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fjo3 shares a report from Phys.org: Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. "It's not a misconception -- mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others," Frederic Simard of France's Institute of Research for Development told AFP. "But we are not all magnets all the time," the medical entomologist added. A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another -- mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale. Female mosquitoes -- which are the only ones that bite -- detect these signals with finely tuned receptors, then choose their target accordingly. "We have known for over 100 years that mosquitoes are attracted by the carbon dioxide that we exhale -- this is the first signal that triggers their behavior" when they are dozens of meters away, Swedish scientist Rickard Ignell told AFP. Within around 10 meters, "mosquitoes will start detecting our odor, and in combination with carbon dioxide," this attracts them even more, said the senior author of a recent study on the subject. As they get closer, body temperature and humidity make particular humans even more enticing. [...] For Ignell's recent study, the researchers released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes -- known for spreading yellow fever and dengue -- on 42 women in a lab, to see which ones they preferred. "We have shown that mosquitoes use a blend of odorous compounds (we identified 27 that the mosquitoes will detect, out of the possible 1,000) for their attraction to us," Ignell said. The woman the mosquitoes most liked to bite -- which included pregnant women in their second trimester -- produced a large amount of a particular compound made by a breakdown of the skin oil sebum. That even a small increase of this compound -- called "1-octen-3-ol", or mushroom alcohol -- made a difference came as a surprise, Ignell emphasized.

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蛇毒复杂且致命，每年威胁着数百万人的生命。据世界卫生组织统计，全球每年有 180 万至 270 万人受毒蛇咬伤影响，约 10 万人因此丧生，30 万人永久性残疾。世界上现存蛇类有 3,000 多种，其中约 600 种有毒。尤其是蝰蛇科（如蝮蛇）和眼镜蛇科（如环蛇和眼镜蛇）引起的蛇咬伤，对人类生命构成的威胁最为严重。蛇毒含有多种复杂的蛋白质和酶，能够迅速引发组织损伤、出血、神经功能障碍甚至死亡。蛇毒中的三指毒素（3FTxs）是一类高致命的神经毒素，能够迅速引发一系列病理效应，包括肌肉瘫痪、呼吸衰竭和组织坏死。该毒素通过与受害者体内的烟碱型乙酰胆碱受体（nAChRs）结合，干扰正常的神经传导，导致生命威胁的神经毒性。2024 年诺贝尔化学奖得主 David Baker 教授与丹麦技术大学的 Timothy Patrick Jenkins 领导的团队采用深度学习技术设计全新的蛋白质结构。研究团队成功创造出专门针对三指毒素 3FTxs 的蛋白质，这些蛋白质在体外实验中有效地中和了所有三种 3FTx 亚家族。研究结果显示，小鼠存活率为 80%~100%，具体取决于确切的剂量、毒素和设计的蛋白质。

Silicon Valley may have begun the era of social media, but its future could be in China. From a report: Tensions between America and China are pushing the world's two largest economies into an escalating trade war. President Donald Trump continues to threaten a tariff hike on more Chinese goods. So it's a strange time for one of the most popular social media platforms in the US -- in the world for that matter -- to be Chinese. Eschewing typical forms of Chinese soft power, TikTok could be the arrival of a subtler form of algorithmic influence, with sophisticated Chinese AI controlling what becomes viral content potentially shared among millions of young Americans. Which isn't unlike the global influence Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been exerting for the last decade. Silicon Valley may have begun the era of social media, but its future could be in China. TikTok, a video-sharing app designed by a Beijing-based tech company called ByteDance, became the first Chinese-owned app to reach No. 1 in the US Apple App Store last November (it's since fallen to below 20th place). And oddly, its success in the States has come by embracing strongly features that fly in the face of American platforms but are central to Chinese social media: It aggressively mines user data, its videos require sound, it is largely oriented around a central recommendation algorithm instead of a network of friends and family, it emphasizes memes and challenges over individual influencers, and it continues to add addictive features to make it impossible to avoid bingeing as Silicon Valley offers dubious tools to curb screentime. TikTok's head of global marketing, Stefan Heinrich Henriquez, based out of its LA office, played down the app's Chinese provenance. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, he said there's nothing particularly different about working for ByteDance as opposed to an American tech company. Yet considering how TikTok's been covered in the US media in the last six months, it seems unlikely it can shake its reputation as a Chinese app.

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Nvidia launched a monster box yesterday called the HGX-2, and it’s the stuff that geek dreams are made of. It’s a cloud server that is purported to be so powerful it combines high-performance computing with artificial intelligence requirements in one exceptionally compelling package.

You know you want to know the specs, so let’s get to it: It starts with 16x NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. That’s good for 2 petaFLOPS for AI with low precision, 250 teraFLOPS for medium precision and 125 teraFLOPS for those times when you need the highest precision. It comes standard with a 1/2 a terabyte of memory and 12 Nvidia NVSwitches, which enable GPU to GPU communications at 300 GB per second. They have doubled the capacity from the HGX-1 released last year.

Paresh Kharya, group product marketing manager for Nvidia’s Tesla data center products, says this communication speed enables them to treat the GPUs essentially as a one giant, single GPU. “And what that allows [developers] to do is not just access that massive compute power, but also access that half a terabyte of GPU memory as a single memory block in their programs,” he explained.

Unfortunately you won’t be able to buy one of these boxes. In fact, Nvidia is distributing them strictly to resellers, who will likely package these babies up and sell them to hyperscale data centers and cloud providers. The beauty of this approach for cloud resellers is that when they buy it, they have the entire range of precision in a single box, Kharya said.

“The benefit of the unified platform is as companies and cloud providers are building out their infrastructure, they can standardize on a single unified architecture that supports the entire range of high-performance workloads. So whether it’s AI, or whether it’s high-performance simulations, the entire range of workloads is now possible in just a single platform,”Kharya explained.

He points out this is particularly important in large-scale data centers. “In hyperscale companies or cloud providers, the main benefit that they’re providing is the economies of scale. If they can standardize on the fewest possible architectures, they can really maximize the operational efficiency. And what HGX allows them to do is to standardize on that single unified platform,” he added.

As for developers, they can write programs that take advantage of the underlying technologies and program in the exact level of precision they require from a single box.

The HGX-2 powered servers will be available later this year from partner resellers, including Lenovo, QCT, Supermicro and Wiwynn.