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Jul 4, 2020

Sub-Saharan solar minigrid market worth $128 billion by 2030

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

BloombergNEF and Sustainable Energy for All have jointly published a report by the Mini-Grid Partnership proposing solar minigrids as a critical technology to bring electricity to the 789 million people who still lack access.

Jul 4, 2020

Results of an Experiment

Posted by in categories: chemistry, innovation

A USC Dornsife chemistry professor’s bet on a student proposal leads to new understanding of what defines a metal — and lands the cover of Science.

Ryan McMullen had never heard of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences when he started casting about for a graduate chemistry program. But on the recommendation of one of his professors, he sent an email to the College’s Professor of Chemistry Stephen Bradforth proposing an experiment to tease out what makes a metal really a metal.

Continue reading “Results of an Experiment” »

Jul 4, 2020

Chinese military aircraft enters Taiwan’s ADIZ

Posted by in category: military

Taipei, July 4 (CNA) A Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s southwest air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Saturday, before being chased off by Taiwanese patrol planes, according to the Air Force Command Headquarters.

Taiwanese fighter jets responded with radio warnings, and they monitored the Chinese aircraft’s movements until it flew off, the Air Force said.

There is no cause for public alarm, the Air Force said, adding that it was closely monitoring the airspace and waters around Taiwan.

Jul 4, 2020

A completely new plasmonic chip for ultrafast data transmission using light

Posted by in categories: internet, robotics/AI

Researchers from ETH Zurich have achieved what scientists have been attempting to do for some 20 years: in their laboratory work as part of European Horizon 2020 research projects, they have manufactured a chip on which fast electronic signals can be converted directly into ultrafast light signals—with practically no loss of signal quality. This represents a significant breakthrough in terms of the efficiency of optical communication infrastructures that use light to transmit data, such as fiber optic networks.

In cities like Zurich, these fiber optic networks are already being used to deliver , digital telephony, TV, and network-based video or audio services (“streaming”). However, by the end of this decade, even these optical communication networks may reach their limits when it comes to rapid data transmission.

This is due to the growing demand for online services for streaming, storage and computation, as well as the advent of artificial intelligence and 5G networks. Today’s optical networks achieve data transmission rates in the region of gigabits (109 bits) per second. The limit is around 100 gigabits per lane und wavelength. In the future, however, transmission rates will need to reach the terabit region (1012 bits per second).

Jul 4, 2020

How AI Helps Digital Enterprises Streamline Operations

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how enterprises analyze and process information. It is also shifting from theoretical to real-world technology. Companies are deploying AI technologies to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and grow sales and profitability. The technology can also reduce marketing waste by predicting what works. It is the most impactful innovation of our lifetime, and it will create new winners and losers across entire industries.

According to Gartner, artificial intelligence will create $2.9 trillion in business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally in 2021. Most of that value will be realized by enterprises that implement AI in functions such as sales management, customer service, manufacturing, and logistics. With improvements in natural language processing, employees and users can easily communicate with machine-learning interfaces.

Let’s look at how AI applications are revamping digital enterprises and the retail industry.

Jul 4, 2020

Search Engine Strategies of the Brain: Why Some Words May Be More Memorable Than Others

Posted by in categories: finance, health, internet, robotics/AI

Thousands of words, big and small, are crammed inside our memory banks just waiting to be swiftly withdrawn and strung into sentences. In a recent study of epilepsy patients and healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may withdraw some common words, like “pig,” “tank,” and “door,” much more often than others, including “cat,” “street,” and “stair.” By combining memory tests, brain wave recordings, and surveys of billions of words published in books, news articles and internet encyclopedia pages, the researchers not only showed how our brains may recall words but also memories of our past experiences.

“We found that some words are much more memorable than others. Our results support the idea that our memories are wired into neural networks and that our brains search for these memories, just the way search engines track down information on the internet,” said Weizhen (Zane) Xie, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist and post-doctoral fellow at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), who led the study published in Nature Human Behaviour. “We hope that these results can be used as a roadmap to evaluate the health of a person’s memory and brain.”

Dr. Xie and his colleagues first spotted these words when they re-analyzed the results of memory tests taken by 30 epilepsy patients who were part of a clinical trial led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon and senior investigator at NINDS. Dr. Zaghloul’s team tries to help patients whose seizures cannot be controlled by drugs, otherwise known as intractable epilepsy. During the observation period, patients spend several days at the NIH’s Clinical Center with surgically implanted electrodes designed to detect changes in brain activity.

Jul 4, 2020

How chemistry, physics, biology, neuroscience lab courses will be conducted in fall 2020

Posted by in category: education

All chemistry lab courses will be taught entirely remotely for fall 2020 with potential optional in-person experience, Merriam Professor of Chemistry and Chemistry Undergraduate Chair Jeffrey Winkler said.

Jul 3, 2020

Welcome anyons! Physicists find best evidence yet for long-sought 2D structures

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

The ‘quasiparticles’ defy the categories of ordinary particles and herald a potential way to build quantum computers.

Jul 3, 2020

Five coronavirus mysteries scientists are still racing to solve

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

But for every insight into COVID-19, more questions emerge and others linger. That is how science works. To mark six months since the world first learnt about the disease responsible for the pandemic, Nature runs through some of the key questions that researchers still don’t have answers to.


From immunity to the role of genetics, Nature looks at five pressing questions about COVID-19 that researchers are tackling. Six months into the outbreak, Nature looks at the pressing questions that researchers are tackling.

Jul 3, 2020

The first petabyte hard disk drive could contain glass

Posted by in categories: computing, electronics

Seagate has confirmed it is working on optical data storage.