- ‘Only US Engineers Can Modify’: Russian MoD Blames US Defense Firm Raytheon For Upgrading Ukraine’s Tu-141 Drones EurAsian Times
- As Bryansk authorities report another downed drone, popular Telegram channel claims Ukraine is targeting region’s airport Meduza
- As Ukraine braces for a major Russian offensive, its ‘drone hunters’ fight to defend its cities CBC News
- The Somme in the Sky: Lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian Air War War On The Rocks
- Ukrainian forces use drones in front line operations in Donetsk Anadolu Agency | English
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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NFL won’t reschedule Bills-Bengals game, set to modify AFC playoffs
The Bengals and Baltimore Ravens also could have the site of a prospective opening-round playoff meeting determined by a coin flip, under the modified format being proposed.
The modifications were recommended by Commissioner Roger Goodell and were approved Thursday by the league’s rulemaking competition committee, the NFL said. They will be considered Friday by the league’s team owners, who are scheduled to meet by videoconference for possible ratification of the plan.
“As we considered the football schedule, our principles have been to limit disruption across the league and minimize competitive inequities,” Goodell said in a statement. “I recognize that there is no perfect solution. The proposal we are asking the ownership to consider, however, addresses the most significant potential equitable issues created by the difficult, but necessary, decision not to play the game under these extraordinary circumstances.”
The NFL’s deliberations over its scheduling issues began after Monday’s game in Cincinnati was stopped during the first quarter. Bills safety Damar Hamlin was injured on a hit and suffered cardiac arrest on the field. The game was postponed later that night. Hamlin’s doctors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center said Thursday that he had made substantial progress in his recovery.
The league decided Thursday to declare the Bills-Bengals game a cancellation.
“This has been a very difficult week,” Goodell said. “We continue to focus on the recovery of Damar Hamlin and are encouraged by the improvements in his condition as well as the tremendous outpouring of support and care for Damar and his family from across the country. We are also incredibly appreciative of the amazing work of the medical personnel and commend each and every one of them.”
Those two teams will play 16 regular season games apiece, one fewer than other NFL teams. The playoff seedings in the AFC will be determined by teams’ winning percentages.
The cancellation gives the Kansas City Chiefs a pathway to the top playoff seed in the AFC, ahead of the Bills. The Chiefs can secure that with a victory Saturday in Las Vegas over the Raiders. Before the postponement, the Bills had been just ahead of the Chiefs based on a tiebreaker advantage from a head-to-head victory this season; they could have secured the No. 1 seed by beating the Bengals on Monday and the New England Patriots on Sunday to finish the regular season.
To address that, the league devised a system by which the AFC title game would be played at a neutral site if the Bills or the Bengals are the road team and potentially could have hosted the game by winning Monday’s game. So that applies only to certain outcomes under a complex formula that will come into sharper focus after this weekend’s results.
If the Chiefs and Bills both win this weekend, for example, and then meet in the AFC championship game, the game would be played at a neutral site. Under that scenario, the Bills could have been the No. 1 seed if they’d beaten the Bengals on Monday. But if the Chiefs win Saturday and the Bills lose Sunday, a Chiefs-Bills game in the AFC title game would be played in Kansas City. Under that scenario, the Chiefs would have been the top seed even if the Bills had won Monday’s game.
The NFL has not yet determined where a neutral-site AFC championship game would be played, a person familiar with the plan said.
The coin-toss possibility for determining the home team in a prospective Ravens-Bengals game in the opening round of the playoffs only comes into play if the Ravens win Sunday’s matchup between the two teams in Cincinnati.
Once it decided not to reschedule the postponed game, the NFL sorted through a range of possibilities. There was speculation about the prospects of adding an eighth playoff team to the AFC’s postseason field; adding an eighth playoff team in both conferences; or making the AFC’s top-seeded team choose between either having a first-round bye or home-field advantage in the conference title game.
DeMaurice Smith, the NFL Players Association’s executive director, said earlier Thursday that the league would have had to bargain with the union to add a playoff team or teams. Smith said he had not received such a proposal from the NFL.
The league did not consider adding an eighth team to the AFC playoffs, a person familiar with the deliberations said.
Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, said Wednesday that “everything is being considered.”
The league could have rescheduled a Bills-Bengals resumption as a stand-alone game in an additional weekend added to the regular season, pushing back the playoffs and eliminating the off weekend between the conference title games and the Super Bowl. Alternatively, it could have played the remainder of the postponed game on a weekend including NFC playoff games while pushing back the AFC playoff games by a week. Instead, the NFL chose not to revisit the postponed game.
The league had to deal with rearranging its schedule in recent seasons affected by the pandemic. But this time, the postponement came so late in the regular season that there was no room to maneuver without pushing back the playoffs.
