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Active materials are hierarchically assembled, starting from extensile microtubule bundles, to form emulsions with unexpected collective biomimetic properties such as autonomous motility. Self-driven active matter Autonomous motion is a characteristic of living organisms; by consuming energy, cells and their components can generate motion without the need for externally applied force. This paper reports the creation of polymer gels, liquid crystals and emulsions that mimic this behaviour using biological molecules as building blocks. The authors assemble microtubules into hierarchical bundles and then into percolating networks. In the presence of ATP as the chemical energy source and the molecular motor protein kinesin, spatiotemporally chaotic flows are generated by creating hydrodynamic instabilities and enhanced fluid transport. When confined to the surface of emulsion droplets, the microtubule networks form two-dimensional active liquid crystals that impart autonomous motility to the emulsion droplets. This work raises the exciting possibility that chaotic behaviour of this type could be engineered to be tunable and controllable. With remarkable precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometre-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and replication 1 . Besides their biological importance, such inherently non-equilibrium processes suggest approaches for developing biomimetic active materials from microscopic components that consume energy to generate continuous motion 2 , 3 , 4 . Being actively driven, these materials are not constrained by the laws of equilibrium statistical mechanics and can thus exhibit sought-after properties such as autonomous motility, internally generated flows and self-organized beating 5 , 6 , 7 . Here, starting from extensile microtubule bundles, we hierarchically assemble far-from-equilibrium analogues of conventional polymer gels, liquid crystals and emulsions. At high enough concentration, the microtubules form a percolating active network characterized by internally driven chaotic flows, hydrodynamic instabilities, enhanced transport and fluid mixing. When confined to emulsion droplets, three-dimensional networks spontaneously adsorb onto the droplet surfaces to produce highly active two-dimensional nematic liquid crystals whose streaming flows are controlled by internally generated fractures and self-healing, as well as unbinding and annihilation of oppositely charged disclination defects. The resulting active emulsions exhibit unexpected properties, such as autonomous motility, which are not observed in their passive analogues. Taken together, these observations exemplify how assemblages of animate microscopic objects exhibit collective biomimetic properties that are very different from those found in materials assembled from inanimate building blocks, challenging us to develop a theoretical framework that would allow for a systematic engineering of their far-from-equilibrium material properties.

\"A simple Chinese immigrant wages a perilous war against one of the most powerful criminal organizations on the planet in this sprawling action drama directed by Derek Yee (One Night in Mongkok) and starring Jackie Chan, Daniel Wu, and Masaya Kato. In Japan, foreign migrants are shunned by mainstream society. Taunted by the yakuza, they live in constant fear of being discovered and repatriated. Into this world ventures Steelhead (Chan), a humble tractor repairman who has traveled to Tokyo in search of his missing girlfriend, Xiu Xiu (Xu Jinglei), who vanished into thin air shortly after arriving in the city. After locating his brother Joe (Daniel Wu), Steelhead discovers that Xiu Xiu has adapted a Japanese identity and married up-and-coming yakuza chief Eguchi (Masaya Kato), with whom he forms an uneasy alliance. Over time, Steelhead earns the respect of his fellow Chinese immigrants by establishing a place for them to gather. But the dark side still beckons to Steelhead, because after helping Eguchi dispense with a powerful rival, he is granted full control of Shinjuku's most popular nightspots. Resistant to the allure of the criminal lifestyle, Steelhead discovers a new love and opens a tractor-repair business just outside the city. When Eguchi begins using Steelhead's former compatriots as pawns to front the yakuza's drug trade, the vengeful immigrant returns to the city determined to exact justice, even if it means destroying the future of the woman he once loved\"--Allmovie.com, viewed October 18, 2018.

Immunotherapy is proving to be an effective therapeutic approach in a variety of cancers. But despite the clinical success of antibodies against the immune regulators CTLA4 and PD-L1/PD-1, only a subset of people exhibit durable responses, suggesting that a broader view of cancer immunity is required. Immunity is influenced by a complex set of tumour, host and environmental factors that govern the strength and timing of the anticancer response. Clinical studies are beginning to define these factors as immune profiles that can predict responses to immunotherapy. In the context of the cancer-immunity cycle, such factors combine to represent the inherent immunological status — or 'cancer–immune set point' — of an individual.

The transport of ordinary fluids tends to be driven by pressure differentials, whereas for active or biological matter, transport may be isotropic or governed by the presence of specific chemical gradients. Wu et al. analyzed the emergence of spontaneous directional flows in active fluids containing a suspension of microtubules and clusters of the molecular motor kinesin, confined in a variety of microfluidic geometries (see the Perspective by Morozov). When confined in periodic toroidal channels and cylindrical domains, the flow was organized and persisted in a unidirectional motion, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Oddly, this behavior was independent of scale; as long as the aspect ratio of the geometry was chosen appropriately, flows were observed for a wide range of system dimensions. Science , this issue p. eaal1979 ; see also p. 1262 An isotropic fluid composed of nanosized motors organizes into an autonomous machine that pumps fluid through long channels. Transport of fluid through a pipe is essential for the operation of macroscale machines and microfluidic devices. Conventional fluids only flow in response to external pressure. We demonstrate that an active isotropic fluid, composed of microtubules and molecular motors, autonomously flows through meter-long three-dimensional channels. We establish control over the magnitude, velocity profile, and direction of the self-organized flows and correlate these to the structure of the extensile microtubule bundles. The inherently three-dimensional transition from bulk-turbulent to confined-coherent flows occurs concomitantly with a transition in the bundle orientational order near the surface and is controlled by a scale-invariant criterion related to the channel profile. The nonequilibrium transition of confined isotropic active fluids can be used to engineer self-organized soft machines.

