Technology
press releases.

Technology12 Aug 2025

AI meets CRISPR for precise gene editing

A research team headed by the University of Zurich has developed a powerful new method to precisely edit DNA by combining cutting-edge genetic engineering with artificial intelligence. This technique opens the door to more accurate modeling of human diseases and lays the groundwork for next-generation gene therapies. Precise and targeted DNA editing by small point mutations as well as the integration of whole genes via CRISPR/Cas technology has great potential for applications in biotechnology and gene therapy. However, it is very important that the so-called “gene scissors” do not cause any unintended ...

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Technology11 Aug 2025

Meet IDEA: An AI assistant to help geoscientists explore Earth and beyond

A new artificial intelligence tool developed by researchers at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa is making it easier for scientists to explore complex geoscience data—from tracking sea levels on Earth to analyzing atmospheric conditions on Mars. Called the Intelligent Data Exploring Assistant (IDEA), the software framework combines the power of large language models, like those used in ChatGPT, with scientific data, tailored instructions, and computing resources. By simply providing questions in everyday ...

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Technology11 Aug 2025

Rice’s dean of engineering and computing building new software infrastructure for evolutionary biology

Rice University computer scientist Luay Nakhleh, who also serves as the dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, has received a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a powerful new software infrastructure that could significantly expand how scientists study evolution. The project, titled PhyNetPy, aims to bring the next generation of evolutionary modeling tools into the hands of researchers around the world by enabling the widespread use of phylogenetic networks — complex, ...

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Technology11 Aug 2025

AI could help emergency rooms predict admissions, driving more timely, effective care

New York, NY [August 11, 2025]— Artificial intelligence (AI) can help emergency department (ED) teams better anticipate which patients will need hospital admission, hours earlier than is currently possible, according to a multi-hospital study by the Mount Sinai Health System. By giving clinicians advance notice, this approach may enhance patient care and the patient experience, reduce overcrowding and “boarding” (when a patient is admitted but remains in the ED because no bed is available), ...

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Technology11 Aug 2025

Is writing with AI at work undermining your credibility?

With over 75% of professionals using AI in their daily work, writing and editing messages with tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude has become a commonplace practice. While generative AI tools are seen to make writing easier, are they effective for communicating between managers and employees? A new study of 1,100 professionals reveals a critical paradox in workplace communications: AI tools can make managers’ emails more professional, but regular use can undermine trust between them ...

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Technology11 Aug 2025

Conditional cash transfers significantly reduce AIDS incidence and mortality among brazil’s most vulnerable women

The world's largest conditional cash transfer programme, the Bolsa Família Programme (BFP), is associated with a substantial reduction in AIDS cases and deaths, especially among brown and black women with lower income and limited education. This was the main conclusion of a study coordinated by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by ”la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAIDS/NIH). The ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Destructive cosmic airbursts likely more common than previously believed

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Touchdown airbursts — a type of cosmic impact that may be more common than the crater-forming, dinosaur-killing kind — remain somewhat less understood. UC Santa Barbara Earth Science Emeritus Professor James Kennett and collaborators continue to make the case that these high-energy events deserve closer attention. “Touchdown events can cause extreme damage through very high temperatures and pressures,” Kennett said. “And yet they don’t necessarily form a crater, or they form ephemeral surface disturbances, but they’re ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Wildfire collaborative responds to community concerns about air quality

When several wildfires ignited in Los Angeles in early January of 2025, Miriam Marlier’s friends and neighbors came to her with questions about how to find reliable air quality information. Marlier is a UCLA scientist and a member of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative (WFFRC), a program of Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies led by Cary forest ecologist Winslow Hansen. Guided by decision makers, the collaborative conducts research to inform solutions to the Western US fire crisis. During the January fires, “people were urgently trying ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Public data reveal extent of air quality impacts during 2025 Los Angeles wildfires

In early 2025, wildfires spread in Los Angeles, destroying tens of thousands of homes and businesses. During the fires, smoke blanketed the region and online maps provided residents with rapid air quality information. Now, a study in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters compares the data that went into the maps from federal monitoring stations, low-cost sensors and satellites. Their results highlight the importance of combining multiple data sources to form easily accessible information for the public. “Timely and accurate air quality information is crucial for the public to ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Towards better earthquake risk assessment with machine learning

