The latest AI News. Learn about LLMs, Gen AI and get ready for the rollout of AGI. Wes Roth covers the latest happenings in the world of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, NVIDIA and Open Source AI.
Mars’s atmosphere and climate are impacted by interactions with solar wind, a stream of plasma comprised of protons and electrons that flows from the sun’s outermost atmosphere (corona), traveling at speeds of 400–1,000 kilometers per second.
As these charged particles interact with the planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere, we may see spectacular auroras over polar regions on Earth. Given Mars’s lack of a global magnetic field, auroras here are instead diffused across the planet.
However, sometimes this solar wind can “disappear” in rare events when there is a gap in the solar wind path as the sun increases its solar activity. This occurs when a faster portion of solar wind overtakes a slower one in a corotating interaction region and incorporates it, leaving a lower-density void in the solar wind path.
Mars has northern and southern hemispheres like Earth, but their defining characteristics are markedly different, a phenomenon known as Martian dichotomy. The Southern Highlands are older, higher in elevation and more cratered than the Northern Lowlands. The elevated terrain of the former acts as a natural barrier to airflow, resulting in varied wind patterns and contributing to localized weather phenomena.
Explanations for the origin of this dichotomy primarily surround giant impactors (~2,000 kilometers in diameter) from space and large-scale convective movements of the mantle caused by differences in its temperature and density.
Research published in Geophysical Research Letters has attempted to further unravel this origin story through study of Martian earthquakes, or marsquakes. Much like on Earth, this seismic activity can be used to explore driving mechanisms beneath Mars’s surface.
A team of climate geochemists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand and Princeton University has found evidence that early hominins living in South Africa ate a mostly vegetarian diet. In their study, published in the journal Science, the group conducted isotopic analysis of fossilized teeth found in the region looking for evidence of meat consumption.
Over the past several decades, scientists have been looking for historical evidence to explain why humans developed characteristics such as an upright posture and large brains. One theory suggests that such characteristics may have arisen due to a switch from a vegetarian diet to carnivory. In this new effort, the research team tested this theory by analyzing fossilized teeth of hominins in South Africa approximately 3.5 million years ago.
The researchers conducted an analysis of the nitrogen and carbon isotopes bound to the tooth enamel of 43 fossilized teeth, all of which had been found in South Africa’s Sterkfontein caves. Seven of the sample teeth were from Australopithecus africanus, and the remainder were from five other mammalian families. They then did the same with teeth from several modern species, both meat eaters and vegetarians.
Smaller than a strawberry seed, this tiny signal amplifier was produced by the European Space Agency to fill a missing link in current technology, helping to make future radar-observing and telecommunications space missions feasible.
“This integrated circuit is a low noise amplifier, measuring just 1.8 by 0.9 mm across,” explains ESA microwave engineer David Cuadrado-Calle. “Delivering state of the art performance, the low noise amplifier’s task is to boost very faint signals to usable levels.”
It could in the future be employed for both radar-based missions—where the faint signals are the radar echoes received by the instrument after they bounce off Earth’s surface and travel back to the satellite—and telecommunications missions —where the communication signals coming from Earth are amplified by the satellite and sent back to Earth for broadband access or broadcasting services.
Columbia researchers created an AI model that predicts gene activity in any human cell, advancing disease research and treatment. It has already uncovered mechanisms behind pediatric leukemia and may reveal hidden genome functions.
Researchers at Columbia University.
Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.
Left and right circularly polarized light, where the electromagnetic waves spiral in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner as they travel, plays a crucial role in a wide range of applications, from enhancing medical imaging techniques to enabling advanced communication technologies. However, generating circularly polarized light often requires complex and bulky optical set-ups, which hinders its use in systems with space constraints.
To address this challenge, a team of researchers from Singapore led by Associate Professor Wu Lin of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has put forth a new type of metasurface—an ultra-thin material with properties not found in nature—that may be able to replace traditional complex and bulky optical set-ups.
They have published their research in the Physical Review Letters paper “Enabling all-to-circular polarization up-conversion by nonlinear chiral metasurfaces with rotational symmetry.”
Researchers have built an optical clock using an array of trapped ions—an architecture that can be scaled up to boost the clock’s precision.
So-called “infinite-layer” nickelate materials, characterized by their unique crystal and electronic structures, exhibit significant potential as high-temperature superconductors. Studying these materials remains challenging for researchers; they have only been synthesized as thin films and then “capped” with a protective layer that could alter properties of the nickelate layered system.
To address this challenge, a team led by researchers at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—used complementary X-ray techniques at two different beamlines to gain new insights into these materials. Their results were published in Physical Review Letters.
A dry material makes a great fire starter, and a soft material lends itself to a sweater. Batteries require materials that can store lots of energy, and microchips need components that can turn the flow of electricity on and off.
Each material’s properties are a result of what’s happening internally. The structure of a material’s atomic scaffolding can take many forms and is often a complex combination of competing patterns. This atomic and electronic landscape determines how a material will interact with the rest of the world, including other materials, electric and magnetic fields, and light.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, as part of a multi-institutional team of universities and national laboratories, are investigating a material with a highly unusual structure—one that changes dramatically when exposed to an ultrafast pulse of light from a laser.
