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Apr 14, 2022

High-efficiency modules and large formats with higher market share

Posted by in category: futurism

High-efficiency modules and large module formats achieve higher market share and larger wafers are established, the 13th edition of the International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaic (ITRPV) states.

Apr 14, 2022

US start-up develops polymer-based batteries for stationary storage

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy

“Our batteries are designed to suit the needs of stationary power applications where safety, lifetime, levelized costs, and environmental footprints are key decision drivers,” the company said in a statement. “PolyJoule’s conductive polymer cells span the performance curve between traditional lead-acid batteries and modern lithium-ion cells, while enhancing service life and reducing balance of plant costs, due to their no-HVAC thermal management design.”

According to the manufacturer, the battery cells were tested to perform for 12,000 cycles at 100% depth of discharge. The device is based on a standard, two-electrode electrochemical cell containing the conductive polymers, a carbon-graphene hybrid, and a non-flammable liquid electrolyte. Alternating anodes and cathodes are interwoven and then connected in parallel to form a cell.

Apr 14, 2022

Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter outright for $41 billion

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

Billionaire and avid platform user Elon Musk has made an offer to purchase 100% of the shares for the social media giant.

Apr 14, 2022

Robot surveys radioactive duct at Dounreay power station in Caithness

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The operators of Dounreay expect to use more robots in areas inaccessible or unsafe for humans.

Apr 14, 2022

NASA scientists spy ‘largest comet ever seen’

Posted by in category: space

It’s 85 miles wide, which is larger than the US state of Rhode Island. And it’s coming this way.

Apr 14, 2022

US military confirms an interstellar meteor collided with Earth

Posted by in categories: military, space travel

A meteor crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014, but it wasn’t until Harvard scientists researched its velocity and trajectory five years later that they learned it came from outside our solar system.

Apr 14, 2022

Android overheating issues are widespread and likely to get worse

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Overheating issues in Android phones are becoming more common, and likely to get worse, as a result of the underlying processor designs.

Apr 14, 2022

Smell significantly enhances sense of realism in virtual reality, researchers find

Posted by in category: virtual reality

You walk along a dark winding path deep in a forest. There is a swamp you must wade through. You spot an old wooden shack and walk to it past a smoldering fire. Its broken shutters and verandah sag under vines and neglect.

Apr 14, 2022

Google Builds Language Models with Socratic Dialogue to Improve Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning Capabilities

Posted by in category: habitats

Large-scale language-based foundation models such as BERT, GPT-3 and CLIP have exhibited impressive capabilities ranging from zero-shot image classification to high-level planning. In most cases, these large language models, visual-language models and audio-language models remain domain-specific and rely highly on the distribution of their training data. The models thus obtain different although complementary common-sense knowledge within specific domains. But what if such models could effectively communicate with one another?

In the new paper Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language, Google researchers argue that the diversity of different foundation models is symbiotic and that it is possible to build a framework that uses structured Socratic dialogue between pre-existing foundation models to formulate new multimodal tasks as a guided exchange between the models without additional finetuning.

This work aims at building general language-based foundation models that embrace the diversity of pre-existing language-based foundation models by levering structured Socratic dialogue, and offers insights into the applicability of the proposed Socratic Models on challenging perceptual tasks.

Apr 14, 2022

Exploring how fungal infections spread in the human lung

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, information science

A chip-based infection model developed by researchers in Jena, Germany, enables live microscopic observation of damage to lung tissue caused by the invasive fungal infection aspergillosis. The team developed algorithms to track the spread of fungal hyphae as well as the response of immune cells. The development is based on a “lung-on-chip” model also developed in Jena and can help reduce the number of animal experiments. The results were presented in the journal Biomaterials.

Aspergillosis is a mold infection caused by Aspergillus fumigatus, which often affects the lungs. The disease can be fatal, especially in immunocompromised individuals. In these cases, invasive aspergillosis usually occurs with fungal hyphae invading . So far, there are only a few active substances that can combat such fungal infections. “That’s why it was so important for us to be able to represent this invasive growth in a ,” says Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal, who co-led the study. The internist is a professor at the Department of Internal Medicine II at Jena University Hospital and conducts research at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology—Hans Knöll Institute (Leibniz-HKI) in Jena, Germany.

The new aspergillosis infection model should help to better observe both the growth of the fungus and the reaction of the immune system and to find possible new approaches for therapies. In addition, new active substances can be tested. The expertise for this is available in Jena: Organ chips have long been developed at the university hospital. The startup Dynamic42, which manufactures the lung chips used in the study, was founded there. First author Mai Hoang also joined the company after completing her doctorate.