As text-messaging chatbots become increasingly "human", it will be important to understand the personal interactions that users are seeking with a chatbot. What chatbot personalities are most compelling to young, urban users in India? To explore this question, we first conducted exploratory Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) studies with 14 users that simulated interactions with a hypothetical chatbot. We evaluated three personalities for the chatbot-Maya, a productivity oriented bot with nerd wit; Ada, a fun, flirtatious bot; and Evi, an emotional buddy bot. We followed up with one-on-one interviews with the users discussing their experiences with each of the chatbots, what they liked, and what they did not. Overall our results show that users wanted a chatbot like Maya, who could add value to their life while being a friend, by making useful recommendations. But they also wanted preferred traits of Ada and Evi infused into Maya.

In this work, we synthesized pristine mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN) and functionalized these with phosphonate groups (MSN-Phos). We report, for the first time, cell death in MCF-7 cells (human breast adenocarcinoma cell line) when exposed to the empty MSN and MSN-Phos nanoparticles. In comparison, the same nanoparticles were found to elicit few deleterious effects on normal human foreskin fibroblast cells (BJ cells). MCF-7 cells were found to exhibit a concentration-dependent uptake, whereas no detectable nanoparticle uptake was observed in the BJ cells, irrespective of treatment dosage. A disruption of the cell cycle in the MCF-7 cells was determined to be the cause of cell death from the nanoparticle exposure, thereby suggesting the role of nondrug loaded MSN and MSN-Phos as effective anticancer drugs.

A Gram-stain-positive, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming, catalase-negative, urease-negative, homofermentative and facultatively anaerobic strain, named WILCCON 0076T, was isolated from a wild ferment of pieces of a ‘Kampung’ durian fruit collected on the island of Ubin (Pulau Ubin), Singapore. The durian had fallen to the ground from a durian tree (Durio zibethinus), on which a group of long-tailed macaques had been observed picking and eating the fruits. Comparative analyses of 16S rRNA gene sequences indicated that WILCCON 0076T potentially represented a novel species within the genus Ligilactobacillus , with the most closely related type strain being Ligilactobacillus agilis DSM 20509T (16S rRNA gene sequence similarity of 97.2 %). Average nucleotide identity and digital DNA–DNA hybridization prediction values were only 86.0% and 18.9 %, respectively. On the basis of the results of a polyphasic approach that included phylogenomic, chemotaxonomic and morphological analyses, we propose a novel species with the name Ligilactobacillus ubinensis sp. nov. (type strain WILCCON 0076T=DSM 114293T=LMG 32698T).

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