New research from India has made it 10 times cheaper to construct buildings on-site using a 3D printer.
A report from The Better India highlights the work of Dr. Pradeepkumar Sundarraj, who built the Kelvin6K Pro. It’s India’s first on-site construction 3D printer that can build a 2,500-square-foot home in less than 30 days.
Early-life adversity affects more than half of the world’s children and is a significant risk factor for cognitive and mental health problems later in life. In an extensive and up-to-the-minute review of research in this domain, scholars from the University of California, Irvine illuminate the profound impacts of these adverse childhood experiences on brain development and introduce new paths for understanding and tackling them.
Their study, published in Neuron, examines the mechanisms behind the long-term consequences of childhood stress (adversity). Despite extensive research spanning over seven decades, the authors point out that significant questions remain unanswered. For example, how do adults—from parents to researchers—fully comprehend what is perceived as stressful by an infant or child?
Such conceptual queries, as well as the use of cutting-edge research tools, can provide a road map, guiding experts toward developing innovative methods and providing solutions to this pressing mental health issue.
In a comprehensive experimental study, an international team of researchers has confirmed the calculations of a leading turbulence simulation code to an unprecedented degree. This marks a major breakthrough in understanding turbulent transport processes in nuclear fusion devices.
The study has now been published in the journal Nature Communications and lays a crucial foundation for predicting the performance of fusion power plants.
Future fusion power plants aim to generate usable energy efficiently by fusing light atomic nuclei. The most advanced approach—magnetic confinement fusion—confines a plasma, a gas heated to millions of degrees Celsius, within a magnetic field. This plasma is suspended without wall contact inside a donut-shaped vacuum chamber.
A fresh deal is expected to streamline and speed up production of hypersonic, solid rocket motors in the United States. Ursa Major, a Colorado-based firm has partnered with Palantir to use the latter’s Warp Speed manufacturing OS technology.
The advanced software is expected to streamline Ursa Major’s rocket propulsion manufacturing process.
It can also be the company’s digital backbone to deliver innovative, cost-effective, and mission critical hardware using advanced manufacturing methods at higher and faster rates.
Scientists from the Beijing-based NOETIX Robotics have developed a new meter-tall humanoid robot that is capable of performing near-perfect continuous backflips. Called the NOETIX N2, this 4.2 foot tall robot features innovative hardware to ensure stability while performing the feat.
According to Jiang Zheyuan, technical leader of the development team, performing a backflip is harder compared to a frontflip as human feet are longer in the front. To enable the robot’s backflip action faultlessly, the team came up with innovative hardware designs to ensure the robot’s stability. For example, the heavy joints of the humanoid’s limbs are placed closer to its crotch to make it easier to rotate in the air.
Posted in innovation | Leave a Comment on Scientists unveil groundbreaking air filter technology that could change the way we breathe: ‘We are just scratching the surface’
Researchers at Drexel University have developed a breakthrough MXene air filter that could last much longer than traditional filters.
A new optical amplifier is changing the game. Unlike conventional amplifiers, this chip-based breakthrough leverages optical nonlinearity rather than rare-earth elements, allowing signals to strengthen themselves. The result? A compact, high-performance device with a bandwidth three times wider than traditional solutions.
Expanding the Limits of Optical Amplification
Modern communication networks rely on optical signals to transmit massive amounts of data. However, like weak radio signals, these optical signals need amplification to travel long distances without degrading. For decades, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) have been the standard solution, extending transmission range without requiring frequent signal regeneration. Despite their effectiveness, EDFAs operate within a limited spectral range, restricting the growth of optical networks.
Supersolids are a strange quantum state of matter that combines properties of solids and liquids.
Now they’ve gotten even more mind-bending, as scientists have transformed light itself into a supersolid. It’s a breakthrough that could lead to new quantum and photonic technologies.
Beyond the everyday solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas, an entire zoo of exotic states of matter exists. Long theorized but only recently created, a supersolid has a crystalline structure like a regular solid, but it can also, counterintuitively, flow freely like a fluid.
In September 2024, OpenAI released its o1 model, trained on large-scale reinforcement learning, giving it “advanced reasoning” capabilities. Unfortunately, the details of how they pulled this off were never shared publicly. Today, however, DeepSeek (an AI research lab) has replicated this reasoning behavior and published the full technical details of their approach. In this article, I will discuss the key ideas behind this innovation and describe how they work under the hood.
Researchers from Tsinghua University, the Beijing Institute of Technology, the University of Wollongong (Australia), and the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have achieved an ultrahigh electrostrain of 1.9% in (K, Na)NbO3 (KNN) lead-free piezoelectric ceramics.
The breakthrough, facilitated by the electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrometer at the Steady High Magnetic Field Experimental Facility (SHMFF), marks a significant advancement in piezoelectric material performance.
The findings are published in Nature Materials.