Vincent said Wednesday that the NFL’s scheduling decision might not be able to ensure competitive fairness, under the circumstances.
“As we saw, potentially there may be a lack of equity,” Vincent said, “where it may not be perfect but it will allow those that are participating, who have earned that right to play, to continue to play.”
One Dose of Alcohol Is Enough to Modify the Brain
Summary: A single dose of alcohol permanently alters the structure of synapses and the dynamics of mitochondria, researchers report.
Source: University of Cologne
A research team from the University of Cologne and the Universities of Mannheim and Heidelberg has found that even the single administration of alcohol permanently alters the morphology of neurons.
In particular, the structure of the synapses as well as the dynamics of mitochondria are influenced by alcohol. Using the genetic model system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, Professor Dr. Henrike Scholz and her team members Michèle Tegtmeier und Michael Berger showed that changes in the migration of mitochondria in the synapses reduce the rewarding effect of alcohol.
These results suggest that even a single consumption event can lay the foundation for alcohol addiction.
The study has appeared in PNAS .
Which changes in the brain accompany the transition from sporadic drinking to chronic alcohol abuse?
That is the question a joint research project with working groups at the University of Mannheim-Heidelberg and the University of Cologne explored. Most scientific research has examined the effects of chronic alcohol consumption on the hippocampus—the control center of our brain. Because of this, little is known about the acute neuronal interactions of critical risk factors, such as a first alcohol intoxication at an early age, explained Henrike Scholz.
“We set out to discover ethanol-dependent molecular changes. These, in turn, provide the basis for permanent cellular changes following a single acute ethanol intoxication. The effects of a single alcohol administration were examined at the molecular, cellular and behavioral levels,” said Scholz.
The working hypothesis was that, similar to the formation of memory after a single lesson, a single administration of ethanol would form a positive association with alcohol.
The team tested its hypothesis using research in fruit flies and mouse models and found ethanol-induced changes in two areas: mitochondrial dynamics and the balance between synapses in neurons. Mitochondria supply cells and especially nerve cells with energy. In order to optimally deliver the energy to the cells, the mitochondria move.
The movement of the mitochondria was disturbed in the cells treated with ethanol. The chemical balance between certain synapses was also disturbed. These changes remained permanent and were confirmed by behavioral changes in the animals: Mice and fruit flies showed increased alcohol consumption and alcohol relapse later in life.
The morphological remodeling of neurons is a well-known basis for learning and memory. These so-called cellular plasticity mechanisms, which are central to learning and memory, are also thought to be at the core of the formation of associative memories for drug-related rewards. Therefore, some of the observed morphological changes may influence ethanol-related memory formation.
Together with the migration of mitochondria in neurons, which are also important for synaptic transmission and plasticity, the researchers speculate that these ethanol-dependent cellular changes are critical for the development of addictive behaviors.
“It is remarkable that the cellular processes contributing to such complex reward behavior are conserved across species, suggesting a similar role in humans,” said Scholz. “It could be a possible general cellular process essential for learning and memory.”
Both of the observed mechanisms could explain observations made in mice that a single intoxication experience can increase alcohol consumption and alcohol relapse later in life.
“These mechanisms may even be relevant to the observation in humans that the first alcohol intoxication at an early age is a critical risk factor for later alcohol intoxication and the development of alcohol addiction,” explained Professor Scholz.
“This means that identifying lasting ethanol-dependent changes is an important first step in understanding how acute drinking can turn into chronic alcohol abuse.”
See also
About this neuroscience research news
Author: Press Office
Source: University of Cologne
Contact: Press Office – University of Cologne
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
“Single-dose ethanol intoxication causes acute and lasting neuronal changes in the brain” by Johannes Knabbe et al. PNAS
Abstract
Single-dose ethanol intoxication causes acute and lasting neuronal changes in the brain
Alcohol intoxication at early ages is a risk factor for the development of addictive behavior.
To uncover neuronal molecular correlates of acute ethanol intoxication, we used stable-isotope–labeled mice combined with quantitative mass spectrometry to screen more than 2,000 hippocampal proteins, of which 72 changed synaptic abundance up to twofold after ethanol exposure. Among those were mitochondrial proteins and proteins important for neuronal morphology, including MAP6 and ankyrin-G.
Based on these candidate proteins, we found acute and lasting molecular, cellular, and behavioral changes following a single intoxication in alcohol-naïve mice. Immunofluorescence analysis revealed a shortening of axon initial segments. Longitudinal two-photon in vivo imaging showed increased synaptic dynamics and mitochondrial trafficking in axons. Knockdown of mitochondrial trafficking in dopaminergic neurons abolished conditioned alcohol preference in Drosophila flies.
