In the spring of 2022, Tim Story’s doctor told him that he likely had just months to live. Story, a high school football coach in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been diagnosed with Stage 3 small bowel cancer two years earlier, at the age of 49, after mysterious pains in his side turned out to be a tumor in his small intestine. Surgery and several grueling rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy had failed to stop the cancer, which had spread to other organs.
The Nano Materials Research Division at the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS), led by Dr. Tae-Hoon Kim and Dr. Jung-Goo Lee has successfully developed a grain boundary diffusion process that enables the fabrication of high-performance permanent magnets without the use of expensive heavy rare earth elements. This pioneering technology marks the world’s first achievement in this field.
The findings are published in Acta Materialia.
Permanent magnets are key components in various high-value-added products, including electric vehicle (EV) motors and robots. However, conventional permanent magnet manufacturing processes have been heavily dependent on heavy rare earth elements, which are exclusively produced by China, leading to high resource dependency and production costs.
“‘Incipient ferroelectricity’ means there’s no stable ferroelectric order at room temperature,” lead author Dipanjan Sen explains of the property that the team investigated. “Instead, there are small, scattered clusters of polar domains. It’s a more flexible structure compared to traditional ferroelectric materials.”
Typically, the “relaxor” behavior of incipient ferroelectric materials at room temperature is a drawback, making their operation less predictable and more fluid — but the team’s breakthrough was to approach it as an advantage instead, showing how it could be of use in devices like neuromorphic processors that increase machine learning and artificial intelligence performance by processing information like the neurons in the human brain.
“To test this,” co-author Mayukh Das says, “we performed a classification task using a grid of three-by-three pixel images fed into three artificial neurons. The devices were able to classify each image into different categories. This learning method could eventually be used for image identification and classification or pattern recognition. Importantly, it works at room temperature, reducing energy costs. These devices function similarly to the nervous system, acting like neurons and creating a low-cost, efficient computing system that uses a lot less energy.”
In September 2024, OpenAI released its o1 model, trained on large-scale reinforcement learning, giving it “advanced reasoning” capabilities. Unfortunately, the details of how they pulled this off were never shared publicly. Today, however, DeepSeek (an AI research lab) has replicated this reasoning behavior and published the full technical details of their approach. In this article, I will discuss the key ideas behind this innovation and describe how they work under the hood.
An earthworm-inspired robot could make undergrounding of power lines cheaper and safer, reducing the risk of future wildfire outbreaks.
Summary: New research indicates a strong link between high social media use and psychiatric disorders involving delusions, such as narcissism and body dysmorphia. Conditions like narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, and body dysmorphic disorder thrive on social platforms, allowing users to build and maintain distorted self-perceptions without real-world checks.
The study highlights how virtual environments enable users to escape social scrutiny, intensifying delusional self-images and potentially exacerbating existing mental health issues. Researchers emphasize that social media isn’t inherently harmful, but immersive virtual environments coupled with real-life isolation can significantly amplify unhealthy mental states.
Summary: A new study reveals that poor sleep in older adults disrupts the brain’s glymphatic system, responsible for clearing harmful waste and toxins. Researchers found that compromised sleep quality leads to dysfunction in this crucial system, potentially increasing risks for memory decline and cognitive impairments.
Using advanced brain imaging in 72 older adults, the research highlighted that poor sleep negatively impacts connections within brain networks linked to memory performance. These insights emphasize the importance of maintaining good sleep hygiene to support brain health and healthy aging.
US tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called “deep research” that can produce detailed reports, as China’s DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the artificial intelligence field.
The company made the announcement in Tokyo, where OpenAI chief Sam Altman also trumpeted a new joint venture with tech investor SoftBank Group to offer advanced artificial intelligence services to businesses.
AI newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with some calling its high performance and supposed low cost a wake-up call for US developers.
This Review summarizes current evidence regarding risk factors, diagnosis, and treatment of testicular cancer, particularly germ cell tumors, in adults and adolescents.
— Kreiner, et al.
In this article, the authors review the current understanding of obesity-related kidney disease and focus on the intertwined cardiometabolic abnormalities, which, in addition to obesity and diabetes, include risk factors such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, and systemic inflammation.
Full text is available
Obesity is a serious chronic disease and an independent risk factor for the new onset and progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD). CKD prevalence is expected to increase, at least partly due to the continuous rise in the prevalence of obesity. The concept of obesity-related kidney disease (OKD) has been introduced to describe the still incompletely understood interplay between obesity, CKD, and other cardiometabolic conditions, including risk factors for OKD and cardiovascular disease, such as diabetes and hypertension. Current therapeutics target obesity and CKD individually. Non-pharmacological interventions play a major part, but the efficacy and clinical applicability of lifestyle changes and metabolic surgery remain debatable, because the strategies do not benefit everyone, and it remains questionable whether lifestyle changes can be sustained in the long term.