Historically, speech therapy apps have relied primarily on online cloud-based speech recognition systems like those used in digital assistants (Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant), which are designed to best guess speech rather than critically evaluate articulation errors. For children with cleft palate specifically, affecting 1 in 700 babies globally, speech therapy is essential follow-up care after reconstructive surgery. Approximately 25% of children with clefts use compensatory articulation errors, and when these patterns become habituated during ages 3-5, they become particularly resistant to change in therapy. Traditional approaches to mobile speech therapy apps have included storybook-style narratives that proved expensive with low replayability and engagement, as well as fast-paced arcade-style games that failed to maintain user interest. Common speech therapy applications require a facilitator to evaluate speech performance and typically depend on continuous internet connectivity, creating barriers for users in areas with poor network coverage or those concerned about data privacy and roaming costs. The shift toward gamified therapy solutions showed that game elements can serve as powerful motivators for otherwise tedious activities. Speech recognition systems face inherent limitations in accuracy compared to cloud-based solutions and require substantial processing power and memory that can impact device performance and battery life, particularly on older mobile devices. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models struggle significantly with children's speech due to non-fluent pronunciation and variability in speech patterns, with phoneme error rates reaching almost 12%, and consonant recognition errors affecting the reliability of speech disorder detection. The challenge becomes even more pronounced for populations with speech impairments, as conventional ASR systems are optimized for typical adult speech rather than atypical articulation patterns of cleft palate speech or developmental disabilities. Moreover, maintaining user engagement over extended therapy periods is hard, and many apps fail to provide sufficient motivation for daily practice, which is essential for speech improvement.

Traditional approaches to indoor mapping relied heavily on manual floor plan tracing or rule-based computer vision algorithms, which proved fragile when confronted with the wide variety of graphical representations used in architectural drawings. While Computer-Aided Design (CAD) floor plans in formats like DWG or DWF exist for most modern buildings, these detailed technical drawings are typically proprietary and inaccessible to the public. Mappers often work with low-quality images (JPEG or PDF format) of floor plans, necessitating manual digitization processes. RGB-D cameras, which capture both color and depth information, emerged as promising tools for 3D indoor scanning, though they face limitations including restricted range (typically less than 5 meters), sensitivity to lighting conditions, noisy point clouds at object edges, and computational demands for real-time processing. Automatic floor plan vectorization algorithms remain highly sensitive to image quality and graphical symbol variations, often requiring substantial manual editing even with state-of-the-art deep learning approaches.

Endoreplication is the process by which a cell undergoes DNA replication in the absence of cell division, becoming polyploid. Developmentally programmed endoreplication occurs in several mammalian tissues during pregnancy and is usually linked to terminal differentiation. In the placenta, trophectoderm cells undergo endoreplication and differentiate into trophoblast giant cells, which penetrate the uterus and promote blastocyst implantation. Subsequently, in the uterus, stromal cells of the endometrium endoreplicate and differentiate into decidual cells, which further facilitate blastocyst implantation and vascularization. Another example is pregnancyinducedliver growth occurring through hepatocyte hypertrophy that is generated by endoreplication. In the mammary gland (MG), alveolar cells undergo endoreplication at the onset of lactation. While these phenomena have long been observed and considered adaptations necessary for tissue expansion during pregnancy, the molecular mechanisms driving these pregnancy-induced endoreplication events remain poorly understood.The MG plays an essential role in the survival of mammalian species by producing milk required for the nourishment of offspring. During pregnancy, the MG undergoes a profound morphological change known as alveologenesis, in which epithelial luminal progenitors proliferate and subsequently differentiate into polyploid alveolar cells that secrete milk during lactation. This polyploidization of the MG is conserved across many mammalian species, including mice and humans, and it is required for efficient milk production. Once breastfeeding is complete, in a process known as involution, massive cell death clears these milk-producing polyploid cells and tissue remodeling brings the epithelium back to a pre-pregnancy-like state.The mechanisms regulating the transition from a proliferative mitotic cell cycle to an endocycle in the MG have yet to be elucidated. The DNA damage response (DDR) plays a central role in the regulation of the cell cycle, to ensure genomic stability and safeguard inheritance. In the event of DNA damage, the DDR kinases ATM and ATR initiate a signaling cascade that activates cell cycle checkpoints, at either the G1/S or G2/M transitions, through inactivation of CDK/Cyclin complexes. These checkpoints permit the DDR to perform any necessary repairs before giving rise to a daughter cell. DNA damage as a consequence of exogenous genotoxic insults has been shown to trigger endoreplication and terminal differentiation through G2/M checkpoint activation .

