Lifeboat Foundation

Receptors found on cell surfaces bind to hormones, proteins, and other molecules, helping cells respond to their environment. MIT chemists have now discovered how one of these receptors changes its shape when it binds to its target, and how those changes trigger cells to grow and proliferate.

This receptor, known as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), is overexpressed in many types of cancer and is the target of several cancer drugs. These drugs often work well at first, but tumors can become resistant to them. Understanding the mechanism of these receptors better may help researchers design drugs that can evade that resistance, says Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT.

“Thinking about more general mechanisms to target EGFR is an exciting new direction, and gives you a new avenue to think about possible therapies that may not evolve resistance as easily,” she says.

A multi-institutional collaboration, which includes the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, has created a material that can be used to create computer chips that can do just that. It achieves this by using so-called “neuromorphic” circuitry and computer architecture to replicate brain functions. Purdue University professor Shriram Ramanathan led the team.

“Human brains can actually change as a result of learning new things,” said Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, a paper co-author with a joint appointment at Argonne and the University of Illinois Chicago. “We have now created a device for machines to reconfigure their circuits in a brain-like way.”

With this capability, artificial intelligence-based computers might do difficult jobs more quickly and accurately while using a lot less energy. One example is analyzing complicated medical images. Autonomous cars and robots in space that might rewire their circuits depending on experience are a more futuristic example.

A chip-sized biocomputer uses molecules moving through a network of channels to solve problems. It uses much less energy per calculation than a traditional computer.

Lightweight and flexible perovskites are highly promising materials for the fabrication of photovoltaics. So far, however, their highest reported efficiencies have been around 20%, which is considerably lower than those of rigid perovskites (25.7%).

Researchers at Nanjing University, Jilin University, Shanghai Tech University, and East China Normal University have recently introduced a new strategy to develop more efficient solar cells based on flexible perovskites. This strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Energy, entails the use of two hole-selective molecules based on carbazole cores and phosphonic acid anchoring groups to bridge the perovskite with a low temperature-processed NiO nanocrystal film.

“We believe that lightweight flexible perovskite solar cells are promising for building integrated photovoltaics, wearable electronics, portable energy systems and aerospace applications,” Hairen Tan, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “However, their highest certified efficiency of 19.9% lags behind their rigid counterparts (highest 25.7%), mainly due to defective interfaces at charge-selective contacts with perovskites atop.”

When it comes to our state of mind and emotions, our faces can be quite telling. Facial expression is an essential aspect of nonverbal communication in humans. Even if we cannot explain how we do it, we can usually see in another person’s face how they are feeling. In many situations, reading facial expressions is particularly important. For example, a teacher might do it to check if their students are engaged or bored, and a nurse may do it to check if a patient’s condition has improved or worsened.

Thanks to advances in technology, computers can do a pretty good job when it comes to recognizing faces. Recognizing facial expressions, however, is a whole different story. Many researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have tried to tackle this problem using various modeling and classification techniques, including the popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, facial expression recognition is complex and calls for intricate neural networks, which require a lot of training and are computationally expensive.

In an effort to address these issues, a research team led by Dr. Jia Tian from Jilin Engineering Normal University in China has recently developed a new CNN model for facial expression recognition. As described in an article published in the Journal of Electronic Imaging, the team focused on striking a good balance between the training speed, memory usage, and recognition accuracy of the model.

Researchers at the Professorship of Electrical Energy Conversion Systems and Drives at Chemnitz University of Technology have succeeded for the first time in 3D printing housings for power electronic components that are used, for example, to control electrical machines. During the printing process, silicon carbide chips are positioned at a designated point on the housing.

As with the printed motor made of iron, copper and ceramics, which the professorship first presented at the Hannover Messe in 2018, ceramic and metallic pastes are also used in the 3D printing of housings. “These are sintered after the printing process, together—and this is what makes them special—with the imprinted chip,” says Prof. Dr. Ralf Werner, head of the Professorship of Electrical Energy Conversion Systems and Drives. Ceramic is used as an insulating material and copper is used for contacting the gate, drain and source areas of the field-effect transistors. “Contacting the gate area, which normally has an edge length of less than one millimeter, was particularly challenging,” adds Prof. Dr. Thomas Basler, head of the Professorship of Power Electronics, whose team supported the project with initial functional tests on prototypes.

Following the ceramic-insulated coils printed at Chemnitz University of Technology, which were presented at the Hannover Messe in 2017, and the printed motor, drive components that can withstand temperatures above 300 °C are now also available. “The desire for more temperature-resistant power electronics was obvious, because the housings for power electronic components are traditionally installed as close as possible to the engine and should therefore have an equally high temperature resistance,” says Prof. Werner.

For many years, the human genome was seen as a book of life, with passages of remarkable eloquence and economy of expression intermingled with long stretches of nonsense. The readable areas carried the instructions for producing cell proteins; the other regions, which accounted for around 90% of the overall genome, were disregarded as junk DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

On Tuesday, July 5, space physics and human studies dominated the science agenda aboard the International Space Station. The Expedition 67 crew also reconfigured a US airlock and put a new 3D printer through its paces.

The lack of gravity in space impacts a wide range of physics revealing new phenomena that researchers are studying to improve life for humans on and off the Earth. One such project uses artificial intelligence to adapt complicated glass manufacturing processes in microgravity with the goal of benefitting numerous Earth-and space-based industries. On Tuesday afternoon, NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.” Its core values are “safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.”

But Cabello and others are interested in investigating a lesser-known but equally magical aspect of quantum mechanics: contextuality. Contextuality says that properties of particles, such as their position or polarization, exist only within the context of a measurement. Instead of thinking of particles’ properties as having fixed values, consider them more like words in language, whose meanings can change depending on the context: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.”

Although contextuality has lived in nonlocality’s shadow for over 50 years, quantum physicists now consider it more of a hallmark feature of quantum systems than nonlocality is. A single particle, for instance, is a quantum system “in which you cannot even think about nonlocality,” since the particle is only in one location, said Bárbara Amaral, a physicist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. “So [contextuality] is more general in some sense, and I think this is important to really understand the power of quantum systems and to go deeper into why quantum theory is the way it is.”

Researchers have also found tantalizing links between contextuality and problems that quantum computers can efficiently solve that ordinary computers cannot; investigating these links could help guide researchers in developing new quantum computing approaches and algorithms.