Science News

There is room for just one small bottle in the world's first refrigerator that is cooled with artificial muscles made of nitinol, a nickel-titanium alloy. But the mini-prototype that the team led by professors Stefan Seelecke and Paul Motzki will be presenting at the Hannover Messe from 22 to 26 April is groundbreaking: It shows that elastocalorics is becoming a viable solution for practical applications. This climate-friendly cooling and heating technology is far more energy-efficient and sustainable than current methods.

A group of researchers led by University of Massachusetts Amherst engineers have created ultraviolet (UV) rays-emitting glass that can reduce 98% of biofilm from growing on surfaces in underwater environments, as reported in the journal Biofilm.

New research from ESMT Berlin shows how AI can manage human participants in large-scale research projects, taking over functions such as task allocation, coordination, and motivation.

There may be few better real-life laboratories in the United States than Cordova, Alaska, to evaluate the challenges and benefits of transitioning to new, cleaner methods of home heating in a colder climate.

With the evolution of artificial intelligence comes a discussion of the technology's environmental impact. A study has found that for the tasks of writing and illustrating, AI emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans performing the same tasks. That does not mean, however, that AI can or should replace human writers and illustrators, the study's authors argue.

Researchers in the UNC-Chapel Hill Chemistry Department are using semiconductors to harvest and convert the sun's energy into high-energy compounds that have the potential to produce environmentally friendly fuels.

When it comes to mating, two things matter for Heliconius butterflies: the look and the smell of their potential partner. The black and orange butterflies have incredibly small brains, yet they must process both sensory inputs at the same time—which is more than current artificial intelligence (AI) technologies can achieve without significant energy consumption.

A team of engineers at The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology's ICFO–Institut de Ciències Fotòniques has developed a nearly transparent camera that can be used for eye tracking without obstructing the view. The team has published a paper describing their camera and its performance as an eye tracker on the arXiv preprint server.

Automated vehicles (AVs) have become a critical link in the development of intelligent transportation systems owing to their vast potential to enhance safety, reduce energy consumption, and optimize traffic flow. With the increase of advanced functionalities included in AVs, safety during their operational phase is of paramount importance for the road vehicles industry.

The idea for Fawn Ngo's latest research came from a television interview. Ngo, a University of South Florida criminologist, had spoken with a Vietnamese language network in California about her interest in better understanding how people become victims of cybercrime. Afterward, she began receiving phone calls from viewers recounting their own experiences of victimization.

Could digital humans—realistic virtual representations of humans that communicate through text-to-speech and speech-to-text interfaces—provide online training that is as effective as that provided by real humans?

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained widespread adoption in recommendation systems. When it comes to processing large graphs, GNNs may encounter the scalability issue stemming from their multi-layer message-passing operations. Consequently, scaling GNNs has emerged as a crucial research area in recent years, with numerous scaling strategies being proposed.

A research group led by Prof. Ge Ziyi from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed two self-assembled molecules (SAMs) with large dipole moments and employed them as hole-transporting layers (HTLs) in binary organic solar cells (OSCs), achieving highly efficient and stable binary OSCs with a record power conversion efficiency (PCE) of up to 19.70%.

A new electrical power converter design achieves a much higher efficiency at lower cost and maintenance than before. The direct current voltage boost converter developed by Kobe University is poised to be a significant contribution to the further development of electric and electronic components across power generation, health care, mobility and information technology.

Two-dimensional (2D) superconducting materials have been found to be promising for the development of miniaturized optoelectronic devices. To perform well while consuming less energy, however, these smaller devices require a higher gate capacitance (i.e., gates that can store more electrical charge in proportion to the voltage applied).

Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are an emerging class of transistors based on organic superconducting materials known for their ability to modulate electrical current in response to small changes in the voltage applied to their gate electrode. Like other electronics based on organic semiconductors, these transistors could be promising for the development of various brain-inspired and wearable technologies.

Could a new collab rescue it from the brink?

Professor Jeongho Kwak's from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST has developed a learning model and resource optimization technology that combines accuracy and efficiency for 6G vision services. This technology is expected to be utilized to address the high levels of computing power and complex learning models required by 6G vision services.

The cargo ship collision that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on March 26, 2024, is raising questions about just how much engineers can do to prevent such catastrophes from occurring in the future. Here, Michael J. Chajes, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Delaware, discusses how bridge design codes have changed over the years and the challenges of building new structures, and retrofitting existing ones, so they can survive extreme events

OpenAI on Friday revealed a voice-cloning tool it plans to keep tightly controlled until safeguards are in place to thwart audio fakes meant to dupe listeners.