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Nanoscale coating boosts hydrogen cell efficiency and durability by improving internal contact

A research team led by professor Wonyoung Lee of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) has developed a technology that addresses interfacial contact resistance, a key factor limiting the performance of protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs), a next-generation clean energy technology. The new approach improves both the energy efficiency and durability of the cells.

The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs) are next-generation eco-friendly energy devices capable of operating in two modes within a single system: as fuel cells that generate clean electricity from hydrogen without producing pollutants and as electrolyzers that use electricity to split water and produce hydrogen.

The Neuroscientist: I Don’t Think AI Is Conscious. Here’s What Would Change My Mind — Anil Seth

Neuroscientist Anil Seth, University of Sussex, on why AI is unlikely to be conscious and where the real danger lies.

Is a language model conscious? Anil Seth thinks it is vanishingly unlikely. The neuroscientist did his own PhD in artificial intelligence and has spent three decades studying how consciousness arises in the brain. He tells Sascha Roehrer where his scepticism comes from: people project an inner life onto anything that speaks fluently, computation alone is probably not enough for consciousness, and experience, in his view, is closely tied to being a living organism.

The bigger danger, he argues, is AI that merely seems conscious. Granting such systems rights and welfare protections makes them harder to control and regulate, up to the question of whether a model may still be switched off. Seth discusses the incident in which OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face, Anthropic’s constitution for Claude, AI companions, and lifelike avatars that scammers can use to talk older people out of their savings.

The conversation also goes beyond AI: why perception is a \.

Lab-grown tumors reveal immune cells capable of killing small cell lung cancer

Researchers have uncovered a previously overlooked immune cell that can recognize and kill small cell lung cancer, the most aggressive form of the disease globally. Published in Cancer Cell, the WEHI study found patients with higher levels of these cells lived longer, uncovering a hidden immune defense that could be exploited to attack these hard-to-treat tumors.

Researchers also showed existing drugs could be repurposed to boost the cancer-killing activity of these immune cells, opening new opportunities to strengthen current treatments and help more patients benefit from these therapies.

Continuously evolving cells help pancreatic cancer evade treatment and spread

An analysis of nearly half a million cells from dozens of patients’ tumors reveals how cancer cells continuously reshape their genetic makeup over time, enabling them to evade treatment for one of the deadliest forms of cancer.

Led by researchers at NYU Langone Health and its Perlmutter Cancer Center, the study focused on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, an often difficult-to-treat disease known to kill nearly 85% of people within five years of diagnosis.

While more than half a dozen genes have been implicated in the complex disease, the analysis of single tumor cells provided new insights into how subpopulations of pancreatic cancer cells reconfigure their DNA within tumors over time.

TNF compromises intestinal bile-acid tolerance dictating colitis progression and limited infliximab response

(Cell Metabolism 36, 2086–2103.e1–e9; September 3, 2024)

During a routine internal review of our data, we identified a data-transfer error that occurred during the preparation of these figures. Specifically, when the experimentally measured values were transferred into GraphPad Prism for plotting, an incorrect set of values was inadvertently pasted into the corresponding data fields. Consequently, Figures S4H and S4I were generated from these incorrectly transferred values. These errors have now been corrected. Related source data can now be accessed at Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.34207137. The correction does not affect any of the conclusions of the article. The authors apologize for any confusion these errors may have caused.

Revealed: UK’s first operation using a robot that can ‘feel’

But that was not specifically why we were here. It was, instead, because the patient was about to become the first in the UK to have the surgery using a robotic-assisted technology.

Called Force Feedback, it is attached to the da Vinci 5 robotic system, allowing the surgeon for the first time to feel the pressure they are exerting as they push and pull on the patient’s tissue inside their body.

Early results from the US show it’s making surgery more gentle and recovery time faster — and it’s even improving the time the patient is in the operating theatre.

WEHI study reveals a new immune pathway for fighting small cell lung cancer

Researchers have uncovered a previously overlooked immune cell that can recognize and kill small cell lung cancer, the most aggressive form of the disease globally.

Published in Cancer Cell, the WEHI study found patients with higher levels of these cells lived longer, uncovering a hidden immune defence that could be exploited to attack these hard-to-treat tumors.

Researchers also showed existing drugs could be repurposed to boost the cancer-killing activity of these immune cells, opening new opportunities to strengthen current treatments and help more patients benefit from these therapies.

Silicon qubits surpass 99.99% gate fidelity while operating three at once

Silicon spin qubits are a promising platform for building scalable quantum computers as they are compatible with the semiconductor manufacturing technologies used to produce today’s computer chips. However, they have an important weakness: silicon spin qubits typically lose accuracy when several qubits are under parallel control. To be useful, quantum computers will need to operate many qubits simultaneously without compromising the accuracy of their operations.

Now, in a study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have addressed this challenge by achieving high-fidelity control of multiple silicon spin qubits operating in parallel. Using a five-qubit silicon array controlled through a single shared microwave line, they identified a key source of errors during the simultaneous operation of qubits and developed a way to mitigate its effects.

According to Leon Camenzind, a research scientist at RIKEN and co-first author who supervised the experiments, “This shows that high-fidelity control can be maintained even when several qubits are operated at the same time and represents an important step toward scaling up silicon-based quantum processors.”