Scientists have made a potentially “life-changing” discovery that could pave the way for new drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease.
Experts have known for several decades that the PINK1 protein is directly linked to Parkinson’s disease – the fastest growing neurodegenerative condition in the world.
Until now, no one has seen what human PINK1 looks like, how PINK1 attaches to the surface of damaged mitochondria inside of cells, or how it is activated.
Steelmaking, for example, is considered a hard-to-abate sector due to the extremely high temperatures necessary that can only be reached by burning fuel. However, analyses suggest that the industry could reach net zero by 2050 with a combination of carbon capture, low-carbon fuels and more efficient steel use. In the short-to medium-term, low-carbon fuels present our best opportunity to press ahead with decarbonizing such hard-to-abate industries.
Complementary fuels
Switching to lower-carbon fuels is among the most economically, politically, and technologically feasible approaches to slowing carbon emissions. It offers a lower-carbon future for newly built infrastructure in East and Southeast Asia, which could otherwise become stranded assets with serious socio-economic consequences.
A team of researchers has made an advancement in the field of multifunctional energy harvesting. Their latest study advances in understanding the photovoltaic effect in ferroelectric crystals.
The article, “Study on Influence of AC Poling on Bulk Photovoltaic Effect in Pb(Mg1/3 Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 Single Crystals,” published in Advanced Electronic Materials, reports the team’s recent research results regarding improving the electric output of the bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE) via manipulation of ferroelectric domains in oxide perovskite crystals.
In ordinary solar cells, the mechanism of harvesting the solar energy and then converting them into green electricity is based on the formation of p-n junctions of semiconductors. While the p-n junction has been invented for more than a century, widely used in the silicon industry nowadays, the BPVE is a more recently discovered physical phenomenon from the 1960s–1970s.
A hospital that wants to use a cloud computing service to perform artificial intelligence data analysis on sensitive patient records needs a guarantee those data will remain private during computation. Homomorphic encryption is a special type of security scheme that can provide this assurance.
The technique encrypts data in a way that anyone can perform computations without decrypting the data, preventing others from learning anything about underlying patient records. However, there are only a few ways to achieve homomorphic encryption, and they are so computationally intensive that it is often infeasible to deploy them in the real world.
MIT researchers have developed a new theoretical approach to building homomorphic encryption schemes that is simple and relies on computationally lightweight cryptographic tools. Their technique combines two tools so they become more powerful than either would be on its own. The researchers leverage this to construct a “somewhat homomorphic” encryption scheme—that is, it enables users to perform a limited number of operations on encrypted data without decrypting it, as opposed to fully homomorphic encryption that can allow more complex computations.
Posted in chemistry, economics, particle physics, sustainability, transportation | Leave a Comment on Discarding a long-standing pessimistic hypothesis to rescue next-generation lithium-ion battery technology
In a megascience-scale collaboration with French researchers from College de France and the University of Montpellier, Skoltech scientists have shown a much-publicized problem with next-generation lithium-ion batteries to have been induced by the very experiments that sought to investigate it. Published in Nature Materials, the team’s findings suggest that the issue of lithium-rich cathode material deterioration should be approached from a different angle, giving hope for more efficient lithium-ion batteries that would store some 30% more energy.
Efficient energy storage is critical for the transition to a low-carbon economy, whether in grid-scale applications, electric vehicles, or portable devices. Lithium-ion batteries remain the best-developed electrochemical storage technology and promise further improvements. In particular, next-generation batteries with so-called lithium-rich cathodes could store about one-third more energy than their state-of-the-art counterparts with cathodes made of lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, or NMC.
A key challenge hindering the commercialization of lithium-rich batteries is voltage fade and capacity drop. As the battery is repeatedly charged and discharged in the course of normal use, its cathode material undergoes degradation of unclear nature, causing gradual voltage and capacity loss. The problem is known to be associated with the reduction and oxidation of the oxygen atoms in NMC, but the precise nature of this redox process is not understood. This theoretical gap undermines the attempts to overcome voltage fade and bring next-generation batteries to the market.
Many companies invest heavily in hiring talent to create the high-performance library code that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA, for instance, developed some of the most advanced high-performance computing (HPC) libraries, creating a competitive moat that has proven difficult for others to breach.
But what if a couple of students, within a few months, could compete with state-of-the-art HPC libraries with a few hundred lines of code, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands?
That’s what researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown with a new programming language called Exo 2.
Moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar will require better ways to store energy for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A new study by researchers at Penn State has found that taking advantage of natural geothermal heat in depleted oil and gas wells can improve the efficiency of one proposed energy storage solution: compressed-air energy storage (CAES).
The researchers recently published their findings in the Journal of Energy Storage.
CAES plants compress air and store it underground when energy demand is low and then extract the air to create electricity when demand is high. But startup costs currently limit commercial development of these projects, the scientists said.
Some of the world’s most advanced AI systems struggle to tell the time and work out dates on calendars, a study suggests.
While AI models can perform complex tasks such as writing essays and generating art, they have yet to master some skills that humans carry out with ease, researchers say.
A team from the University of Edinburgh has shown that state-of-the-art AI models are unable to reliably interpret clock-hand positions or correctly answer questions about dates on calendars.
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“The findings are significant because they could pave the way for new treatments to keep the brain healthier longer,” says Agustín Ibáñez, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. “But much more research is needed before these findings can be applied in practice.”
Fueling excitement, Tesla’s Cybercab was spotted navigating the expansive grounds of Gigafactory Texas autonomously. Tesla Cybercab, also labeled as the Robotaxi, was unveiled by CEO Elon Musk in October 2024, during the ‘We Robot’ event in California. The two-seat vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals – it represents Tesla’s end goal for a completely autonomous transportation network.
The Cybercab has butterfly doors that open automatically, a hatchback layout for the cargo room, and an inductive charging technique that eliminates the need for conventional charging ports. Tesla expects to start production of the Cybercabs before 2027, and the price is estimated at $30,000.
The Tesla CyberCab is an autonomous vehicle that Tesla plans to use in its upcoming ride-hailing system. The CyberCab represents its distinct vehicle type because it is specially designed without any human driver functionalities for enhanced efficiency combined with premium passenger comfort and an extended product life span.