Laser-thermal propelled spacecraft in Earth orbit awaiting its departure. Credit: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Could a laser send a spacecraft to Mars? That is a proposed mission from a group at McGill University, made to fulfill a solicitation from NASA. The laser, a 10-meter vast array in the world, would certainly heat up...
Credit: Ghedoghedo/Wikimedia Commons Pleistocene age worms found in Arctic permafrost live and eat well after being defrosted some 42,000 years later. Two ancient nematodes are moving and eating normally again for the very first time since the Pleistocene age. The roundworms were discovered frozen in the Siberian permafrost and subsequently thawed out and resuscitated in Petri...
The image represents the 3D model of the polarization pattern in the ferroelectric PbTiO3 representing the cycloidal modulation of the vortex core. Credit: University of Warwick Ferromagnetic materials possess a self-generating magnetic field; ferroelectric materials create their own electrical field. Electric and magnetic fields are important. Physics tells us that they are entirely different classes...
A 3D illustration of fiber optic cables. Credit: Christoph Bergstedt / iStock We are in for an information revolution. Engineers in Japan demolished the world record for the fastest internet speed, reaching a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications...
Scientists from MIT have crafted a new composite material from a greater part of cellulose nanocrystals and a synthetic polymer. Credit: Adam Hunt Research on the new material has been published in the journal Cellulose. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have engineered a new composite material made from cellulose and synthetic polymer. Cellulose fibers...
What if surplus renewable energy could be stored as computation instead? that’s the thinking behind “information batteries.” Photo/ISTOCK. A future powered by sustainable energy sources can save the globe from drastic climate change and reduce energy expenses. But the renewable resource has an intermittency issue-- the sun offers no power during the night, while winds...
Federated learning Federated learning is a great tool for training artificial intelligence (AI) systems while shielding data privacy, however the quantity of data traffic entailed has made it unwieldy for systems that utilize wireless devices. A new technique uses compression to substantially lower the size of data transmissions, creating additional possibilities for AI training on...
Assistant Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi analyzes how disguised biases in medical data can jeopardize artificial intelligence approaches. While completing her dissertation in computer science at MIT, Marzyeh Ghassemi wrote numerous papers on how machine learning strategies from artificial intelligence could be applied to medical data to anticipate patient outcomes. "It was not till the end of...
QESOCAS, Project Number: EXL01 - Atomic Clock The International Clock and Oscillator Networking (ICON) project have been endowed ₤ 1.5 million in financing from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to unite world-leading portable optical clocks and world-leading optical link space infrastructure to inspect the limits of precision time transfer. The project...
This fluorescence microscopy image shows yeast vacuoles that have undergone phase separation. Credit: Luther Davis/Alexey Merz/University of Washington Membranes are essential to our cells. Every cell in your body is encased by one. And each of those cells contains specialized chambers, or organelles, which are similarly confined by membranes. Membranes assist cells in accomplishing tasks like...
