Hyundai Engineering & Construction (Hyundai E&C) has taken a major step in expanding its global nuclear energy footprint.
On October 26, the company announced that it signed a basic design contract with Fermi America, a U.S.-based energy development firm, for the construction of four large nuclear reactors in Texas. The project will form part of what is expected to be the world’s largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence (AI) campus.
Pegatron officials will start construction on the Georgetown facility before the end of the year, the news release states. The company will invest a minimum of $35 million in capital in the city, and will hire at least 100 employees within the first three years of opening.
“The jobs and investment this corporation is bringing to Georgetown mark a milestone in our community’s economic growth,” Georgetown Mayor Josh Schroeder said in the news release. “Their decision to put down roots here will have a lasting, positive impact on our community and the broader region for generations.”
Research by Assistant Professor Jacob S. Suissa at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is revealing complexity in how ferns have evolved. Instead of the vascular structure inside fern stems changing as a direct adaptation to the environment, he discovered that shifts in vascular bundle arrangement in the stem are developmentally covaried with leaf placement on the stem.
“As leaf number increases, we see a direct 1:1 increase in vascular bundle number, and as the placement of leaves along the stem changes, we also see a shift in the arrangement of vascular bundles in the stem,” said Suissa, a member of UT’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
For 150 years, researchers have focused on how vascular bundles adapt to the environment. Suissa’s new research, published in Current Biology, suggests leaves are steering the evolution of vascular patterns inside the stem.
An international, multi-university research team, including scientists from Columbus State University, has unearthed a crucial new piece of the puzzle in the evolution of sharks.
A recent study published in Communications Biology, “Early gigantic lamniform marks the onset of mega-body size in modern shark evolution,” has identified a new, extinct lamniform shark—a group that includes modern-day great white and mako sharks. It marks the earliest known example of a gigantic shark, suggesting that the trend of mega-body size in modern shark evolution began much earlier than previously thought.
The team, led by Dr. Mohamad Bazzi of Stanford University, included Dr. Mike Newbrey of Columbus State’s Department of Biology and 2020 alumna Tatianna Blake. They derived their conclusions after studying specimens from the Darwin Formation that outcrops at Darwin, Australia. These specimens, collected by other researchers in the 1980s, had been stored in a museum collection and remained unstudied until recently, when the team examined them in detail.
Lead poisoning isn’t just a modern phenomenon: fossil teeth show signs that it affected ancient hominids, and Homo sapiens may have coped better than our close relatives.
The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s.
That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.
Uranus is one of the least explored planets—the last probe to visit it was Voyager 2 during a flyby 40 years ago. Neither it, nor its ice giant cousin Neptune, have ever had an orbiter visit it, nor any consistent mission presence in their system, marking them out as the only two planets that haven’t been studied in detail up close so far.
Experiments with membranes offer a path toward scalable neuromorphic computing.
Imagine a future in which computers process information not with streams of electrons but with hydrated ions flowing through salt water, a system that mimics how the brain itself computes. This emerging field—known as iontronics, a portmanteau of ions and electronics—is rapidly growing as researchers design neuromorphic computing devices, inspired by animal nervous systems and powered by electrolyte solutions at the nanoscale [1–3]. Since Leon Chua introduced the memory resistor or “memristor” in the 1970s [4], these components have been considered revolutionary building blocks for neuromorphic computing. A memristor’s electrical resistance depends on the current that flowed through it before it was powered off, offering a way to store information. Unlike solid-state memristors, fluidic ones still face challenges in terms of scalability and integration with a circuit.