Science News

A three-year research project at Mid Sweden University has made several advancements in creating the airport of the future with safe and cost-effective solutions, including autonomous measurements of the runway surface as well as more opportunities to monitor vehicles and drones at airports.

Researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough in developing a small-scale energy storage device capable of stretching, twisting, folding, and wrinkling. Their study is published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have achieved a milestone in accelerating and adding features to complex multi-physics simulations run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a development that could advance high-performance computing and engineering.

When hurricanes threaten tropical shores, "super grids" could come to the rescue.

In February, OpenAI released videos created by its generative artificial intelligence program Sora. The strikingly realistic content, produced via simple text prompts, is the latest breakthrough for companies demonstrating the capabilities of AI technology. It also raised concerns about generative AI's potential to enable the creation of misleading and deceiving content on a massive scale.

The industrial production of steel, concrete, or glass requires more than 20% of Germany's total energy consumption. Up to now, 90% of the fuels used for these processes have been of fossil nature.

Electric vehicles and portable electronic devices such as laptops and mobile phones are unthinkable without lithium-ion batteries. The problem is highly toxic materials such as cobalt are often used for the cathodes of these batteries, which jeopardize the environment and the health of people in the countries where they are mined. In addition, the reserves of these metals are very limited.

Estuaries—where freshwater rivers meet the salty sea—are great locations for birdwatching and kayaking. In these areas, waters containing different salt concentrations mix and may be sources of sustainable, "blue" osmotic energy.

In recent years, developers have introduced artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can simulate or reproduce various human abilities, such as recognizing objects in images, answering questions, and more. Yet in contrast with the human mind, which can deteriorate over time, these systems typically retain the same performance or even improve their skills over time.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning technique that trains software by mimicking the trial-and-error learning process of humans. It has demonstrated considerable success in many areas that involve sequential decision-making. However, training RL models with real-world online tests is often undesirable as it can be risky, time-consuming, and importantly, unethical. Thus, using offline datasets that are naturally collected through past operations is becoming increasingly popular for training and evaluating RL and bandit policies.

There's some irony in the fact that devices that seem indispensable to modern life—mobile phones, personal computers, and anything battery-powered—depend entirely on minerals extracted from mining, one of the most ancient of human industries. Once their usefulness is spent, we typically return these objects to the earth in landfills, by the millions.

We use computers to help us make (hopefully) unbiased decisions. The problem is that machine-learning algorithms do not always make fair classifications if human bias is embedded in the data used to train them—which is often the case in practice.

In a recent publication in Science China Life Sciences, a research team led by Professor Jing-Dong Jackie Han and Ph.D. student Xinyu Yang from Peking University established a deep learning model for age estimation using non-registered 3D face point clouds. They also proposed the coordinate-wise monotonic transformation algorithm to isolate age-related facial features from identifiable human faces.

As China propels itself into a new era of aviation with its significant advancements in unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the nation is on the brink of a transformative shift in low-altitude airspace management. These changes are driven by an urgent need to integrate a burgeoning number of unmanned aircraft into the national airspace, posing unique challenges and opportunities for regulation, technology, and industry practices.

Engineers have invented energy-efficient bricks with scrap materials, including glass, that are normally destined for landfill.

While the class imbalance issue has been extensively investigated within the multi-class paradigm, its study in the multi-dimensional classification (MDC) context has been limited due to the imbalance shift phenomenon. A sample's classification as a minor or major class instance becomes ambiguous when it belongs to a minor class in one labeling dimension (LD) and a major class in another.

While wind energy is becoming one of the fastest-growing energy sources in the world, wind turbine blade waste emerges as a critical issue. Addressing this urgent environmental concern, Lithuanian researchers have developed an innovative solution, claiming that the benefits of pyrolysis can help reduce pollution.

Setting the stage for a new era of immersive displays, researchers are one step closer to mixing the real and virtual worlds in an ordinary pair of eyeglasses using high-definition 3D holographic images, according to a study led by Princeton University researchers.

Traditional non-aqueous lithium-ion batteries have a high energy density, but their safety is compromised due to the flammable organic electrolytes they utilize.

Citizens will need greater financial support and advice as they make the switch to decarbonized heat sources, research from Cardiff University shows.