This study introduces mitochondrial trafficking as a process implicated in reward learning and highlights the potential of high-resolution proteomics to identify cellular mechanisms relevant for addictive behavior.
Google will modify search algorithms to tackle clickbait | Google
Google is tweaking its search results in an effort to prioritise “content by people, for people” and fight back against the scourge of clickbait, the company says.
“We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers,” Danny Sullivan, from Google, said in a blog post. “Many of us have experienced the frustration of visiting a webpage that seems like it has what we’re looking for, but doesn’t live up to our expectations. The content might not have the insights you want, or it may not even seem like it was created for, or even by, a person.”
So-called “SEO spam”, content written explicitly for the purposes of appearing high up on the results pages of search engines, has long been a thorn in the side of companies like Google. To tackle it, the company is launching a “helpful content update” next week.
The update covers a number of tweaks to the company’s ranking algorithms that attempt to identify content “that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people”. Google says that, in tests, the update has resulted in particular improvements for searches related to online education, arts and entertainment, shopping and technology.
In one example, Sullivan says, a search about a recent movie can sometimes bring up articles that simply aggregate reviews from other sites; now, “you’ll see more results with unique, authentic information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven’t seen before”.
There are winners and losers from such changes, of course, and online publishers may fear that their content strategies will see them caught up in the net. In its advice for “content creators”, Google implies that some of the signals it will use to downgrade search results are whether or not a website has a primary purpose or focus, and whether there is “an existing or intended audience” that would find the content useful if they came directly to the page.
The “banhammer” will be wielded liberally. “Any content – not just unhelpful content – on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display,” Google says. “For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”
In recent months, Google has launched a concerted effort to fight perceptions that the company’s search products have grown worse over time. Headlines like “It’s not just you, Google search really is getting worse” and “Google search has gotten worse. Here’s the trick people have found to get around it” blame the company’s increasing desire to offer structured results, paid-for adverts and links to other Google services above simple web links, as well as the constant cat-and-mouse game with SEO spam, and suggest focusing on sites like Reddit to find useful answers to queries.
Navneet Alang, writing in the Toronto Star, called the process a “sort of vicious cycle”. “Google endlessly refines search to try and predict what people want, but in response, entire industries work to pollute search results by giving people a cheap, knock-off version of what they want,” he wrote.
NASA to delay, modify SLS countdown rehearsal
WASHINGTON — After discovering a problem with a valve on the Space Launch System’s upper stage, NASA is delaying a countdown rehearsal and fueling test and modifying it to limit fueling of the upper stage.
NASA said in an April 9 blog post that it was delaying the wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the SLS by another three days. NASA previously planned to restart the test with a “call to stations” for personnel April 9, leading up to the tanking test and practice countdown April 11. NASA said the call to stations is now set for April 12 and tanking on April 14.
The latest delay is linked to a faulty helium check valve in the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), the upper stage of the SLS. The valve prevents helium, used to purge propellant lines and drain propellant, from escaping the rocket.
NASA said April 7 that engineers found a problem maintain helium purge pressure in the ICPS after changing out a regulator in the mobile launch platform. At that time, the agency said it was able to restore normal pressure but was still studying the source of the problem, now linked to the faulty valve in the ICPS itself.
Because that issue, NASA now plans to limit the amount of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant loaded into the ICPS during the WDR. NASA said the countdown rehearsal will be modified with “minimal propellant operations” on the ICPS, but didn’t elaborate on how much propellant would be transferred into the upper stage.
“Wet dress rehearsal is an opportunity to refine the countdown procedures and validate critical models and software interfaces,” NASA said in the post. “The modified test will enable engineers to achieve the test objectives critical to launch success.”
The ICPS is based on the second stage of the Delta 4 launch vehicle and uses a single RL10 engine. This particular stage was one of the first components of the overall vehicle that was completed. It was delivered and placed into storage several years ago while the core stage and solid rocket boosters were still being manufactured.
The valve issue is the latest glitch in the WDR process that has delayed the full test of the vehicle by more than a week. NASA scrubbed the first countdown rehearsal April 3 after delays caused by severe weather the night before, followed by malfunctions of fans in the mobile launch platform designed to prevent the buildup of hazardous gases. A second attempt the next day resulted in filling the core stage’s liquid oxygen tank halfway, but several other problems, including a vent valve that failed to open, led controllers to halt the test before the start of liquid hydrogen loading.
The delays in the in the WDR and the need to replace the helium valve in the ICPS now put into doubt the ability of SLS to be ready for a launch window that runs from June 6 to 16. NASA said in its April 9 blog post that it is “confident in the ability to replace the valve” once the SLS returns to the Vehicle Assembly Building after the WDR, but didn’t estimate how long that would take and what additional testing might be required.