‘Cosmic collisions’ 12bn years ago could be key to understanding formation, say researchers.
Abstract. To gain insight into how researchers of aging perceive the process they study, we conducted a survey among experts in the field. While highlighting some common features of aging, the survey exposed broad disagreement on the foundational issues. What is aging? What causes it? When does it begin? What constitutes rejuvenation? Not only was there no consensus on these and other core questions, but none of the questions received a majority opinion—even regarding the need for consensus itself. Despite many researchers believing they understand aging, their understanding diverges considerably. Importantly, as different processes are labeled as “aging” by researchers, different experimental approaches are prioritized. The survey shed light on the need to better define which aging processes this field should target and what its goals are. It also allowed us to categorize contemporary views on aging and rejuvenation, revealing critical, yet largely unanswered, questions that appear disconnected from the current research focus. Finally, we discuss ways to address the disagreement, which we hope will ultimately aid progress in the field.
Natural selection isn’t just something that happens to organisms, their activities also play a role, giving some species – including humans – a supercharged ability to evolve.
By Kevin Lala
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Scientists at the University of Würzburg and the German national metrology institute (PTB) have carried out an experiment that realizes a new kind of quantum standard of resistance. It’s based on the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect.
A recent study found associations between cognitive-behavioral therapy for hoarding disorder, reduced maladaptive beliefs about possessions, and changes in brain activity during discarding tasks.
MIT engineers have released DrivAerNet++, an open-source dataset of over 8,000 car designs, to accelerate automotive innovation using AI. This dataset, featuring detailed aerodynamic data, aims to enhance fuel efficiency and electric vehicle range, promoting sustainable car design advancements.
Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. Significant advances in performance, such as in fuel efficiency or electric vehicle range, can therefore be slow and siloed from company to company.
MIT engineers say that the search for better car designs can speed up exponentially with the use of generative artificial intelligence tools that can plow through huge amounts of data in seconds and find connections to generate a novel design. While such AI tools exist, the data they would need to learn from have not been available, at least in any sort of accessible, centralized form.
A team of roboticists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, working with a colleague from the University of California, has designed, built and demonstrated a bird-like robot that can launch itself into flight using spring-like legs.
The group describes their robot in a paper published in the journal Nature. Aimy Wissa, an aerospace engineer at Princeton University, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue suggesting possible ways the innovation could be used in real-world applications.
Some types of drones, such as those with rotors, can rise straight up off the ground—others that are powered with forward-facing rotors or engines that push exhaust out the back must either race along a runway or catapult to get airborne. For this new project, the research team developed a new design for getting such craft into the air—jumping using spring-like legs.
Transistors based on two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2), could outperform conventional silicon-based transistors, while also being easier to reduce in size. To perform well, these transistors need to be based on high-quality dielectric materials, which can be difficult to prepare.
Researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently introduced a new promising strategy to prepare the dielectric materials for these transistors. Their approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was successfully used to deposit an ultrathin and uniform native oxide of gallium Ga2O3 on the surface of MoS2.
“Traditional methods of preparing dielectric layer, such as atomic layer deposition (ALD), encounter quality problems because of the high-quality surface of 2D semiconductors without sufficient nucleation points, especially at thin thicknesses down to a few nanometers,” Kongyang Yi, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.
Researchers in China have developed an AI model that can discern species and larval stage of four lepidopteran corn pests with 96 percent accuracy.