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Alvaro Morales is the co-founder and CEO of Orb, a flexible usage-based billing engine for modern software pricing models.

Many SaaS companies want to leverage AI in their products. However, since AI is so new, pricing remains volatile. Costs can drop drastically for an AI model when the next iteration is out, and many companies lower their pricing in response to a competitor launch to gain or retain market share.

In addition to the fluctuating and unpredictable model prices, AI pricing is mostly based on usage. Customer usage is usually difficult to predict, which affects the costs your product will incur if it relies on AI models.

An international group of researchers has developed a novel approach that enhances the efficiency of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), a key process in renewable energy technologies. By introducing rare earth single atoms into manganese oxide (MnO2), the group successfully modulated oxygen electronic states, leading to unprecedented improvements in OER performance.

A recent study led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers provides fundamental insight into how light, electrons, and crystal vibrations interact in materials. The research has implications for developing on-chip architectures for quantum information processing, significantly reducing fabrication constraints, and thermal management.

Researchers with the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) have experimentally demonstrated that metasurfaces (two-dimensional materials structured at the nanoscale) can precisely control the optical properties of thermal radiation generated within the metasurface itself. This pioneering work, published in Nature Nanotechnology, paves the way for creating custom light sources with unprecedented capabilities, impacting a wide array of scientific and technological applications.

We use the new simulation capabilities of the extended-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code, M3D-C1, to investigate the nonlinear MHD properties of a reactor-scale quasisymmetric stellarator equilibrium. Our model captures the self-consistent evolution of the magnetic field, temperature, density, and flow profiles without imposing restrictions on the structure of the first. We include the effects of resistivity using a realistic temperature-dependent Spitzer model, along with a model for heat transport that captures the key physical characteristic, namely, strongly anisotropic diffusion in directions perpendicular and parallel to the magnetic field. We consider a quasi-axisymmetric, finite-pressure equilibrium that was optimized for self-consistent bootstrap current, quasi-symmetry, and energetic particle confinement. Our assessment finds that the equilibrium is highly unstable to interchange-like pressure-driven instabilities near the plasma edge. The initially unstable modes rapidly destabilize other modes in the direction of the N-fold rotational symmetry (toroidal, in this case). For this equilibrium, N = 2, meaning destabilization of a large number of even-numbered toroidal Fourier modes. Thus, field-periodicity is likely to be an important factor in the nonlinear MHD stability characteristics of optimized stellarators.

Curtin University researchers found that Western Australia’s Hamersley iron ore deposits are one billion years younger than previously believed, formed during significant geological events 1.4 to 1.1 billion years ago.

Research conducted by Curtin University has uncovered that the vast iron ore deposits in Western Australia’s Hamersley Province are approximately one billion years younger than previously estimated. This finding could significantly boost the search for more of the resource.

Using a new geochronology technique to accurately measure the age of iron oxide minerals, researchers found the Hamersley deposits formed between 1.4 and 1.1 billion years ago, rather than 2.2 billion years ago as previously estimated.