From depressed polar bears to charismatic pandas, conservationists have used anthropomorphism, or the practice of attributing human qualities to non-human subjects, to garner public support for conservation efforts. In a new study publishing June 18 in the Cell Press journal iScience, scientists tease apart some of the social factors that influence whether people view animals similarly to humans. The researchers found that factors such as social integration, urban living, formal education, and religion can affect an individual’s tendency to assign human characteristics to animals. This in turn may affect their willingness to engage with conservation programs.  

A research group led by Professor SUZUKI Hiroaki from Faculty of Science and Engineering at Chuo University, graduate students YONEYAMA Ryotaro (at the time), MORIKAWA Naoya, and USHIYAMA Ryota (at the time), Research Fellow TSUGANE Mamiko, Technical Assistant SATO Reiko (at the time), and Special Appointed Assistant Professor MARUYAMA Tomoya from Research Center for Autonomous Systems Materialogy (ASMat), Institute of Integrated Research (IIR), Institute of Science Tokyo, along with Professor TAKINOUE Masahiro from Department of Computer Science, Institute of Science Tokyo, has developed a technology for mass-producing uniform artificial cells (lipid bilayer vesicles) with artificial model nuclei using microfluidic devices with high reproducibility. They also demonstrated that protein synthesis from this model nuclei was possible.

Recently, the research team led by Rui Jiang at Tsinghua University’s Department of Automation published a study titled “CASHeart: A database of single-cell chromatin accessibility for the human heart” in Quantitative Biology. This work systematically integrates and processes publicly available datasets to reveal cellular heterogeneity in the human heart, thereby advancing molecular insights into cardiac development, functional maintenance, disease pathogenesis, and therapeutic responses.

Recently, Xie Zhen's team from Tsinghua University published a research article titled "SPECIFIC: A systematic framework for engineering cell state-responsive synthetic promoters reveals key regulators of T cell exhaustion" in Quantitative Biology, proposing an integrated framework combining chromatin accessibility analysis and machine learning for rational design of synthetic promoters.