Super-Kamiokande (or “Super-K” as it’s sometimes referred to) is a neutrino detector. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles which travel through space and pass through solid matter as though it were air.
Studying these particles is helping scientists detect dying stars and learn more about the universe. Business Insider spoke to three scientists about how the giant gold chamber works — and the dangers of conducting experiments inside it.
You didn’t think scientists would let IBM’s “world’s smallest computer” boast go unchallenged, did you? Sure enough, University of Michigan has produced a temperature sensing ‘computer’ measuring 0.04 cubic millimeters, or about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter. It’s so small that one grain of rice seems gigantic in comparison — and it’s so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.
The size limitations forced researchers to get creative to reduce the effect of light. They switched from diodes to switched capacitors, and had to fight the relative increase in electrical noise that comes from running on a device that uses so little power.
The result is a sensor that can measure changes in extremely small regions, like a group of cells in your body. Scientists have suspected that tumors are slightly hotter than healthy tissue, but it’s been difficult to verify this until now. The minuscule device could both check this claim and, if it proves true, gauge the effectiveness of cancer treatments. The team also envisions this helping to diagnose glaucoma from inside the eye, monitor biochemical processes and even study tiny snails.
Engineer and adventurer Richard Jenkins has made oceangoing robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and environmental science. His aim: a thousand of them.
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Insilico and its researchers are the first in the world to use GANs to generate molecules.
“The GAN technique is essentially an adversarial game between two deep neural networks,” as Alex explains.
While one generates meaningful noise in response to input, the other evaluates the generator’s output. Both networks thereby learn to generate increasingly perfect output.
