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A team of scientists led by Yosuke Toda, Designated Assistant Professor at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM), Nagoya University, and Fumio Okura, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research,Osaka University, have developed a system which utilizes image analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically and precisely analyze the shape of large numbersof seeds from a single image. As the shape of the seed is an important agronomic trait that is closely linked to the yield and quality of crops, a method for automatically determining and evaluating suchfrom an image is an indispensable tool for plant breeding. However, creating the training dataset is laborious and time consuming, especially when the number of objects to annotate is as large as it is in the case of seeds. To date,it has been difficult to quickly and conveniently analyze the number of seeds of different crop species at once.

A research team led by North Carolina State University has engineered a new catalyst that can more efficiently convert ethane into ethylene, which is used in a variety of manufacturing processes.

A worldwide compilation of long-term insect abundance studies shows that the number of land-dwelling insects is in decline.

Scientists in Texas and Pennsylvania have identified a protein sensor that restricts how much sugar and fat our cells convert into energy during periods of starvation.

A new study led by McGill University has found that tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface can show varying degrees of roughness and could help explain why certain earthquakes are stronger than others.

Earthquakes happen when the rocks beneath the Earth’s surface break along geological fault lines and slide past each other. The properties of these faults - such as the roughness of their surface - can have an influence on the size of seismic events, however their study has been challenging because they are buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

In order to have a better understanding of the characteristics of these faults, researchers from McGill University, the University of California Santa Cruz and Ruhr University Bochum in Germany used high-resolution seismic reflection data to map and measure the roughness of 350 km2 of a plate boundary fault located off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

“We already knew that the roughness of a fault was an important factor, but we did not know how rough faults in the subsurface truly are, nor how variable the roughness is for a single fault,” says James Kirkpatrick, a professor in McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Read More: McGill University