“A building is only as strong as its foundation” is a common adage to signify the importance of having a stable and solid base to build upon. The type and design of foundation are important for ensuring the structural safety of a building. Among several factors that can affect the design and laying of a foundation, bearing stratum depth, namely the depth at which the underlying layer of soil or rock has adequate strength to support a foundation, is one of the most crucial. This is because in regions that are prone to earthquakes or landslides, the bearing stratum depth, also ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Quantum ‘Starry Night’: Physicists capture elusive instability and exotic vortices

Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” has stirred the souls of art lovers for over a century. Now, its swirling skies may also speak to physicists, as it echoes the patterns of quantum turbulence. Physicists at Osaka Metropolitan University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have for the first time successfully observed the quantum Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (KHI) — a phenomenon predicted decades ago but never before seen in quantum fluids. The instability produces exotic vortex patterns known as eccentric fractional skyrmions, whose crescent-shaped structures ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

'One child called the robot "my little brother"': Can assistance tech become part of the family?

What happens to a social robot after it retires? Four years ago, we placed a small owl-shaped reading robot named Luka into 20 families’ homes. At the time, the children were preschoolers, just learning to read. Luka’s job was clear: scan the pages of physical picture books and read them aloud, helping children build early literacy skills. That was in 2021. In 2025, we went back — not expecting to find much. The children had grown. The reading level was no longer age-appropriate. Surely, Luka’s work was done. Instead, ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Japan launches fully domestically produced quantum computer

Osaka, Japan – A Japanese superconducting quantum computer, fully designed and built with homegrown components and software, went live on July 28th at The University of Osaka’s Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology (QIQB). This achievement signifies Japan's technological prowess in quantum computing, demonstrating the nation's capacity to design, manufacture, and integrate a complete quantum system. Visitors to Expo 2025, Osaka, Kansai, Japan will have the opportunity to interact with this cutting-edge technology through a dedicated exhibit. The project, spearheaded ...

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Technology8 Aug 2025

Home is where the airfields are: What happens when hawks are moved from Los Angeles airports

To a hawk an airport can look like the perfect place to settle down. The layout provides ample open space, perches, and nice habitat for a variety of prey species. However, congregations of birds, especially big birds, poses a safety issue for aircraft. A new study focused on Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii), published in the Journal of Raptor Research, found that removing a hawk from an airfield and taking it somewhere else, called translocation, can serve as a method for reducing this risk. Researchers also showed that ...

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Technology7 Aug 2025

A thoughtful approach to governing emerging quantum technologies

In a Policy Forum, Mateo Aboy and colleagues argue that, instead of turning immediately to rigid regulation to govern emerging quantum technologies, the community should apply a standards-based governance approach tailored to the early, technically focused stage of development. Quantum technologies are poised to revolutionize everything from computing to medicine, offering performance leaps that far surpass the limits of current systems. Yet, this promise comes with complex governance challenges, as these powerful tools ...

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Technology7 Aug 2025

Simple color-changing sensor quickly identifies poisonous gases

Not all poisonous gases have a smell or a color. But a tiny grid of pastel- and candy-colored squares that effectively “sniffs” out hazardous chemicals in the air such as chlorosarin — a highly toxic nerve agent — could help detect them. Researchers report in ACS Sensors that the colorful patterns in their inexpensive and durable paper-based sensor array changed in the presence of poisonous gases, allowing for quick and accurate measurements within minutes. Electronic noses, ...

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Technology7 Aug 2025

Announcing Gordian Biotechnology as Tier 5 Sponsor of ARDD 2025

The University of Copenhagen is excited to announce Gordian Biotechnology as a Tier 5 Sponsor of the 12th Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting, the world's largest conference on aging research in the biopharmaceutical industry that will transpire on August 25 - August 29, 2025 on-site at the Ceremonial Hall, University of Copenhagen, and online. Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company transforming how the industry discovers and develops treatments for age-related diseases. By integrating pooled screening in naturally occurring disease models, single-cell analysis, and in vivo gene therapy, ...

