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A team of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) researchers has developed a new kind of self-cleaning, hybrid membrane that provides a solution that overcomes significant challenges that have, until now, limited desalination technologies.

The most energy-efficient desalination technologies are based on membrane desalination. However, the membranes used for desalination are prone to fouling, the accumulation of scale that results in decreased membrane performance, shorter lifespan, and the need for chemical cleaning, which has unknown environmental consequences.

Researchers at NYUAD’s Smart Materials Lab and the Center for Smart Engineering Materials, led by Professor Panče Naumov and Research Scientist Ejaz Ahmed, together with their collaborators from the Institute for Membrane Technology in Italy, created a unique hybrid membrane by utilizing stimuli-responsive materials, thermosalient organic crystals, embedded in polymers. The thermosalient crystals are a new class of dynamic materials that are capable of sudden expansion or motion upon heating or cooling.

While the nanobio interaction is crucial in determining nanoparticles’ in vivo fate, a previous work on investigating nanoparticles’ interaction with biological barriers is mainly carried out in a static state. Nanoparticles’ fluid dynamics that share non-negligible impacts on their frequency of encountering biological hosts, however, is seldom given attention. Herein, inspired by badmintons’ unique aerodynamics, badminton architecture Fe3O4&mPDA (Fe3O4 = magnetite nanoparticle and mPDA = mesoporous polydopamine) Janus nanoparticles have successfully been synthesized based on a steric-induced anisotropic assembly strategy. Due to the “head” Fe3O4 having much larger density than the mPDA “cone”, it shows an asymmetric mass distribution, analogous to real badminton.

Researchers have developed a method of “wiring up” graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), a class of one-dimensional materials that are of interest in the scaling of microelectronic devices. Using a direct-write scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) based process, the nanometer-scale metal contacts were fabricated on individual GNRs and could control the electronic character of the GNRs.

The researchers say that this is the first demonstration of making metal contacts to specific GNRs with certainty and that those contacts induce device functionality needed for transistor function.

The results of this research, led by electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Joseph Lyding, along with ECE graduate student Pin-Chiao Huang and materials science and engineering graduate student Hongye Sun, were recently published in the journal ACS Nano.

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The company announced a slew of AI-powered tools including backgrounds and video topic suggestions at its creator event.

More content on YouTube is going to be created at least in part using generative AI. The video platform announced several new AI-powered tools for creators at its annual Made on YouTube event on Thursday. Among the features coming later this year or next are AI-generated photo and video backgrounds, AI video topic suggestions, and music search.

A new feature called Dream Screen will create AI-generated videos and photos that creators can place in the background of their YouTube Shorts. Initially, creators will be able to type in prompts to generate backgrounds; eventually,… More.

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OpenAI today unveiled an upgraded version of its text-to-image tool, DALL-E, that uses ChatGPT — OpenAI’s viral AI chatbot — to take some of the pain out of prompting.

Most cutting-edge, AI-powered image generation tools today take prompts — descriptions of images — and turn them into artwork in an array of styles, ranging from the photorealistic to fantastical. But crafting the right prompt can be a challenge, so much so that “prompt engineering” is becoming a bona fide profession.

OpenAI’s new tool, DALL-E 3, uses ChatGPT to help fill in prompts. Via ChatGPT, subscribers to OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans, ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise, can type in a request for an image and hone it through conversations with the chatbot — receiving the results directly within the chat app.

Cisco has a reputation of building the company through acquisitions, but it has tended to stay away from the really huge ones. That changed this morning when the company announced it was acquiring Splunk for $28 billion.

With Splunk, it gets an observability platform that could fit nicely into its security business to help customers better understand security threats, while also helping parse oodles of log data to resolve other problems like helping understand system failures or troubleshoot myriad issues across a broad array of enterprise systems.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco is paying a hefty premium of $157 per share. When you consider that the 52-week low was $65 a share and it has hovered in the high 80s and low 90s much of this year, that’s a big bump for Splunk stockholders and suggests there might have been some competition for the logging giant. The company’s most recent market cap sits at just over $20 billion.

Since its launch in 2017, Harness, the software delivery platform founded by AppDynamics founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal, expanded from being continuous code deployment to covering continuous integration, feature flags, cloud cost management, security testing orchestration, chaos engineering and more. But even though it focused heavily on GitOps, it never offered its own Git repositories. That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness.

“There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it. […] If you look at any of the git repos, whether it’s GitLab or GitHub or Bitbucket, they don’t have the true one source ethos around them anymore. We strongly believe that Git started as open source, so let’s bring the true open-source ethos back to Git repos.”

Neuralink’s brain implants could help protect humanity from the risks of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk said on Wednesday, as the company prepares to launch its first in-human trials for the chips it hopes could restore lost functions to people with paralysis.

Neuralink will hopefully play a role in cutting the “civilizational risk” artificial intelligence poses to humanity, Musk said in a post on X.

The implantable tech will allow humans to interact with computers with their thoughts alone and should improve our abilities to communicate with AI “by several orders of magnitude,” Musk explained.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Says Neuralink Could Slash Risk From AI As Firm Prepares For First Human Trials” »