| | | | | | | | | | | Axios Science | | By Alison Snyder · Jul 06, 2023 | | Thanks for reading Axios Science. This edition is 1,795 words, about a 7-minute read. | | | | | | 1 big thing: AI tools trace the body's link between the brain and behavior |  | | | An AI tool called SLEAP labels the body parts of flies. Credit: Talmo Lab at the Salk Institute | | | | AI-enabled micro-measurements of animals running, hunting, preening and playing are unlocking troves of new data that scientists now want to use to simulate animals and test theories about behavior and the brain. Why it matters: A primary function of the brain is to produce behavior and help animals move through the world — but there are questions about how that happens, with ramifications for medicine and efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI). - "The body gives us a missing link between what the brain evolved to do and how it operates in the real world," says Talmo Pereira, a fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences who uses machine learning to study animal behavior. "You don't think without a body."
- A better understanding of the circuits of neurons involved in different behaviors could aid researchers trying to develop treatments and medicines for psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, whose early symptoms can manifest as subtle changes in behavior.
What's happening: AI methods are increasingly being used to help scientists measure the behaviors of animals, a laborious task that typically involves researchers watching animals and tracking and annotating their movements. - The tools — SLEAP, DeepLabCut, and others — rely on deep neural networks and computer vision techniques called pose estimation that identify the joints of a body (the left knee, right shoulder or tip of the tail) in an image or video and output them as coordinates in space.
- Pose estimation powered Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, which used data from infrared sensors to track the movements of players and then fed their actions back into the character in a game.
Animal behavior scientists, or ethologists, use the AI tools to track the natural behaviors of single — and more recently multiple — animals. The information can be used to recreate the behavior in a lab, where at the same time researchers can measure the activity of neurons in the brain or silence them, and see the effect on behavior. - The tools have yielded insights about how marmoset monkeys catch flying insects, the neural basis for different behaviors — fighting back or running away — mice exhibit when they are bullied, and more.
- Another tool called MoSeq finds smaller components of movement — what the tool's developer, Harvard University neurobiologist Bob Datta, calls "syllables." His research group has identified about 50 of these short units of behavior and the sequences in which they tend to occur in order to identify and predict different behaviors.
Yes, but: The brain does not output coordinates, Pereira says. "It does not think in x,y, z changes in position of wrist." - "We need a way to connect what we're seeing — these traces of movement — to the system that actually gives rise to it, the brain," Pereira says.
What's next: An effort in its early stages is underway to use behavioral data to create simulated bodies, or animals. - These "digital twins" — doubles of mice, rats and flies with fully modeled limbs, skeletons, and muscles — could be put in a video game and trained to behave like the real animal, Pereira says.
- The idea is to compare the behavior of the fake mouse, which is based on a model of the brain-body relationship, to a real mouse. Based on the differences, the model would be updated until the fake mouse behaves like a real mouse.
- "If you can generate behavior computationally, then the machine will give you insight about how the brain actually does it," says Datta, adding that the possibility is "really exciting."
The big picture: There is an active debate about whether any artificial general intelligence will need to be embodied. - One camp of prominent AI researchers recently advocated for an "embodied Turing test" to shift the focus away from AI mastering games and language to models that "interact with the sensorimotor world."
- "The body is always there, serving as the primary filter between the brain and the world," Pereira says. Its biomechanics, biophysics and physiology are "the key translator between what the brain actually wants to do and what actually happens in the world."
|     | | | | | | 2. Earth sees three hottest days on record |  Data: NOAA CFS/CFSR via Climate Reanalyzer, University of Maine; Chart: Simran Parwani/Axios The past three days have each broken or tied records as the Earth's hottest day since at least 1979 and likely far longer, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, accessible via a University of Maine website, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes. Why it matters: Daily temperature milestones are largely symbolic — but point to an alarming trend, scientists say. Zoom in: The accessibility of global climate data is fueling interest in — and concern over — signs that the planet is warming faster than anticipated. That is tied in part to El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific, as well as human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases. The big picture: The daily heat records on July 3, 4 and 5 are novel in part because the last time the world saw such a dramatic spike in global average temperatures was in August 2016. That date featured the last strong El Niño event, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, tells Axios via email. - At that time, computer model "reanalysis" data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction was not being piped directly online in such an easily accessible way, he said.
- Instead, that year "the attention was directed towards the monthly means," which are released on a slight time delay from NOAA, NASA and other agencies, Schmidt explains.
- "The novelty of the metric is part of what's driving this," he said, regarding the media and public attention on the daily mean temperature.
