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Category: computing – Page 6

Climate-smart housing design helps cities beat the heat

Painting walls in light colors, insulating roofs, choosing medium-sized windows, and aligning buildings to the sun’s path may seem like simple choices. But they could provide powerful defenses against climate change for millions of people in the world’s most vulnerable regions.

That’s the message of a study, appearing in the journal Energy and Buildings, which identifies low-cost, climate-smart design strategies as crucial for future housing in Latin America’s rapidly warming cities.

Researchers used computer simulations to test how various climate-resilient building projects would perform under current and projected climate conditions in five major cities—Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in Brazil, Santiago (Chile), Bogotá (Colombia), and Lima (Peru).

HALO: hierarchical causal modeling for single cell multi-omics data

Chromatin accessibility dynamics causally influence changes in gene expression levels, but these fluctuations may not be directly coupled over time. Here, authors develop computational causal framework HALO, examining epigenetic plasticity and gene regulation dynamics in single-cell multi-omic data.

Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines

Computational Creativity, Concept Invention, and General Intelligence in their own right all are flourishing research disciplines producing surprising and captivating results that continuously influence and change our view on where the limits of intelligent machines lie, each day pushing the boundaries a bit further. By 2014, all three fields also have left their marks on everyday life – machine-composed music has been performed in concert halls, automated theorem provers are accepted tools in enterprises’ R&D departments, and cognitive architectures are being integrated in pilot assistance systems for next generation airplanes.

Nobel Prize: Quantum Tunneling on a Large Scale

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunneling in electrical circuits.

This story will be updated with a longer explanation of the Nobel-winning work on Thursday, 9 October.

Running up against a barrier, a classical object bounces back, but a quantum particle can come out the other side. So-called quantum tunneling explains a host of phenomena, from electron jumps in semiconductors to radioactive decays in nuclei. But tunneling is not limited to subatomic particles, as underscored by this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize recipients—John Clarke from the University of California, Berkeley; Michel Devoret from Yale University; and John Martinis from the University of California, Santa Barbara—demonstrated that large objects consisting of billions of particles can also tunnel across barriers [1– 3]. Using a superconducting circuit, the physicists showed that the superconducting electrons, acting as a collective unit, tunneled across an energy barrier between two voltage states. The work thrust open the field of superconducting circuits, which have become one of the promising platforms for future quantum computing devices.

Computer advances and ‘invisibility cloak’ vie for physics Nobel

A math theory powering computer image compression, an “invisibility cloak” or the science behind the James Webb Space Telescope are some achievements that could be honored when the Nobel physics prize is awarded Tuesday.

The award, to be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT) in Stockholm, is the second Nobel of the season, after the Medicine Prize was awarded on Monday to a US-Japanese trio for research into the human immune system.

Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, of the United States, and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi were recognized by the Nobel jury for identifying immunological “security guards”

Observing quantum weirdness in our world: Nobel physics explained

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists on Tuesday for discovering that a bizarre barrier-defying phenomenon in the quantum realm could be observed on an electrical circuit in our classical world.

The discovery, which involved an effect called , laid the foundations for technology now being used by Google and IBM aiming to build the quantum computers of the future.

Here is what you need to know about the Nobel-winning work by John Clarke of the UK, Frenchman Michel Devoret and American John Martinis.

Quantum Tunneling Experiments Earn Team The Nobel Prize in Physics

Briton John Clarke, Frenchman Michel Devoret and American John Martinis won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for putting quantum mechanics into action and enabling the development of all kinds of digital technology from cellphones to a new generation of computers.

The Nobel jury noted that their work had “provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers and quantum sensors”

Quantum mechanics describes how differently things work on incredibly small scales.

Physicists develop new quantum sensor at the atomic lattice scale

From computer chips to quantum dots—technological platforms were only made possible thanks to a detailed understanding of the used solid-state materials, such as silicon or more complex semiconductor materials. This understanding also includes being able to identify and control irregularities in the crystal lattice of such materials.

If, for example, an atom is missing in the lattice structure of the crystals, a and thus an can become trapped there. Such charge traps generate electromagnetic noise that limits the functionality of these materials. However, it is extremely difficult to locate these charge traps on an atomic scale.

Researchers from the “Integrated Quantum Photonics” group at the Department of Physics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU) and the “Joint Lab Diamond Nanophotonics” at the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut, led by Prof. Dr. Tim Schröder, have developed a new sensor that can detect such individual electrical charges more precisely than ever before.

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