Jails and prisons are major sites of novel coronavirus (SARSCoV-2) infection. Many jurisdictions in the United States have therefore accelerated the release of low-risk offenders. Early release, however, does not address how arrest and pretrial detention practices may be contributing to disease spread. Using data from Cook County Jail-one of the largest known nodes of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the United States-in Chicago, Illinois, we analyzed the relationship between jailing practices and community infections at the ZIP code level. We found that jailcommunity cycling was a significant predictor of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), accounting for 55 percent of the variance in case rates across ZIP codes in Chicago and 37 percent of the variance in all of Illinois. Jail-community cycling far exceeds race, poverty, public transit use, and population density as a predictor of variance. The data suggest that cycling people through Cook County Jail alone is associated with 15.7 percent of all documented COVID-19 cases in Illinois and 15.9 percent of all documented cases in Chicago as of April 19, 2020. Our findings support arguments for reduced reliance on incarceration and for related justice reforms both as emergency measures during the present pandemic and as sustained structural changes vital for future pandemic preparedness and public health.

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and Major League Baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is most consistent with the law of small numbers and the gambler’s fallacy—people underestimating the likelihood of sequential streaks occurring by chance—leading to negatively autocorrelated decisions that result in errors. The negative autocorrelation is stronger among more moderate and less experienced decision makers, following longer streaks of decisions in one direction, when the current and previous cases share similar characteristics or occur close in time, and when decision makers face weaker incentives for accuracy. Other explanations for negatively autocorrelated decisions such as quotas, learning, or preferences to treat all parties fairly are less consistent with the evidence, though we cannot completely rule out sequential contrast effects as an alternative explanation.

This study explores politically motivated reasoning among U.S. Circuit Court judges over the past 120 years, examining their writing style and use of previous case citations in judicial opinions. Employing natural language processing and supervised machine learning, we scrutinize how judges’ language choices and legal citations reflect partisan slant. Our findings reveal a consistent, albeit modest, polarization in citation practices. More notably, there is a significant increase in polarization within the textual content of opinions, indicating a stronger presence of motivated reasoning in their prose. We also examine the impact of heightened scrutiny on judicial reasoning. On divided panels and as midterm elections draw near, judges show an increase in dissent votes while decreasing in polarization in both writing and citation practices. Furthermore, our study explores polarization dynamics among judges who are potential candidates for Supreme Court promotion. We observe that judges on the shortlist for Supreme Court vacancies demonstrate greater polarization in their selection of precedents. “I pay very little attention to legal rules, statutes, constitutional provisions ... The first thing you do is ask yourself — forget about the law — what is a sensible resolution of this dispute? ... See if a recent Supreme Court precedent or some other legal obstacle stood in the way of ruling in favor of that sensible resolution. ... When you have a Supreme Court case or something similar, they’re often extremely easy to get around.” ( An Exit Interview with Richard Posner , The New York Times, Sep. 11, 2017 ).

We report a one-pot chemical approach for the synthesis of highly monodisperse colloidal nanophosphors displaying bright upconversion luminescence under 980 nm excitation. This general method optimizes the synthesis with initial heating rates up to 100°C/minute generating a rich family of nanoscale building blocks with distinct morphologies (spheres, rods, hexagonal prisms, and plates) and upconversion emission tunable through the choice of rare earth dopants. Furthermore, we employ an interfacial assembly strategy to organize these nanocrystals (NCs) into superlattices over multiple length scales facilitating the NC characterization and enabling systematic studies of shape-directed assembly. The global and local ordering of these superstructures is programmed by the precise engineering of individual NC's size and shape. This dramatically improved nanophosphor synthesis together with insights from shape-directed assembly will advance the investigation of an array of emerging biological and energy-related nanophosphor applications.

Black and Hispanic communities are disproportionately affected by both incarceration and COVID-19. The epidemiological relationship between carceral facilities and community health during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, remains largely unexamined. Using data from Cook County Jail, we examine temporal patterns in the relationship between jail cycling (i.e., arrest and processing of individuals through jails before release) and community cases of COVID-19 in Chicago ZIP codes. We use multivariate regression analyses and a machine-learning tool, elastic regression, with 1,706 demographic control variables. We find that for each arrested individual cycled through Cook County Jail in March 2020, five additional cases of COVID-19 in their ZIP code of residence are independently attributable to the jail as of August. A total 86% of this additional disease burden is borne by majority-Black and/or -Hispanic ZIPs, accounting for 17% of cumulative COVID-19 cases in these ZIPs, 6% in majority-White ZIPs, and 13% across all ZIPs. Jail cycling in March alone can independently account for 21% of racial COVID-19 disparities in Chicago as of August 2020. Relative to all demographic variables in our analysis, jail cycling is the strongest predictor of COVID-19 rates, considerably exceeding poverty, race, and population density, for example. Arrest and incarceration policies appear to be increasing COVID-19 incidence in communities. Our data suggest that jails function as infectious disease multipliers and epidemiological pumps that are especially affecting marginalized communities. Given disproportionate policing and incarceration of racialized residents nationally, the criminal punishment system may explain a large proportion of racial COVID-19 disparities noted across the United States.