Learning is always creative

Education should learn from artists who have embraced artificial intelligence rather than seeing it purely in negative terms. AI has the potential t

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No one had ever seen one virus latching onto another virus, until anomalous sequencing results sent a UMBC team down a rabbit hole leading to a first-of-its-kind discovery. It's known that some viruses, called satellites, depend not only on their host organism to complete their life cycle, but also on another virus, known as a "helper," explains Ivan Erill, professor of biological sciences. The satellite virus needs the helper either to build its capsid, a protective shell that encloses the virus's genetic material, or to help it replicate its DNA. These viral relationships require the satellite and the helper to be in proximity to each other at least temporarily, but there were no known cases of a satellite actually attaching itself to a helper—until now. In a paper published in The ISME Journal, a UMBC team and colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) describe the first observation of a satellite bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacterial cells) consistently attaching to a helper bacteriophage at its "neck"—where the capsid joins the tail of the virus. In detailed electron microscopy images taken by Tagide deCarvalho, assistant director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences Core Facilities and first author on the new paper, 80 percent (40 out of 50) helpers had a satellite bound at the neck. Some of those that did not had remnant satellite tendrils present at the neck. Erill, senior author on the paper, describes them as appearing like "bite marks." "When I saw it, I was like, I can't believe this," deCarvalho says. "No one has ever seen a bacteriophage—or any other virus—attach to another virus."

A long-term virus relationship

After the initial observations, Elia Mascolo, a graduate student in Erill 's research group and co-first author on the paper, analyzed the genomes of the satellite, helper, and host, which revealed further clues about this never-before-seen viral relationship. Most satellite viruses contain a gene that allows them to integrate into the host cell's genetic material after they enter the cell. This allows the satellite to reproduce whenever a helper happens to enter the cell from then on. The host cell also copies the satellite's DNA along with its own when it divides. A bacteriophage sample from WashU also contained a helper and a satellite. The WashU satellite has a gene for integration and does not directly attach to its helper, similar to previously observed satellite-helper systems. However, the satellite in UMBC's sample, named MiniFlayer by the students who isolated it, is the first known case of a satellite with no gene for integration. Because it can't integrate into the host cell's DNA, it must be near its helper—named MindFlayer—every time it enters a host cell if it is going to survive. Given that, although the team did not directly prove this explanation, "attaching now made total sense," Erill says, "because otherwise, how are you going to guarantee that you are going to enter into the cell at the same time?" Additional bioinformatics analysis by Mascolo and Julia López-Pérez, another Ph.D. student working with Erill, revealed that MindFlayer and MiniFlayer have been co-evolving for a long time. "This satellite has been tuning in and optimizing its genome to be associated with the helper for, I would say, at least 100 million years," Erill says, which suggests there may be many more cases of this kind of relationship waiting to be discovered.

Original research published in ISME (October 31, 2023):

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-023-01548-0 

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Creativity is core to the human experience. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas and new paths of creative possibilities. However, ideas provided by GenAI may also anchor a human creator, resulting in less creative output. Here, we study for the first time the causal impact of GenAI on the production of a creative output, focusing on the creation of short stories. In an online experimental study, some writers are offered the opportunity to obtain ideas for a story from a GenAI platform.

We find that access to GenAI ideas causes an increase in the writer’s creativity by 8% to 9% over stories written by human writers with no GenAI assistance, as assessed by third party evaluators. Stories written with access to GenAI ideas are considered to be better written and more enjoyable, with improvements of up to 22% to 26% among less creative writers.

Despite more positive subjective evaluations, an analysis using embeddings of the texts demonstrates that stories by writers with GenAI access are more similar to each other—and to the initial GenAI idea—than stories by humans alone. Consequently, stories produced by writers with GenAI assistance are viewed less as reflecting the author’s own ideas.

Our experiment is designed for causal inference rather than a personalized writing experience, suggesting that further development in GenAI may be able to push the boundaries of human creativity further. Our results have direct implications for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners interested in bolstering human creativity in all sectors of the economy.

A blog to share ideas about innovative, real, and relevant learning.

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With a remarkable observational campaign that involved 12 telescopes both on the ground and in space, including three European Southern Observatory (ESO) facilities, astronomers have uncovered the strange behaviour of a pulsar, a super-fast-spinning dead star. This mysterious object is known to switch between two brightness modes almost constantly, something that until now has been an enigma. But astronomers have now found that sudden ejections of matter from the pulsar over very short periods are responsible for the peculiar switches.

“We have witnessed extraordinary cosmic events where enormous amounts of matter, similar to cosmic cannonballs, are launched into space within a very brief time span of tens of seconds from a small, dense celestial object rotating at incredibly high speeds,” says Maria Cristina Baglio, researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi, affiliated with the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and the lead author of the paper published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. 

A pulsar is a fast-rotating, magnetic, dead star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation into space. As it rotates, this beam sweeps across the cosmos — much like a lighthouse beam scanning its surroundings — and is detected by astronomers as it intersects the line of sight to Earth. This makes the star appear to pulse in brightness as seen from our planet. PSR J1023+0038, or J1023 for short, is a special type of pulsar with a bizarre behaviour. Located about 4500 light-years away in the Sextans constellation, it closely orbits another star. Over the past decade, the pulsar has been actively pulling matter off this companion, which accumulates in a disc around the pulsar and slowly falls towards it. 

Since this process of accumulating matter began, the sweeping beam virtually vanished and the pulsar started incessantly switching between two modes. In the ‘high’ mode, the pulsar gives off bright X-rays, ultraviolet and visible light, while in the ‘low’ mode it’s dimmer at these frequencies and emits more radio waves. The pulsar can stay in each mode for several seconds or minutes, and then switch to the other mode in just a few seconds. This switching has thus far puzzled astronomers.  

"Our unprecedented observing campaign to understand this pulsar’s behaviour involved a dozen cutting-edge ground-based and space-borne telescopes," says Francesco Coti Zelati, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences, Barcelona, Spain, and co-lead author of the paper. The campaign included ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT), which detected visible and near-infrared light, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner.

Over two nights in June 2021, they observed the system make over 280 switches between its high and low modes. 

“We have discovered that the mode switching stems from an intricate interplay between the pulsar wind, a flow of high-energy particles blowing away from the pulsar, and matter flowing towards the pulsar,” says Coti Zelati, who is also affiliated with INAF.

In the low mode, matter flowing towards the pulsar is expelled in a narrow jet perpendicular to the disc. Gradually, this matter accumulates closer and closer to the pulsar and, as this happens, it is hit by the wind blowing from the pulsating star, causing the matter to heat up. The system is now in a high mode, glowing brightly in the X-ray, ultraviolet and visible light. Eventually, blobs of this hot matter are removed by the pulsar via the jet. With less hot matter in the disc, the system glows less brightly, switching back into the low mode.

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