Join Pattie Maes, Andy Lippman, and a host of special guests and Media Lab researchers for a deep dive into generative artificial intelligence—the use of deep learning and large data sets to produce text, sound, images, movies, 3D designs, virtual characters, even proteins and drug candidates.
This discussion will be livestreamed, and no registration is required; it will be embedded on this page before the presentations begin. The livestream will be closed-captioned, and the archived video will be posted with closed captions within a few days of the event.
Billions of years ago, a version of planet Earth that looked very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia – and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.
Until now, most theories have claimed that the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. However, a new simulation presents a different outcome – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.
“This opens up a whole new range of possible starting places for the Moon’s evolution,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and lead author of a paper this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We went into this project not knowing exactly what the outcomes of these high-resolution simulations would be. So, on top of the big eye-opener that standard resolutions can give you misleading answers, it was extra exciting that the new results could include a tantalisingly Moon-like satellite in orbit.”
The speed demonstrated by the researchers is equivalent to twice the traffic of the entire global Internet.
The first data transmission to exceed 1 petabit per second (Pbit/s) using only a single laser and a single optical chip has been demonstrated by European researchers.
Tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon enable significantly higher efficiencies than silicon solar cells alone. Tandem cells from HZB have already achieved several world records. Most recently, in November 2021, HZB research teams achieved a certified efficiency of 29.8% with a tandem cell made of perovskite and silicon. This was an absolute world record that stood unbeaten at the top for eight months. It was not until the summer of 2022 that a Swiss team at EPFL succeeded in surpassing this value.
Three HZB teams worked closely together for the record-breaking tandem cell. Now they present the details in Nature Nanotechnology. The journal also invited them to write a research briefing, in which they summarize their work and give an outlook on future developments.
Edward Boyden is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. A professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Edward Boyden explains how humanity is only at its infancy in merging with machines. His work is leading him towards the development of a “brain co-processor”, a device that interacts intimately with the brain to upload and download information to and from it, augmenting human capabilities in memory storage, decision making, and cognition. The first step, however, is understanding the brain on a much deeper level. With the support of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, Ed Boyden pursued a PhD in neurosciences from Stanford University.
The Hertz Foundation mission is to provide unique financial and fellowship support to the nation’s most remarkable PhD students in the hard sciences. Hertz Fellowships are among the most prestigious in the world, and the foundation has invested over $200 million in Hertz Fellows since 1963 (present value) and supported over 1,100 brilliant and creative young scientists, who have gone on to become Nobel laureates, high-ranking military personnel, astronauts, inventors, Silicon Valley leaders, and tenured university professors. For more information, visit hertzfoundation.org.
Most efforts so far have relied on external heating and cooling systems, but these add a lot of bulk and also tend to use up a considerable amount of energy themselves. The researchers’ innovation, outlined in a recent paper in Nature , was to add an extra component to the batteries: a sheet of nickel foil just a few micrometers thick between the stacked electrodes of each cell.
This ultra-thin sheet is used as a heating element, and when a current is passed through it the cell heats up to 149° Fahrenheit in about a minute. This temperature is maintained through charging, but the cell then quickly cools back to room temperature as soon as the current is switched off.
When they tested their approach, the researchers found that they could charge a 265 watt-hour battery to 70 per cent in 11 minutes. They also showed that heating the battery didn’t seriously affect its lifetime, as it survived 2,000 cycles of charging, which would provide enough energy to drive more than 500,000 miles overall.
