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But blueberry land and other parcels of rural Maine are being increasingly eyed for housing development, and Sweetland feels the wild blueberry sector is under pressure, especially when blueberry market prices drop.

He hopes that a new “crop” growing in tandem with berries could help boost the local industry and preserve farmland. That would be solar panels that have been installed across 11 acres of the land where Sweetland farms blueberries in Rockport, Maine.

The University of Maine is studying this example of dual-use agrivoltaics. The solar installation was developed by the Boston-based solar developer BlueWave, and it is owned by the company Navisun, which makes lease payments to the landowner. Sweetland tends, harvests and sells the blueberries, and shares profits with the landowner.

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When one of China’s biggest celebrities, Simon Gong —also known as Gong Jun—released a new music video in June 2022, it quickly attracted 15 million views on the country’s Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo. But the event also stood out for a different reason—one that only eagle-eyed fans might have noticed. The singer in the video was not Gong himself, but a digital replica created by Baidu, a “digital human” powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Likewise, the lyrics and melody were generated by AI, marking the recording as China’s first AI-generated content music video.

Deloitte defines digital humans as AI-powered virtual beings that can produce a whole range of human body language. In recent years, businesses focused on providing round-the-clock services, as well as the media and entertainment industry, are increasingly adopting this nascent technology, aiming to capture a growing market. And as digital humans increasingly populate other sectors like retail, health care, and finance, Emergen Research forecasts that the global market for digital humans will jump to about $530 billion in 2030, from $10 billion in 2020.

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AN UNDERWATER city of unique, upward-reaching rocks and chemical reactions has scientists wondering if they’ve found the answer to how life begins.

The Lost City Hydrothermal Field is situated in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The Lost City is affixed on top of an underwater mountain and spreads out over 5,000 square feet.

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The Great Pyramid of Cholula is actually an Aztec temple that was constructed over 2000 years ago. The complex is located in Cholula, Mexico.

The structure holds three records as the largest archaeological site of a pyramid and the largest pyramid in the world by volume. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it is also the largest monument ever constructed anywhere in the world. It surpasses the largest Egyptian pyramid which is the Great Pyramid of Giza.

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In recent years, electronics and chemical engineers have devised different chemical doping techniques to control the sign and concentration of charge carriers in different material samples. Chemical doping methods essentially entail introducing impurities into materials or substances to change their electrical properties.

These promising methods have been successfully applied on several materials including van der Waals (vdW) materials. VdW materials are structures characterized by strongly bonded 2D layers, which are bound in the third dimension through weaker dispersion forces.

Researchers at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shenzhen University, Tsinghua University recently introduced a new tunable and reversible approach to chemically dope graphene. Their approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on laser-assisted chlorination.

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A new theoretical model explains why chiral molecules favour transporting electrons in one spin state over the other, providing a quantitative fit to experiments.1

Many current-carrying materials show no bias towards the spin state of the electrons they transport, allowing spin-up and spin-down species to flow in equal numbers. But chiral molecules can be more discriminating, offering easier passage to one spin orientation than to its counterpart.

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