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A.I. is only beginning to show what it can do for modern medicine.

In today’s society, artificial intelligence (A.I.) is mostly used for good. But what if it was not?

Naive thinking “The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery,” wrote the researchers in their paper. “We have spent decades using computers and A.I. to improve human health—not to degrade it. We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade, as our aim had always been to avoid molecular features that could interfere with the many different classes of proteins essential to human life.”

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Rice University researchers have tested a tiny lensless microscope called Bio-FlatScope, capable of producing high levels of detail in living samples. The team imaged plants, hydra, and, to a limited extent, a human.

A previous iteration of the technology, FlatCam, was a lensless device that channeled light through a mask and directly onto a camera sensor, aimed primarily outward at the world at large. The raw images looked like static, but a custom algorithm translated the raw data into focused images.

The device described in current research looks inward to image micron-scale targets such as cells and blood vessels inside the body, and even through skin. The technology combines a sophisticated phase mask to generate patterns of light that fall directly onto the chip, the researchers said. The mask in the original FlatCam looked like a barcode and limited the amount of light that passes through to the sensor.

From a performance standpoint we know building a homebrew Raspberry Pi cluster doesn’t make a lot of sense, as even a fairly run of the mill desktop x86 machine is sure to run circles around it. That said, there’s an argument to be made that rigging up a dozen little Linux boards gives you a compact and affordable playground to experiment with things like parallel computing and load balancing. Is it a perfect argument? Not really. But if you’re anything like us, the whole thing starts making a lot more sense when you realize your cluster of Pi Zeros can be built to look like the iconic Cray-1 supercomputer.

This clever 3D printed enclosure comes from [Kevin McAleer], who says he was looking to learn more about deploying software using Ansible, Docker, Flask, and other modern frameworks with fancy sounding names. After somehow managing to purchase a dozen Raspberry Pi Zero 2s, he needed a way to keep them all in a tidy package. Beyond looking fantastically cool, the symmetrical design of the Cray-1 allowed him to design his miniature version in such a way that each individual wedge is made up of the same identical set of 3D printed parts.

In the video after the break, [Kevin] explains some of the variations the design went through. We appreciate his initial goal of making it so you didn’t need any additional hardware to assemble the thing, but in the end you’ll need to pick up some M2.5 standoffs and matching screws if you want to build one yourself. We particularly like how you can hide all the USB power cables inside the lower “cushion” area with the help of some 90-degree cables, leaving the center core open.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China and the U.S. has found that it is possible to track the sliding of grain boundaries in some metals at the atomic scale using an electron microscope and an automatic atom tracker. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of platinum using their new technique and the discovery they made in doing so.

Scientists have been studying the properties of metals for many years. Learning more about how crystal grains in certain metals interact with one another has led to the development of new kinds of metals and applications for their use. In their recent effort, the researchers took a novel approach to studying the sliding that occurs between grains and in so doing have learned something new.

When crystalline metals are deformed, the grains that they are made of move against one another, and the way they move determines many of their properties, such as malleability. To learn more about what happens between grains in such metals during deformity, the researchers used two types of technologies: and automated atom-tracking.