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Chemists from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin discovered more isn’t always better when it comes to packing charge-acceptor molecules on the surface of semiconducting nanocrystals.

The combination of organic and inorganic components in hybrid nanomaterials can be tailored to capture, detect, convert or control light in unique ways. Interest in these materials is high, and the pace of scientific publication about them has grown more than tenfold over the past 20 years. For example, they could potentially improve the efficiency of solar power systems by harvesting energy from wavelengths of sunlight—like infrared—that are missed by traditional photovoltaic solar panels.

To create the materials, chemists marry nanocrystals of light-capturing semiconductors with “charge acceptor” molecules that act as , attaching to the semiconductor’s surface and transporting electrons away from the nanocrystals.

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The Seebeck effect is a thermoelectric phenomenon by which a voltage or current is generated when a temperature difference exists across a conductor. This effect is the basis of established and emerging thermoelectric applications alike, such as heat-to-electricity energy harvesters, sensing devices, and temperature control.

In line with the unrelenting demand for ever-smaller devices, scientists are looking for new ways to leverage the Seebeck effect at the nanoscale. One way to achieve this is by using molecular junctions, which are miniature devices consisting of two electrodes bridged by one or a few individual molecules. Depending on how sensitive these molecules are to temperature, it is possible to fine tune the thermoelectric properties of molecular junctions to match their intended application.

Thus far, most studies on molecular thermoelectrics have been limited to rather simple organic molecules. This has led to molecular junctions with a low Seebeck coefficient, which translates to poor temperature-to-voltage conversion and performance. There is therefore an ongoing challenge to design molecular junctions with better characteristics and, most importantly, a higher Seebeck coefficient.

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As lidar company Luminar pushed ahead to meet its goals for 2022 — milestones that included locking in new commercial contracts with unnamed automakers and shipping production-ready sensors to SAIC — it also snapped up a small HD mapping startup called Civil Maps.

The acquisition, which was disclosed Wednesday during Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell’s presentation at CES 2023, is more than just a large publicly traded company taking advantage of a consolidating industry. Although the timing couldn’t have been better due to the current economic environment, according to Russell.

For Russell, the acquisition is part of Luminar’s longer term vision to be more than just a lidar supplier. Mapping, specifically the mapping tech that Civil Maps created, is foundational to that goal, Russell said.

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An international research group has for the first time reconstructed ancestors dating back 2.6 billion years of the well-known CRISPR-Cas system, and studied their evolution over time. The results suggest that the revitalized systems not only work, but are more versatile than current versions and could have revolutionary applications. Nature Microbiology has published the results of this research, which, in the opinion of the research team, “opens up new avenues for gene editing.”

The project, led by Ikerbasque research professor Rául Pérez-Jiménez of CIC nanoGUNE, involves teams from the Spanish National Research Council, the University of Alicante, the Rare Diseases Networking Biomedical Research Center (CIBERER), the Ramón y Cajal Hospital-IRYCIS and other national and international institutions.

The acronym CRISPR refers to the repeated sequences present in the DNA of bacteria and archaea (prokaryotic organisms). Among the repeats, these microorganisms harbor fragments of genetic material from viruses that infected their ancestors; that enables them to recognize a repeat infection and defend themselves by cutting the invaders’ DNA using Cas proteins associated with these repeats. It is a mechanism (CRISPR-Cas system) of antiviral defense. This ability to recognize DNA sequences is the basis of their usefulness, and they act as if they were molecular scissors. Nowadays CRISPR-Cas technology enables pieces of genetic material to be cut and pasted into any cell, so that it can be used to edit DNA.

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The Memo: https://lifearchitect.ai/memo/

Demo site: https://muse-model.github.io/
Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.

Dr Alan D. Thompson is a world expert in artificial intelligence (AI), specialising in the augmentation of human intelligence, and advancing the evolution of ‘integrated AI’. Alan’s applied AI research and visualisations are featured across major international media, including citations in the University of Oxford’s debate on AI Ethics in December 2021.

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Nadella highlighted that while generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, generated less than 1% of the world’s AI data sets in 2021, this can increase to 10% of all data generated by AI by 2025.

“In future, the generative models will generate most of the data. We are right now seeing the emergence of a new reasoning engine. We’ll clearly have to talk about this reasoning engine — what are its responsible uses, what displacements will it cause, and so on. But on the other side, we should also think about how it can augment us in what we are doing today since it can have a huge impact on our future,” Nadella said.

“Ultimately, these tools will accelerate creativity, ingenuity and productivity across a range of tasks. It is going to be a golden age — the computer revolution created mass consumer behaviour change and productivity for knowledge workers. But, what if we could spread that productivity more evenly? To me, that is one of the biggest things to look forward to, and the way to achieve this is by building a robust data infrastructure,” he added.

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In a recent study published in the journal Cureus, researchers conducted a literature review to determine whether platelet-rich plasma therapy could help slow disease progression through lung regeneration in patients with chronic respiratory disease.

Chronic respiratory disease comprises many disorders related to the respiratory system, such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and interstitial lung fibrosis, of which COPD is the most fatal, causing close to 3.23 million deaths worldwide in 2019. Statistics suggest that approximately 37 million people in the United States live with chronic respiratory disease, and over 150,000 individuals in the country succumbed to the disease in 2020.

Chronic bronchitis and emphysema as the two prominent disorders constituting COPD, causing abnormal airflow into and out of the lungs. Emphysema causes the destruction of the alveoli, which is where the exchange of gases occurs in the lungs, while chronic bronchitis causes excessive mucus production and obstruction of airways.

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Scientists have developed a synthetic tissue that repairs injuries and restores normal erectile function in a pig model, in a study publishing January 4 in the journal Matter. The findings suggest that the artificial tunica albuginea (ATA), which mimics a fibrous sheath of tissue necessary to maintain erections, shows promise for repairing penile injuries in humans.

“We largely foresaw the problems and results of the ATA construction process, but we were still surprised by the results in the , where the penis regained normal erection immediately after the use of ATA,” said Xuetao Shi, a researcher at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, China, and an author of the study.

“The greatest advantage of the ATA we report is that it achieves tissue-like functions by mimicking the microstructure of natural tissues,” he added. “This design approach is not limited to the biomimetic design of tunica albuginea tissues but can be extended to many other load-bearing tissues.”

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