Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise. Until now, AI applications generally have “black box” character: How AI arrives at its results remains hidden. Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bajorath, a cheminformatics scientist at the University of Bonn, and his team have developed a method that reveals how certain AI applications work in pharmaceutical research. The results are unexpected: the AI programs largely remembered known data and hardly learned specific chemical interactions when predicting drug potency. The results have now been published…

For a magnet to stick to a fridge door, inside of it several physical effects need to work together perfectly. The magnetic moments of its electrons all point in the same direction, even if no external magnetic field forces them to do so. This happens because of the so-called exchange interaction, a combination of electrostatic repulsion between electrons and quantum mechanical effects of the electron spins, which, in turn, are responsible for the magnetic moments. This is common explanation for…

Frontier sets new pace for artificial intelligence… The team that built Frontier set out to break the exascale barrier, but the supercomputer’s record-breaking didn’t stop there. “The exascale number marks a major milestone itself, but it also marks the beginning of a new chapter in high-speed computing,” said Feiyi Wang, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory computer scientist who leads research into artificial intelligence and analytics. “We don’t have to wait for the next generation of computing anymore. We can have…

CALET instrument detects electrons arriving with more energy than ever recorded before. A new study using data from the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) instrument on the International Space Station has found evidence for nearby, young sources of cosmic ray electrons, contributing to a greater understanding of how the galaxy functions as a whole. The study included more than seven million data points representing particles arriving at CALET’s detector since 2015, and CALET’s ability to detect electrons at the highest energies…

Goethe University Frankfurt helped set new measurement record. After a five-year break, the large LHC accelerator at the CERN international research institute has once again brought lead ions to collision. During the process, the colliding matter dissolves into its components for an extremely short time, reaching a state like the one that prevailed in the universe a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The particle tracks of these collisions are recorded by the house-sized ALICE detector, which…

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg, Germany, have shown that a previously demonstrated ability to turn on superconductivity with a laser beam can be integrated on a chip, opening up a route toward opto-electronic applications. Their work, now published in Nature Communications, also shows that the electrical response of photo-excited K₃C₆₀ is not linear, that is, the resistance of the sample depends on the applied current. This is a key…

HZDR team proposes improvements for an experiment designed to explore the limits of physics. Absolutely empty – that is how most of us envision the vacuum. Yet, in reality, it is filled with an energetic flickering: the quantum fluctuations. Experts are currently preparing a laser experiment intended to verify these vacuum fluctuations in a novel way, which could potentially provide clues to new laws in physics. A research team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a series of proposals…

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used their expertise in quantum biology, artificial intelligence and bioengineering to improve how CRISPR Cas9 genome editing tools work on organisms like microbes that can be modified to produce renewable fuels and chemicals. CRISPR is a powerful tool for bioengineering, used to modify genetic code to improve an organism’s performance or to correct mutations. The CRISPR Cas9 tool relies on a single, unique guide RNA that directs the Cas9 enzyme to bind with and…

Recently, a team led by Prof. WANG Mingtai from the Institute of Solid State Physics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has put forward an intriguing approach to enhance the efficiency of solar cells. Their focus on the potential antimony trisulfide (Sb2S3) as a photovoltaic absorber has led to a Parallel Planar Heterojunction (PPHJ) strategy for the preparation of highly efficient solar cells. Their findings have been published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. One of the…

Research team, including a UC Riverside astronomer, made discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team, including astronomer Alexander de la Vega of the University of California, Riverside, has discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way that has been observed to date. Until now it was believed that barred spiral galaxies like the Milky Way could not be observed before the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old,…

Lasers have become relatively commonplace in everyday life, but they have many uses outside of providing light shows at raves and scanning barcodes on groceries. Lasers are also of great importance in telecommunications and computing as well as biology, chemistry, and physics research. In those latter applications, lasers that can emit extremely short pulses—those on the order of one-trillionth of a second (one picosecond) or shorter—are especially useful. Using lasers operating on such small timescales, researchers can study physical and…

The striking image represents one of the most comprehensive views of the universe ever taken and reveals a vivid landscape of galaxies along with more than a dozen newfound, time-varying objects. Astronomers once again have combined the observational powers of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope to create one of the most detailed and colorful portraits of the cosmos, just in time for the holiday season. The new image, dubbed the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster by the research team that includes…

A method developed at the University of Duisburg-Essen makes it possible to read data from noisy signals: Theoretical physicists and their experimental colleagues have collaborated on this and published their findings in the current issue of the renowned journal “Physical Review Research”. The method they describe could also be significant for quantum computers. You know it from the car radio: the weaker the signal, the more disturbing the noise. This is even more true for laboratory measurements. Researchers from the…

The results open the door to exploring superconductivity and other exotic electronic states in three-dimensional materials. Electrons move through a conducting material like commuters at the height of Manhattan rush hour. The charged particles may jostle and bump against each other, but for the most part they’re unconcerned with other electrons as they hurtle forward, each with their own energy. But when a material’s electrons are trapped together, they can settle into the exact same energy state and start to…

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just made a breakthrough discovery in revealing how planets are made. By observing water vapor in protoplanetary disks, Webb confirmed a physical process involving the drifting of ice-coated solids from the outer regions of the disk into the rocky-planet zone. Theories have long proposed that icy pebbles forming in the cold, outer regions of protoplanetary disks — the same area where comets originate in our solar system — should be the fundamental seeds of…

Scientists have trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to accurately map – in one-hundredth of a second – the surface area and outline of giant icebergs captured on satellite images.   It is a major advance on existing automated systems which struggle to distinguish icebergs from other features in the image. Manual – or human – interpretation of the image is more accurate but it can take several minutes to delineate the outline of a single iceberg. If that has to be repeated numerous times, the process quickly becomes time-consuming and laborious. Icebergs…