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In a new study from the California Institute of Technology, experts have discovered that fruit flies can fly up to 15 kilometers in a single journey. This distance is the equivalent of the average human traveling over 10000 kilometers, or more than 6200 miles.

The record for the longest distance by a human was set in 2005, when an ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes ran continuously for 80 hours over 350 miles – roughly 324000 times his body length. The Caltech study has found that fruit flies can travel up to six million times the length of their body.

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The CEO of Pfizer says that people who got the company’s version of the COVID-19 vaccine will likely need a booster shot within a year.

Albert Bourla made the announcement in an interview with CNBC correspondent Bertha Coombs that was filmed two weeks ago and released publicly on Thursday.

“Likely scenarios is there will likely be a need for a third dose somewhere between six and 12 months and then from there, there will be an annual vaccination,” says Bourla.

IBM has built the first 2nm wafers in the semiconductor industry, several years before the node is expected to hit commercial volumes.

They are getting about 30 infections a day, down from 3000 in the January peak.

The US is following, and we are close to our old minimum (not counting initial run-up) of 600 deaths a day (last July).

Visit the COVID-19 Information Center for vaccine resources.

Launching this summer, NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will showcase the dynamic powers of laser communications technologies. With NASA’s ever-increasing human and robotic presence in space, missions can benefit from a new way of “talking” with Earth.

Since the beginning of spaceflight in the 1950s, NASA missions have leveraged radio frequency communications to send data to and from space. Laser communications, also known as optical communications, will further empower missions with unprecedented data capabilities.

Scientists from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University have used machine-learning methods to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in data collected when tiny spheres are passed through microscopic nanopores cut into silicon substrates. This work may lead to much more sensitive data collection when sequencing DNA or detecting small concentrations of pathogens.

Miniaturization has opened the possibility for a wide range of diagnostic tools, such as point-of-care detection of diseases, to be performed quickly and with very small samples. For example, unknown particles can be analyzed by passing them through nanopores and recording tiny changes in the electrical current. However, the intensity of these signals can be very low, and is often buried under random noise. New techniques for extracting the useful information are clearly needed.

Now, scientists from Osaka University have used deep learning to “denoise” nanopore data. Most machine learning methods need to be trained with many “clean” examples before they can interpret noisy datasets. However, using a technique called Noise2Noise, which was originally developed for enhancing images, the team was able to improve resolution of noisy runs even though no clean data was available. Deep neural networks, which act like layered neurons in the brain, were utilized to reduce the interference in the data.

Three billion years ago, light first zipped through chlorophyll within tiny reaction centers, the first step plants and photosynthetic bacteria take to convert light into food.

Heliobacteria, a type of bacteria that uses photosynthesis to generate energy, has reaction centers thought to be similar to those of the common ancestors for all photosynthetic organisms. Now, a University of Michigan team has determined the first steps in converting light into energy for this bacterium.

“Our study highlights the different ways in which nature has made use of the basic reaction center architecture that emerged over 3 billion years ago,” said lead author and U-M physicist Jennifer Ogilvie. “We want to ultimately understand how energy moves through the system and ends up creating what we call the ‘charge-separated state.’ This state is the battery that drives the engine of photosynthesis.”

Harnessing the Hum of Fluorescent Lights for More Efficient Computing

The property that makes fluorescent lights buzz could power a new generation of more efficient computing devices that store data with magnetic fields, rather than electricity.

A team led by University of Michigan researchers has developed a material that’s at least twice as “magnetostrictive” and far less costly than other materials in its class. In addition to computing, it could also lead to better magnetic sensors for medical and security devices.

Moore’s Law, the famous prediction that the number of transistors that can be packed onto a microchip will double every couple of years, has been bumping into basic physical limits. These limits could bring decades of progress to a halt, unless new approaches are found.

One new direction being explored is the use of atomically thin materials instead of silicon as the basis for new transistors, but connecting those “2D” materials to other conventional electronic components has proved difficult.

Now researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and elsewhere have found a new way of making those electrical connections, which could help to unleash the potential of 2D materials and further the miniaturization of components—possibly enough to extend Moore’s Law, at least for the near future, the researchers say.