For anything Computer Science related that doesn’t require its own separate discussion.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Nature is the endless variety of shapes, colours and behaviours exhibited by organisms. These traits help organisms survive and find mates, like how a male peacock’s colourful tail attracts females or his wings allow him to fly away from danger. Understanding traits is crucial for biologists, who study them to learn how organisms evolve and adapt to different environments. To do this, scientists first need to describe these traits in words, like saying…

In an ongoing game of cosmic hide and seek, scientists have a new tool that may give them an edge. Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a computer program incorporating machine learning that could help identify blobs of plasma in outer space known as plasmoids. In a novel twist, the program has been trained using simulated data. The program will sift through reams of data gathered by spacecraft in the magnetosphere,…

Balance can be impacted by various factors, including diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, acute and chronic injuries to the nervous system, and the natural aging process. Accurately assessing balance in patients is important to identify and manage conditions that affect coordination and stability. Balance assessments also play a key role in preventing falls, understanding movement disorders, and designing appropriate therapeutic interventions across age groups and medical conditions. However, traditional methods used to assess balance often suffer from subjectivity, are not…

In a breakthrough that brings to mind Lucky Luke — the man who shoots faster than his shadow — Rasmus Kyng and his team have developed a superfast algorithm that looks set to transform an entire field of research. The groundbreaking work by Kyng’s team involves what is known as a network flow algorithm, which tackles the question of how to achieve the maximum flow in a network while simultaneously minimising transport costs. Imagine you are using the European transportation…

The growing prevalence of high-speed wireless communication devices, from 5G mobile phones to sensors for autonomous vehicles, is leading to increasingly crowded airwaves. This makes the ability to block interfering signals that can hamper device performance an even more important — and more challenging — problem. With these and other emerging applications in mind, MIT researchers demonstrated a new millimeter-wave multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless receiver architecture that can handle stronger spatial interference than previous designs. MIMO systems have multiple antennas, enabling…

Quantum computers have the potential to be revolutionary tools for their ability to perform calculations that would take classical computers many years to resolve. But to make an effective quantum computer, you need a reliable quantum bit, or qubit, that can exist in a simultaneous 0 or 1 state for a sufficiently long period, known as its coherence time. One promising approach is trapping a single electron on a solid neon surface, called an electron-on-solid-neon qubit. A study led by…

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a kirigami-inspired mechanical computer that uses a complex structure of rigid, interconnected polymer cubes to store, retrieve and erase data without relying on electronic components. The system also includes a reversible feature that allows users to control when data editing is permitted and when data should be locked in place. Mechanical computers are computers that operate using mechanical components rather than electronic ones. Historically, these mechanical components have been things like levers or…

Computers have come so far in terms of their power and potential, rivaling and even eclipsing human brains in their ability to store and crunch data, make predictions and communicate. But there is one domain where human brains continue to dominate: energy efficiency. “The most efficient computers are still approximately four orders of magnitude — that’s 10,000 times — higher in energy requirements compared to the human brain for specific tasks such as image processing and recognition, although they outperform…

Researchers at the University of Bonn have developed software that can simulate the growth of field crops. To do this, they fed thousands of photos from field experiments into a learning algorithm. This enabled the algorithm to learn how to visualize the future development of cultivated plants based on a single initial image. Using the images created during this process, parameters such as leaf area or yield can be estimated accurately. The results have been published in the journal Plant…

Using computer-assisted neural networks, Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Duisburg-Essen have been able to accurately identify affective states from the body language of tennis players during games. For the first time, they trained a model based on artificial intelligence (AI) with data from actual games. Their study, published in the journal Knowledge-Based Systems, demonstrates that AI can assess body language and emotions with accuracy similar to that of humans. However, it also points…