… at a small fraction of the energy and size of today’s compute platforms. The NeuRRAM chip is the first compute-in-memory chip to demonstrate a wide range of AI applications at a fraction of the energy consumed by other platforms while maintaining equivalent accuracy. An international team of researchers has designed and built a chip that runs computations directly in memory and can run a wide variety of AI applications–all at a fraction of the energy consumed by computing platforms…
Engineering feat expands what researchers can accomplish with organoids. It could be the world’s tiniest EEG electrode cap, created to measure activity in a brain model the size of a pen dot. Its designers expect the device to lead to better understanding of neural disorders and how potentially dangerous chemicals affect the brain. This engineering feat, led by Johns Hopkins University researchers and detailed today in Science Advances, expands what researchers can accomplish with organoids, including mini brains—the lab-grown balls of…
Study finds shifting climate will have little effect on breadfruit cultivation. In the face of climate change, breadfruit soon might come to a dinner plate near you. While researchers predict that climate change will have an adverse effect on most staple crops, including rice, corn and soybeans, a new Northwestern University study finds that breadfruit — a starchy tree fruit native to the Pacific islands — will be relatively unaffected. Because breadfruit is resilient to predicted climate change and particularly…
Modeling the way that snow distribution depends on terrain, elevation and vegetation will improve Earth-system models. Comprehensive data from several seasons of field research in the Alaskan Arctic will address uncertainties in Earth-system and climate-change models about snow cover across the region and its impacts on water and the environment. “Snow cover and its distribution affects not only the Arctic but global energy balances, and thus how it is changing is critically important for understanding how future global climate will…
Impacts affect the porosity and structure of moons and planets more dramatically than scientists suspected, increasing their potential habitability for life. The harder you hit something – a ball, a walnut, a geode – the more likely it is to break open. Or, if not break open, at least lose a little bit of its structural integrity, the way baseball players pummel new gloves to make them softer and more flexible. Cracks, massive or tiny, form and bear a silent,…
The world is “woefully underprepared” for a massive volcanic eruption and the likely repercussions on global supply chains, climate and food, according to experts from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), and the University of Birmingham. In an article published in the journal Nature, they say there is a “broad misconception” that risks of major eruptions are low, and describe current lack of governmental investment in monitoring and responding to potential volcano disasters as…
Preservation of the high-pressure states of materials at ambient conditions is a long-sought-after goal for fundamental research and practical applications. A team of scientists led by Drs. Zhidan (Denise) Zeng, Qiaoshi Zeng, and Ho-Kwang Mao from the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research (HPSTAR) and Prof. Wendy Mao from Stanford University report an innovative breakthrough where they were able to maintain the extraordinary properties of high-pressure materials in free-standing, nanostructured diamond capsules without the support of traditional…
A plasma-based method may one day convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and produce fuels, fertilizers on the red planet. An international team of researchers came up with a plasma-based way to produce and separate oxygen within the Martian environment. It’s a complementary approach to NASA’s Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, and it may deliver high rates of molecule production per kilogram of instrumentation sent to space. Such a system could play a critical role in the development of life-support…
Ready for its close-up: When scientists unveiled humanity’s historic first image of a black hole in 2019 — depicting a dark core encircled by a fiery aura of material falling toward it — they believed even richer imagery and insights were waiting to be teased out of the data. Simulations predict that, obscured by that bright orange glow, there should exist a thin, bright ring of light created by photons flung around the back of the black hole by its…
By using the lymphatic system as a storage reservoir, researchers found they could optimize drug concentrations to simultaneously target two molecular signaling pathways responsible for cancer growth. A team of University of Michigan researchers is developing a new anti-cancer drug that is absorbed through the gut’s lymphatic system rather than blood vessels, potentially outmaneuvering the molecular signaling pathways that lead to drug resistance while increasing cancer-fighting ability and reducing side effects. In a study published today in Nature Communications, the team reports…
Rice lab leads effort to generate thickness-independent piezoelectricity in atom-thick materials. There’s still plenty of room at the bottom to generate piezoelectricity. Engineers at Rice University and their colleagues are showing the way. A new study describes the discovery of piezoelectricity — the phenomenon by which mechanical energy turns into electrical energy — across phase boundaries of two-dimensional materials. The work led by Rice materials scientists Pulickel Ajayan and Hanyu Zhu and their colleagues at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, the University of Southern California, the University of Houston,…
Bone health requires a balanced activity of various bone cell types including bone-forming osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts. Osteoporosis occurs when osteoclasts dominate without adequate bone formation to compensate. In new research published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, elevated blood levels of a certain chemokine, or small signaling protein, that promotes osteoclast formation were linked with a higher risk of hip fracture in men. The study included 55 men and 119 women who had experienced a hip fracture an…
It’s not just the land that is groaning under the heat – the ocean is also suffering from heatwaves. In the Mediterranean Sea along the Italian and Spanish coasts, for example, water temperatures are currently up to 5 °C higher than the long-term average at this time of year. Scientists have investigated marine heatwaves for a few years now – for example at the University of Bern. However, relatively little is known about how marine heatwaves co-occur with other extreme…
When it comes to royalty, things are clear: The monarch’s first child inherits the crown. Siblings born later must make do with a less glamorous profession. This is quite similar for some nerve cells in the brain. In their case, it is not the order in which they are born, but at least the time of their emergence that determines their further career. This is shown by a recent study by the University of Bonn. The results were obtained in…
Under most conditions, according to a new proof, algorithms on a quantum annealing computer don’t offer quantum speed-up. Recent research proves that under certain conditions, quantum annealing computers can run algorithms—including the well-known Shor’s algorithm—more quickly than classical computers. In most cases, however, quantum annealing does not provide a speed-up compared to classical computing when time is limited, according to a study in Nature Communications. “We proved that you can be sure you will reach a fast solution from the…
German-New Zealand project on water electrolysis. The production of “green hydrogen” by electrolysis from renewable electricity is a key technology in the energy transition. One unsolved problem so far has been the need for expensive, hard-to-find precious metals. This is where the “HighHy” project, launched on 1 August 2022, comes in, in which the University of Bayreuth collaborates with Fraunhofer IFAM and three universities in New Zealand. Together, the partners want to develop a cost-effective and resource-saving process for water…
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