Something that is chiral cannot be superposed over its mirror image, no matter how it is shifted (ex. our hands). These two mirror images, called enantiomers, rotate plane-polarized light in opposite directions.Chiral nanostructures have unique materials properties that can be used in many applications. In pharmaceutical research and development, chiral analysis is critical, as one enantiomer may be more effective than the other. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed new ways of performing enantiomeric analyses using the plasmonic circular dichroism absorption qualities of nanostructures. 

Nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA find many different applications in research. They can act as research reagents, diagnostic agents, therapeutic agents, and more. Nucleic acids are made by enzymes, which are macromolecules that catalyze reactions. Since nucleic acids are so frequently used in research, there is continued interest in finding new and improved ways to synthesize them. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed ways to continuously synthesize nucleic acids without the use of enzymes.

Colony-stimulating factors (CSF) including macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF), granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF), and granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF also known as colony stimulating factor 2, CSF2) are crucial for survival, proliferation, differentiation and functional activation of hematopoietic cells, including macrophages and dendritic cells (DCs).  Due to cell number limitations from harvesting cDCs and AMs directly from mice, in vitro culturing of bone marrow and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid for dendritic cells and alveolar macrophages is important. GM-CSF greatly facilitates the culturing of these cells. However GM-CSF is difficult to produce and therefore expensive.   

Porcine astrovirus (PoAstV) was first detected by electron microscopy in the feces of piglets with diarrhea in 1980. There are five known genotypes of PoAstV, which are thought to be more closely related to other species than to each other. This divergence among genotypes suggests different ancestral origin of PoAstVs. PoAstVs have been detected across the globe including South Africa, Canada, China, Colombia, and Chile. All five genotypes are present in the US with high incidence. It is currently thought to be endemic in commercial swine in the US and potentially elsewhere. One study of fecal samples from 509 pigs from 255 farms across 19 US states showed PoAstV4 was the most prevalent genotype in 62% (317/509) of samples. At least one PoAstV genotype was found in 64% (326/509) of the samples. It is common for multiple astroviruses to be detected in a single pig at once, which could provide opportunity for recombination to occur and lead to the emergence of new strains. Multiple studies have connected PoAstV to a range of disease manifestations, with the virus frequently detected in feces of pigs displaying diarrheal symptoms as well as asymptomatic pigs. PoAstV5 is a cause of clinical enteritis, while PoAstV3 has been identified and characterized in the central nervous system of pigs with neurologic signs and nonsuppurative polioencephalomyelitis. Additionally, PoAstV4 has been identified in nasal samples from pigs with respiratory disease.Researchers have investigated cases of bronchitis and/or tracheitis in pigs where PCR results were negative for influenza virus and other known causes of respiratory virus infection. Next generation sequencing revealed reads of PoAstV4. In a retrospective study of cases of tracheitis and/or bronchitis of unknown etiology, RNA in situ hybridization (ISH) was used to detect PoAstV4 RNA in airway epithelium (trachea, bronchi, or bronchioles), revealing PoAstV4 RNA in 73% (85/117) of cases. So PoAstV4 is strongly associated with lesions of epitheliotropic viral infection in young pigs with clinical respiratory disease.Accurate tests and vaccines for PoAstV4 infection are clearly needed.    

The use of standing surface acoustic waves (SSAWs) in microfluidic channels gained significant momentum when researchers demonstrated size-based cell separation (acoustophoresis) using lateral acoustic forces. Using interdigitated transducers (IDTs) positioned on piezoelectric substrates, SSAWs were found to create pressure nodes along the channel width, allowing larger particles to experience greater acoustic radiation forces and migrate toward these nodes faster than smaller particles. Acoustic-based microfluidic devices were successfully applied to circulating tumor cell (CTC) isolation from clinical blood samples in ~2015, demonstrating recovery rates >80% using tilted-angle standing surface acoustic waves, though these systems relied primarily on size-based separation principles. The integration of acoustic methods with microfluidics offered key advantages including label-free operation, biocompatibility, non-contact manipulation, and preservation of cell viability, addressing limitations of earlier methods like centrifugation, FACS, and magnetic separation that could damage cells or require labeling. Despite these advances in acoustic microfluidics, significant challenges persist in affinity-based rare cell isolation, particularly mass transport limitations in microfluidic channels operating at high Peclet numbers (Pe>10⁶) where convective flow dominates over diffusion. In traditional microfluidic affinity capture systems, cells flow predominantly in the center of laminar flow channels where fluid velocity is highest, resulting in minimal interaction with capture agents immobilized on channel walls and requiring extremely long channels or impractically slow flow rates to achieve adequate capture efficiency. The extremely low concentration of CTCs , combined with their phenotypic heterogeneity and the low diffusion coefficients of cells creates a "needle in a haystack" challenge that existing acoustic separation methods based solely on size discrimination cannot adequately address.