Plant doctor: An AI system that watches over urban trees without touching a leaf
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 2-Apr-2025 18:08 ET (2-Apr-2025 22:08 GMT/UTC)
Monitoring urban plant health traditionally requires extensive manual labor and botanical expertise, creating challenges for cities facing expanding green spaces, higher population densities, and increasing threats to plants. Now, researchers from Japan have developed ‘Plant Doctor,’ an artificial intelligence-based tool that could revolutionize plant health monitoring. The proposed system can track individual leaves in urban video footage and precisely quantify the damage from pests and diseases, enabling scalable, non-invasive urban plant management.
A well-timed “furrowed face”—a subtle expression we instinctively recognize as “thinking”—can make androids appear less creepy and more relatable to humans.
Self-healing coatings are advanced materials that can repair damage, such as scratches and cracks on their own. Researchers from Waseda University have developed an efficient method for preparing self-healing films consisting of alternating layers of highly cross-linked organosiloxane and linear polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Their film is more durable than conventional self-healing PDMS materials, offering superior hardness and greater thermal stability while self-healing at mild temperatures, paving the way for stronger, more reliable, and easier-maintained self-healing materials.
A novel technique to visualize gene-active and gene-repressive DNA regions in living cells, developed by a multi-institutional team based in Japan. The technique reveals the distinct physical properties of chromatin—gene-active euchromatin acts like a liquid, while gene-repressive heterochromatin behaves like a gel—shedding light on their roles in gene expression and DNA replication, with potential implications for understanding genome regulation.