Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is buried in adorable fluff balls in the classic 1967 episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles," on Star Trek: TOS. (credit: Paramount/CBS Television)

Chalk this one up to fun scientific papers we inexplicably missed last year. A group of undergraduates at the University of Leicester in the U.K. calculated the growth rate of the fictional Star Trek critters known as tribbles. They published their results in a short paper in the university's undergraduate-centric Journal of Physics Special Topics, estimating just how long it would take for there to be enough tribbles to fill up the USS Enterprise.

First aired on December 29, 1967, "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode was written by David Gerrold, then a 23-year-old college student in California. He originally envisioned it as a cautionary tale of ecological disaster—inspired in part by how quickly rabbits multiplied when they were first introduced to Australia in 1859, a region where they had no natural predators. However, over several rewrites, the tone evolved to incorporate more humor—much to the dismay of ST:TOS creator Gene Roddenberry, who thought the episode lacked gravitas. Roddenberry was ultimately proven wrong. The episode frequently ranks among the top ten best episodes of ST:TOS, if not the entire franchise.

In the episode, the Enterprise is charged with guarding a shipment of "quadrotriticale" grain to Sherman's Planet. While on shore leave, Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) is given a purring ball of fluff called a Tribble by interstellar trader Cyrano Jones (Stanley Adams) and brings it aboard the ship. The tribble quickly reproduces, and its offspring reproduce in turn.

Enlarge / Here, have some antibiotics. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Biochemists have had some success at designing drugs to match specific targets. But much of drug development remains an arduous grind, screening hundreds to thousands of chemicals for a "hit" that has the effect you're looking for. There have been several attempts to perform this grind in silico, using computers to analyze chemicals, but they've had mixed results. Now, a US-Canadian team is reporting that it's modified a neural network to handle chemistry and used it to identify a potential new antibiotic.

Artificial neurons meet chemicals

Two factors have a major influence on the success of neural networks: the structure of the network itself, and the training it undergoes. In this case, the training was pretty minimalist. The research team did the training using a group of 1,760 drugs that were previously approved by the US FDA, along with another 800 or so natural products. Most of these aren't antibiotics; they target a variety of conditions and are made up of largely unrelated molecules. The researchers simply tested whether these slowed down the growth of E. coli. Even though many of them were partially effective, the researchers set a cutoff and used that to provide a yes or no answer.

This approach does have some advantages in that it shouldn't bias the resulting neural network for any particular chemical structure. But with a dataset that small, it's likely that some specific functional chemical groups were left out of the training set entirely. Success was also very rare, with only 120 molecules coming in above the cutoff. And, since the cutoff was a binary "works" or "doesn't work," the network had no way of identifying trends that could help it project what chemicals might be more active.

Enlarge (credit: NOAA)

We’re off to a hot start in 2020, with January setting a new mark as the warmest instance of that month on record for the globe. And as NOAA pointed out in its monthly summary released Thursday, that occurred without the warming influence of an El Niño in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, where conditions remain neutral.

Few places around the world had a cool month, with much of India and Alaska/Western Canada providing exceptions. Europe through to northern Asia was particularly warm, and January ranked fifth warmest over the contiguous US. This was largely due to remarkably tight circulation of the “polar vortex,” which helped keep Arctic air bottled up north of the mid-latitudes.

For the US, the weather pattern was dominated by an area of low pressure around Alaska and high pressure off the coast of California. Alaska and western Canada stayed colder in this pattern, which also funneled moisture over the Pacific Northwest while keeping the US Southwest dry. In the middle of the month, the low pressure shifted east for a bit, bringing just enough cool air over the central US to produce a fair bit of precipitation.

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  This is the LED set used for The Mandalorian. [credit: ILM ]

Industrial Light and Magic has published a behind-the-scenes video on the production of Disney+'s The Mandalorian that gives an illuminating look at two of the biggest, high-tech trends in film and TV production: LED sets, and using game engines to create scenes. The video explains a major shift in virtual filmmaking that is unknown to most viewers.

It has historically been impractical to achieve the production values seen in The Mandalorian in TV series, because the kind of visual effects work necessary simply takes more time than a TV production schedule allows. Generally, special effects-driven productions shoot scenes with actors and props in front of a green screen, and then teams add in the background environments and any computer-generated objects in a lengthy post-production period.

That's not how things worked on The Mandalorian. Executive Producer Jon Favreau, Industrial Light and Magic, and game engine-maker Epic Games collaborated to use the Unreal Engine to pre-render scenes then display them as parallax images on giant LED walls and an LED ceiling in a 21-by-75-feet digital set. It's part of a lineage of production techniques and tools developed by Favreau's teams called StageCraft. This approach offered numerous benefits.