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Technology7 Aug 2025

Quantum freezing at room temperature

What are the limits of quantum physics? This is a question that has been researched around the world for decades. If we want to make the properties of the quantum world technically usable, we need to understand whether objects that are significantly larger than atoms and molecules can also exhibit quantum phenomena. For example, small glass spheres with a diameter of one hundred nanometres can be examined – still over a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand, but huge by quantum standards. For years, attempts have been made to show the extent to which such spheres ...

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Technology7 Aug 2025

Consider the chemistry of your quantum materials, say researchers at Columbia

Chemistry and physics are combining forces at Columbia, and it’s leaving everyone frustrated—in a good way. New work, published today in Nature Physics, describes a new two-dimensional material capable of complex quantum behaviors that arise from its underlying chemistry, rather than its atomic structure. “It’s a classic Columbia story—multiple groups in physics and chemistry came together to work on this new material, and we found exciting new results about how electrons move,” said Aravind Devarakonda, an applied physicist at Columbia Engineering. The material, Pd5AlI2, ...

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Technology6 Aug 2025

With just a few messages, biased AI chatbots swayed people’s political views

If you’ve interacted with an artificial intelligence chatbot, you’ve likely realized that all AI models are biased. They were trained on enormous corpuses of unruly data and refined through human instructions and testing. Bias can seep in anywhere. Yet how a system’s biases can affect users is less clear. So a University of Washington study put it to the test. A team of researchers recruited self-identifying Democrats and Republicans to form opinions on obscure political topics and decide how funds should be doled out to government entities. For help, they were ...

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Technology6 Aug 2025

Novel microwave dielectric ceramics enable high-performance 5G/6G communication devices

With the global rollout of 5G networks and the onset of 6G research, the need for advanced materials that enable faster and more reliable wireless communication has never been greater. Microwave dielectric ceramics, key components in devices like resonators, filters, and antennas, must meet strict criteria: low signal delay, low loss, and stable performance across temperatures. A research team from Guilin University of Technology in China has risen to this challenge by developing a novel garnet-type ceramic, YMAG. Synthesized using a solid-state reaction method, YMAG exhibits impressive microwave properties: a permittivity (εr) of 9.86, a quality factor ...

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Technology6 Aug 2025

Yonsei University researchers directly measure quantum metric tensor in real material

Quantum distance refers to a measure of quantum mechanical similarity between two quantum states. A quantum distance of one means that the two quantum states are the same, whereas a quantum distance of zero implies that they are exactly the opposite. Physicists introduced this concept in the realm of theoretical science a long time ago, but its importance has been increasingly recognized in the field of physics only in recent times. In the last few years, many experimental physicists have tried to measure the quantum distance of electrons ...

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Technology6 Aug 2025

Pure quantum state without the need for cooling

Three nano glass spheres cling to one another. They form a tower-like cluster, similar to when you pile three scoops of ice cream on top of one another – only much smaller. The diameter of the nano cluster is ten times smaller than that of a human hair. With the help of an optical device and laser beams, researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in keeping such objects almost completely motionless in levitation. This is significant when it comes to the future development of quantum sensors, which, together with quantum computers, constitute the most promising applications of quantum research. As part of their levitation ...

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Technology6 Aug 2025

Breathing low-oxygen air slows Parkinson’s progression in mice

Researchers from the Broad Institute and Mass General Brigham have shown that a low-oxygen environment — similar to the thin air found at Mount Everest base camp — can protect the brain and restore movement in mice with Parkinson’s-like disease. The new research, in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that cellular dysfunction in Parkinson’s leads to the accumulation of excess oxygen molecules in the brain, which then fuel neurodegeneration — and that reducing oxygen intake could help prevent or even reverse Parkinson’s symptoms. “The ...

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Technology6 Aug 2025

Can adding a compound to artificial sweeteners lessen their bitter aftertaste?

Some artificial sweeteners, such as saccharin and acesulfame K, have a bitter aftertaste that affects consumer acceptance of reduced-calorie foods and beverages. New research in FEBS Open Bio reveals the potential of compounds that inhibit bitter taste receptors to make artificial sweeteners more palatable. Saccharin and acesulfame K are detected by two types of bitter taste receptors from the taste receptor type 2 (TAS2R) family: TAS2R31 and TAS2R43. When investigators measured the inhibitory effects of various compounds against TAS2R31, they found that menthols reduced the responses ...

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