World’s first private nuclear reactor, ‘the atomic furnace’ pioneered advancements in agriculture, chemistry, and medicine while employing an innovative safety design The Armour Research Foundation Reactor at Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) has been officially recognized as a Nuclear Historic Landmark by the American Nuclear Society (ANS), joining an elite group of fewer than 100 sites across the United States to receive this designation. Nicknamed “the atomic furnace,” the world’s first privately owned and operated nuclear reactor marked a significant transition in the…

Bringing SETI science to community colleges SETI Institute Launches ARISE Lab, Bringing SETI and Radio Astronomy to Community Colleges The SETI Institute announced it will expand its pilot program funded through a grant from the Amateur Radio and Digital Communication (ARDC) Foundation now called ARISE Lab (arise.seti.org). This initiative brings SETI science to community colleges and provides hands-on training for community college instructors and students in astronomy, digital signal processing, and radio science. “Hands-on experiences are proven to improve student…

Another race to space is on, but the competitors aren’t reaching for the moon. Instead, multiple national agencies and private companies across the world are aiming for the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Launching satellites into this very low Earth orbit (VLEO) environment — the altitude between 60 and 280 miles above Earth — could solve spacecraft crowding in traditional orbits, according to Sven Bilén, Penn State professor of engineering design, of electrical engineering and of aerospace engineering. Bilén said satellites in traditional…

Scientists and space explorers have been on the hunt to determine where and how much ice is present on the Moon. Water ice would be an important resource at a future lunar base, as it could be used to support humans or be broken down to hydrogen and oxygen, key components of rocket fuel. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa researchers are using two innovative approaches to advance the search for ice on the Moon. ShadowCam scouts for surface ice Water…

Team from University of Stuttgart publishes results in Nature Physics “Our results add another chapter to the emerging field of skyrmion research,” proclaims Prof. Harald Giessen, head of the Fourth Physics Institute at the University of Stuttgart, whose group achieved this breakthrough. The team demonstrated the existence of “skyrmion bags” of light on the surface of a metal layer. A better understanding of physical phenomena Skyrmions are a mathematical description of vortex-like structures that help researchers better understand fundamental physical…

In two commentaries, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine say combining modeling methods—and ethically sharing health data—could transform treatment With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), predictive medicine is becoming an important part of healthcare, especially in cancer treatment. Predictive medicine uses algorithms and data to help doctors understand how a cancer might continue to grow or react to specific drugs—making it easier to target precision treatment for individual patients. While AI is important in this work,…

An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has discovered the most distant spiral galaxy candidate known to date. This ultra-massive system existed just one billion years after the Big Bang and already shows a remarkably mature structure, with a central old bulge, a large star-forming disk, and well-defined spiral arms. The discovery was made using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and offers important insights into how galaxies can form and evolve so rapidly in…

Neural networks are one typical structure on which artificial intelligence can be based. The term ›neural‹ describes their learning ability, which to some extent mimics the functioning of neurons in our brains. To be able to work, several key ingredients are required: one of them is an activation function which introduces nonlinearity into the structure. A photonic activation function has important advantages for the implementation of optical neural networks based on light propagation. Researchers in the Stiller Research Group at…

New AI model explains the basis for its decisions and the intention behind actions The Titanic sunk 113 years ago on April 14-15, after hitting an iceberg, with human error likely causing the ship to stray into those dangerous waters. Today, autonomous systems built on artificial intelligence can help ships avoid such accidents, but could such a system explain to the captain why it was maneuvering a certain way? That’s the idea behind explainable AI, which should help human actors…

Findings identify opportunities for new treatments of Parkinson’s and related neurodegenerative disorders A longstanding mystery in Parkinson’s disease research has been why some individuals carrying pathogenic variants that increase their risk of PD go on to develop the disease, while others who also carry such variants do not. The prevailing theory has suggested additional genetic factors may play a role. To address this question, a new study from Northwestern Medicine used modern technology, called CRISPR interference, to systematically examine every…

Discovery in a magnetic crystal could enable breakthroughs in quantum tech A team of Rice University researchers reported the first direct observation of a surprising quantum phenomenon predicted over half a century ago, opening pathways for revolutionary applications in quantum computing, communication and sensing. Known as a superradiant phase transition (SRPT), the phenomenon occurs when two groups of quantum particles begin to fluctuate in a coordinated, collective way without any external trigger, forming a new state of matter. The discovery…

‘Optical rotatum’ describes new structure of light Beams of light that can be guided into corkscrew-like shapes called optical vortices are used today in a range of applications. Pushing the limits of structured light, Harvard applied physicists in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) report a new type of optical vortex beam that not only twists as it travels but also changes in different parts at different rates to create unique patterns. The way the light behaves…

A research paper by scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University presented a novel channel-wise cumulative spike train image-driven model (cwCST-CNN) for hand gesture recognition. The research paper, published on Mar. 21, 2025 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, leverage a custom convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract both local and global features for classifying hand gestures, by decomposing high-density surface EMG (HD-sEMG) signals into channel-wise cumulative spike trains (cw-CSTs) and reconstructing these into two-dimensional images based on the spatial…

A recent paper published in Engineering titled “Machine Memory Intelligence: Inspired by Human Memory Mechanisms” explores a novel approach to AIby drawing inspiration from the human brain’s memory mechanisms. This research aims to address the limitations of current large models, such as ChatGPT, and paves the way for the development of more efficient and intelligent machines. Large models have achieved remarkable performance in various fields but suffer from several drawbacks. They consume excessive amounts of data and computing power, are prone to…

Although we know that supermassive black holes (millions of times the mass of our Sun) lurk at the centre of most galaxies, their very nature makes them difficult to spot and study. In contrast to the popular idea of black holes constantly ‘gobbling up’ matter, these gravitational monsters can spend long periods of time in a dormant, inactive phase. This was true of the black hole at the heart of SDSS1335+0728, a distant and unremarkable galaxy 300 million light-years away…

Scientists build ‘digital twin’ of mouse brain Much as a pilot might practice maneuvers in a flight simulator, scientists might soon be able to perform experiments on a realistic simulation of the mouse brain. In a new study, Stanford Medicine researchers and collaborators used an artificial intelligence model to build a “digital twin” of the part of the mouse brain that processes visual information. The digital twin was trained on large datasets of brain activity collected from the visual cortex…