GoKawiilResearchers are racing to safeguard coffee from climate change. Plus, how ticks are making people allergic to meat and how AI tools can help neurodivergent students succeed in their science careers.
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Ethiopia is the homeland of arabica coffee (Coffea arabica).Credit: hadynyah/Getty
Researchers are racing to save the engine of scientific discovery — coffee — from the effects of climate change and preserve the livelihoods of farmers who grow the cash crop. Efforts vary from improving the resilience of the two main species, to experimenting with relatives in the Coffea genus, to squeezing more coffee out of current crops with clever chemistry tricks.
Nature | 8 min read
Pigeons live at “the edge of chaos” to maintain their legendary flexibility and adaptability, suggests new research. Scientists presented common pigeons (Columba livia) with five colourful buttons, and pecking any sequence of five resulted in a tasty reward. Despite cutting down the number of sequences they used, the birds never fully gave up on trying new versions, and their favourites fell in and out of favour. The findings run counter to ‘Thorndike’s Law of Effect’ — proposed by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1905 — that rewarded behaviours become more frequent and less variable.
Scientific American | 6 min read
Reference: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition paper
Infographic of the week
Figure 1 | AI agents enter the biomedical discovery loop. Gottweis et al. and Ghareeb et al. introduce Co-Scientist and Robin, two AI systems in which several agents collaborate to scour the literature, generate biomedical hypotheses and design ways to test them. Examples of how each system fits into the laboratory discovery cycle are shown. Co-Scientist proposed that a small molecule called KIRA6 could be repurposed to treat acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) by selectively killing cancer cells. Robin, which uses three agents (Crow, Falcon and Finch), proposed that drugs called ROCK inhibitors could treat the eye disease dry age-related macular degeneration (dry AMD) by boosting a cellular process called phagocytosis, and analysed the resulting data. The remaining steps rest with human investigators for now, but they could be performed by AI agents and robotic platforms in the future.
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