWE or build the credibility of a low-card act chaotically thrust into the World Title picture, I like how choices pack more meaningful engagement to their overall enjoyable tales. It’s delightfully silly at points, and I also like seeing characters and plot points from last year’s MyRise reappear here, adding a welcomed continuity to 2K’s alternate WWE universe. Thankfully, created characters and unlockables finally carry over into more modes, adding deeper returns to my investment in MyRise.
MyGM, a personal favorite destination, remains a good time bolstered by expanded match types, GMs, talent interactions, and other options. It also feels more strategic now that you can level up individual talent by placing them in certain matches and negotiate Superstar trades between brands each season. Although Universe mode is less my jam, I’m happy to see the giant sandbox sim get options such as Money in the Bank cash-ins and run-ins, plus more cutscenes that add to its TV-like presentation. The card-collecting-themed MyFaction has never been my cup of tea, and 2K24 doesn’t change this, but it’s nice to see it receive more depth in match types and competitive multiplayer options. The already stellar creation suite sports additional items to build the coolest – or silliest – Superstars, arenas, entrances, or championships you can concoct, but don’t expect any major changes to its reliable template. That last point applies to nearly all of 2K24’s offerings: good iterations of an established formula.
2K24 sees Visual Concepts layer on quality new bricks to WWE 2K’s strong foundation while sanding away some rough edges. The series has settled into an exceptional, if very familiar, blueprint, and I would love to see a bigger shake-up in the future, but the result offers the best package since the franchise returned in 2022. If you’re a curious fan who’s held off on jumping back into the digital ring, 2K24 is as good an argument as any to shake off the ring rust. For diehard enthusiasts, this year’s entry won’t bowl you over in the broad sense, but its incremental updates and continued polish make it a worthy contender for another year.
Exploring the cellular neighborhood
Cells rely on complex molecular machines composed of protein assemblies to perform essential functions such as energy production, gene expression, and protein synthesis. To better understand how these machines work, scientists capture snapshots of them by isolating proteins from cells and using various methods to determine their structures. However, isolating proteins from cells also removes them from the context of their native environment, including protein interaction partners and cellular location.
Recently, cryogenic electron tomography (cryo-ET) has emerged as a way to observe proteins in their native environment by imaging frozen cells at different angles to obtain three-dimensional structural information. This approach is exciting because it allows researchers to directly observe how and where proteins associate with each other, revealing the cellular neighborhood of those interactions within the cell.
With the technology available to image proteins in their native environment, MIT graduate student Barrett Powell wondered if he could take it one step further: What if molecular machines could be observed in action? In a paper published March 8 in Nature Methods, Powell describes the method he developed, called tomoDRGN, for modeling structural differences of proteins in cryo-ET data that arise from protein motions or proteins binding to different interaction partners. These variations are known as structural heterogeneity.
Although Powell had joined the lab of MIT associate professor of biology Joey Davis as an experimental scientist, he recognized the potential impact of computational approaches in understanding structural heterogeneity within a cell. Previously, the Davis Lab developed a related methodology named cryoDRGN to understand structural heterogeneity in purified samples. As Powell and Davis saw cryo-ET rising in prominence in the field, Powell took on the challenge of re-imagining this framework to work in cells.
When solving structures with purified samples, each particle is imaged only once. By contrast, cryo-ET data is collected by imaging each particle more than 40 times from different angles. That meant tomoDRGN needed to be able to merge the information from more than 40 images, which was where the project hit a roadblock: the amount of data led to an information overload.
To address this, Powell successfully rebuilt the cryoDRGN model to prioritize only the highest-quality data. When imaging the same particle multiple times, radiation damage occurs. The images acquired earlier, therefore, tend to be of higher quality because the particles are less damaged.
“By excluding some of the lower-quality data, the results were actually better than using all of the data — and the computational performance was substantially faster,” Powell says.
Just as Powell was beginning work on testing his model, he had a stroke of luck: The authors of a groundbreaking new study that visualized, for the first time, ribosomes inside cells at near-atomic resolution, shared their raw data on the Electric Microscopy Public Image Archive (EMPIAR). This dataset was an exemplary test case for Powell, through which he demonstrated that tomoDRGN could uncover structural heterogeneity within cryo-ET data.
According to Powell, one exciting result is what tomoDRGN found surrounding a subset of ribosomes in the EMPIAR dataset. Some of the ribosomal particles were associated with a bacterial cell membrane and engaged in a process called cotranslational translocation. This occurs when a protein is being simultaneously synthesized and transported across a membrane. Researchers can use this result to make new hypotheses about how the ribosome functions with other protein machinery integral to transporting proteins outside of the cell, now guided by a structure of the complex in its native environment.
After seeing that tomoDRGN could resolve structural heterogeneity from a structurally diverse dataset, Powell was curious: How small of a population could tomoDRGN identify? For that test, he chose a protein named apoferritin, which is a commonly used benchmark for cryo-ET and is often treated as structurally homogeneous. Ferritin is a protein used for iron storage and is referred to as apoferritin when it lacks iron.
Surprisingly, in addition to the expected particles, tomoDRGN revealed a minor population of ferritin particles — with iron bound — making up just 2 percent of the dataset, that was not previously reported. This result further demonstrated tomoDRGN’s ability to identify structural states that occur so infrequently that they would be averaged out of a 3D reconstruction.
Powell and other members of the Davis Lab are excited to see how tomoDRGN can be applied to further ribosomal studies and to other systems. Davis works on understanding how cells assemble, regulate, and degrade molecular machines, so the next steps include exploring ribosome biogenesis within cells in greater detail using this new tool.
“What are the possible states that we may be losing during purification?” Davis asks. “Perhaps more excitingly, we can look at how they localize within the cell and what partners and protein complexes they may be interacting with.”