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Blog – Page 11

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) utilizes mid-infrared spectroscopy to precisely analyze molecular components such as water vapor and sulfur dioxide in exoplanet atmospheres. The key to this analysis, where each molecule exhibits a unique spectral “fingerprint,” lies in highly sensitive photodetector technology capable of measuring extremely weak light intensities.

Recently, KAIST researchers have developed an innovative capable of detecting a broad range of mid-infrared spectra, garnering significant attention. A research team led by Professor SangHyeon Kim from the School of Electrical Engineering has developed a mid-infrared photodetector that operates stably at room temperature, marking a major turning point for the commercialization of ultra-compact optical sensors.

The work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

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X-ray imaging is indispensable in medical diagnostics and material characterization. To generate an image, a detector converts X-rays that pass through the object into electrical signals. Higher detector sensitivity enables lower radiation doses, which is particularly important in medical applications.

Currently used X-ray detectors consist of inorganic compounds of elements with medium to high atomic numbers. In recent years, inorganic perovskite compounds have also been tested as X-ray detectors with very good results.

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Most biochemistry labs that study DNA isolate it within a water-based solution that allows scientists to manipulate DNA without interacting with other molecules. They also tend to use heat to separate strands, heating the DNA to more than 150°F, a temperature a cell would never naturally reach. By contrast, in a living cell DNA lives in a very crowded environment, and special proteins attach to DNA to mechanically unwind the and then pry it apart.

“The interior of the cell is super crowded with molecules, and most biochemistry experiments are super uncrowded,” said Northwestern professor John Marko. “You can think of extra molecules as billiard balls. They’re pounding against the DNA double helix and keeping it from opening.”

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Today we’re releasing early access to Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition), an updated version of 2.5 Pro that has significantly improved capabilities for coding, especially building compelling interactive web apps. We were going to release this update at Google I/O in a couple weeks, but based on the overwhelming enthusiasm for this model, we wanted to get it in your hands sooner so people can start building.

This builds on the overwhelmingly positive feedback to Gemini 2.5 Pro’s coding and multimodal reasoning capabilities. Beyond UI-focused development, these improvements extend to other coding tasks such as code transformation, code editing and developing complex agentic workflows.

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What if the secret to longevity wasn’t in the mind or the gut — but in the heart?

Speaking at the inaugural New York Times Well Festival on Wednesday, psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Robert Waldinger announced he and his team were “shocked” by “the biggest predictor of who was going to live long and stay healthy.”

Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest-running scientific study of adult life — revealed the predictor was “how connected you were to other people and particularly the warmth of your connection to other people.”

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“What if consciousness, like love, is the work of making relationships?” Alva Noë, chair of the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley, proposed at Stanford’s annual Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts on Wednesday.

“Love names the work of opening up the world, the very labor of consciousness,” Noë said.

His talk at the Stanford Humanities Center went on to challenge philosophy’s traditional distinction between value and fact where it delimits questions about love and human perception, respectively.

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For the first time, physicists have demonstrated a phenomenon known as the Terrell-Penrose effect, which causes an object moving close to the speed of light to warp before our eyes.

The new findings, a collaboration between TU Wien and the University of Vienna, once again confirm a key prediction of Einstein’s theory of relativity by making an optical illusion of relativistic motion observable for the first time.

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