Science News

Massive stars should not be able to have magnetic fields, but around 7% of them do anyway. A recent study found that this could be caused by stellar mergers.

It's a major contributor to climate change—the way buildings and roads are made with concrete. It's also a problem that's growing as more of the world develops. So the race has been on to find solutions for a material that's responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

As countries worldwide transition to more wind and solar generation and electrify energy end uses, societies are becoming more intertwined with weather conditions. Meanwhile, the climate is rapidly changing and making extreme weather events the "new normal."

Controlling heat flow is key to enhancing performance in a wide variety of systems. In electronic devices, such as mobile phones or any type of processor, overheating decreases their performance and reduces their lifetime. All these technologies are based on materials with a certain resistance to the heat that flows through them.

An electricity market analysis found adding battery storage to enhance grid reliability caused power generation markets to favor coal over natural gas.

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the Holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, of preparing for missions and entertaining them, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working on two different problems—how to quickly detect damaged buildings in crisis zones and how to accurately estimate the size of bird flocks—recently announced an AI framework that can do both. The framework, called DISCount, blends the speed and massive data-crunching power of artificial intelligence with the reliability of human analysis to quickly deliver reliable estimates that can quickly pinpoint and count specific features from very large collections of images.

High-quality, defect-free, and perfectly dimensioned metal components. Quantum computing power looks set to optimize production processes in the metalworking industry.

A new methodology developed by scientists from Japan allows for the precise activation of integrated sensors by manipulating the droplets' locations, thus detecting capacitance changes to estimate their positions without the need for visual confirmation. Such a strategy is invaluable in scenarios such as internal body examinations, where direct visibility is obstructed, where it outperforms conventional techniques by ensuring meticulous control over the droplets' maneuvers.

The pursuit of greener energy also requires efficient rechargeable batteries to store that energy. While lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widely used, all-solid-state sodium batteries are attracting attention as sodium is far more plentiful than lithium. This should make sodium batteries less expensive, and solid-state batteries are thought to be safer, but processing issues mean mass production has been difficult.

ReelSphere aims to make weather forecast graphics faster.

An EPFL engineer has developed a forecasting model that factors in not just our commuting habits, but also our activities during the day. Her flexible approach incorporates the idea of trade-offs in order to deliver more realistic predictions.

The human brain, with its remarkable general intelligence and exceptional efficiency in power consumption, serves as a constant inspiration and aspiration for the field of artificial intelligence. Drawing insights from the brain's fundamental structure and information processing mechanisms, brain-inspired computing has emerged as a new computational paradigm, poised to steer artificial intelligence from specialized domains towards broader applications in general intelligence.

University of Florida engineers have developed a method for 3D printing called vapor-induced phase-separation 3D printing, or VIPS-3DP, to create single-material as well as multi-material objects. The discovery has the potential to advance the world of additive manufacturing.

In a world where rising temperatures increase the demand for cooling, traditional air conditioning (AC) systems contribute significantly to global energy consumption. They also heat Earth overall: to cool down a certain volume of space (e.g., a room), AC systems typically dump heat nearby (e.g., outside the house). Seeking sustainable alternatives, researchers have turned to radiative cooling—a passive, zero-energy cooling method. Radiative cooling irreversibly removes heat to outer space, so from the point of view of Earth, it's a net cooling effect.

How do we know what a quantum computer is good for when it hasn't been built yet? That's what Ph.D. candidate Casper Gyurik investigated by combining two terms you often hear: quantum computing and machine learning.

Researchers from Lehigh University have developed a material that demonstrates the potential for drastically increasing the efficiency of solar panels.

The spread of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011 and the ongoing threat of a possible release of radiation from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in the Ukrainian war zone have underscored the need for effective and reliable ways of detecting and monitoring radioactive isotopes.

Oxide ion conductors used in solid-state fuel cells often fail to reach full potential when operating at temperatures below 500 oC, but researchers from Tokyo Tech have recently found a solution to this problem. They demonstrated high conductivity and stability in bismuth-containing Sillén oxyhalides with triple fluorite-like layers (e.g., 10 mS/cm at 431 oC; 204 times higher conductivity than that of conventional conductors at 310 oC).

As artificial intelligence gets better at giving humans what they want, it also could get better at giving malicious humans what they want.