Between the lines: The record daily high temperatures come from a computer model that takes in readings from thermometers on the land and aboard ocean buoys, plus data from satellite sensors and weather balloons to arrive at a best-estimate of the global average temperature for the planet during one-hour increments of each day. - "It's not a surprise at all, and it will be broken again soon," Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said of the daily records.
| | | | | | | | 3. Maternal deaths widespread beyond the South |  Data: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; Map: Tory Lysik/Axios Visuals Maternal mortality rates more than doubled in the U.S. between 1999 and 2019 with states in the Midwest and Great Plains accounting for significant increases along with the South, according to a JAMA study that provides the first state-level breakdowns by ethnic group, Axios' Oriana Gonzalez writes. Driving the news: American Indians and Alaska Natives had the biggest increases, particularly in states in the middle of the country where such inequities "had not been previously highlighted," researchers wrote. - "Often, states in the South are called out as having the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation, whereas California and Massachusetts have the best. But that doesn't tell the whole story," said Allison Bryant, co-first study author and senior medical director for health equity at Mass General Brigham.
- Overall, there were an estimated 1,210 maternal deaths in 2019, compared to 505 in 1999.
- Maternal mortality is defined as a death that takes place during birth or up to a year later. The study looked at pregnant individuals aged 10 to 54.
- Common causes of maternal death include mental health conditions (including death by suicide and overdose related to substance use disorder), hemorrhages, blood clots, high blood pressure and cardiac and coronary conditions.
By the numbers: The number of deaths per 100,000 live births rose from 12.7 to 32.2 in total from 1999 to 2019. - Broken down by group, deaths rose from 14.0 to 49.2 among American Indians and Alaska Natives; 26.7 to 55.4 among Black individuals, 9.6 to 20.9 among Asians, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (AAPI); 9.6 to 19.1 among Hispanics; and 9.4 to 26.3 among white people, researchers found.
Go deeper. | | | | | | | | A message from Axios | | Your daily news in 10 minutes | | |  | | | | Hear the most important news and interesting stories with the Axios Today podcast. Host Niala Boodhoo fills you in on what you need to know each weekday morning. Listen for free in your favorite podcast app. | | | | | | 4. Worthy of your time | | Why depression after traumatic brain injury is distinct (Elizabeth Cooney — STAT) AI is coming for mathematics, too (Siobhan Roberts — NYT, paywall) New measurement confirms electrons are extremely round (Emily Conover — Science News) | | | | | | | | 5. Something wondrous |  | | | Annapurna IV in the clouds, Pokhara, Nepal. Photo: Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images | | | | A giant rockslide during Medieval times may have taken hundreds of meters off a mountain peak high in the Himalayas, according to research published this week. The big picture: The finding provides new evidence about how the planet's highest peaks evolve. - "On human timescales, mountain peaks seem eternal," researchers led by Jérôme Lavé at the Université de Lorraine in France write in the journal Nature.
- "Yet, on geological timescales, mountain peaks are ephemeral: their shape and altitude are constantly evolving in response to the competition between tectonic uplift and erosion."
- Glaciers can erode rock on the floors of mountain valleys, but higher in the peaks, glaciers may not form, and year-round cold temperatures limit the freezing and thawing of ice that can break rocks, leaving open questions about how the highest mountains evolve over time.
Details: Most of the valleys and basins of the Himalayas are filled with fertile soil but the Sabche Cirque basin in central Nepal is covered with rocks. - Researchers collected the samples from the remote location and found the deposits are breccia, or fragments of rock embedded in other rock. Features of the breccia indicated they were "generated by a single rockslide granular avalanche," they report.
- Carbon dating of plant fossils in the rocks revealed they were all deposited at the same time, around 1200 CE.
- The team of scientists estimated they came from 23 cubic kilometers of rock that slid from a mountain and buried the basin floor below one kilometer of rock.
What happened: The researchers think the rock was "beheaded" from the summit of Annapurna IV, a peak with cliffs that don't have any evidence of erosion caused by a glacier or run-off but rock that appears to have been sheared off. - That means the mountain lost about 0.5 kilometers in height from the slide and was once more than 8,000 meters high.
The intrigue: The team suggests massive landslides like this one could shape other tall mountains. - Glaciers may not reach the highest peaks but they can still etch away at the lower slopes, making them steeper until the rock can collapse, possibly triggered by earthquakes.
- The study "adds to the understanding that catastrophic processes can happen in this and similar regions," Louis Derry, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University who wasn't involved in the study, writes in an email to Axios. "Fortunately such events would be rare on a human time scale."
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