Technology
press releases.

Technology15 Jan 2025

On-chip light control of semiconductor optoelectronic devices using integrated metasurfaces

A new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI 10.29026/oea.2025.240159, discusses on-chip light control of semiconductor optoelectronic devices using integrated metasurfaces. Since the initial demonstration of the first semiconductor laser in the early 1960s, semiconductor optoelectronic devices have achieved unparalleled commercial success and permeated every facet of human lives from communication, lighting, and entertainment to medicine. Furthermore, in response to the emergence of novel applications, such as the consumer electronics, AR/VR ...

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Technology15 Jan 2025

This fast and agile robotic insect could someday aid in mechanical pollination

CAMBRIDGE, MA — With a more efficient method for artificial pollination, farmers in the future could grow fruits and vegetables inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment. To help make this idea a reality, MIT researchers are developing robotic insects that could someday swarm out of mechanical hives to rapidly perform precise pollination. However, even the best bug-sized robots are no match for natural pollinators like bees when it comes to endurance, speed, and maneuverability. Now, inspired by the anatomy of these natural pollinators, the researchers ...

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Technology15 Jan 2025

ASU-led collaboration receives $11.2 million to build a Southwest Regional Direct Air Capture Hub

Arizona State University and a team of its collaborators have received $11.2 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to begin developing a regional Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hub for removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The team will prepare to build a multi-site Direct Air Capture Hub located in the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States. Additionally, the project will receive $11.2 million in matching funds from the project partners. In May of 2022, the Biden administration announced the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $3.5 billion DOE program to establish large-scale Direct Air Capture Hubs for removing carbon ...

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Technology15 Jan 2025

From drops to data: Advancing global precipitation estimates with the LETKF algorithm

With the increase in climate change, global precipitation estimates have become a necessity for predicting water-related disasters like floods and droughts, as well as for managing water resources. The most accurate data that can be used for these predictions are ground rain gauge observations, but it is often challenging due to limited locations and sparse rain gauge data. To solve this problem, Assistant Professor Yuka Muto from the Center for Environmental Remote Sensing, Japan, and Professor Shunji Kotsuki of the Institute for Advanced Academic Research, Center for Environmental Remote Sensing, ...

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Technology15 Jan 2025

Reading signs: New method improves AI translation of sign language

Sign languages have been developed by nations around the world to fit the local communication style, and each language consists of thousands of signs. This has made sign languages difficult to learn and understand. Using artificial intelligence to automatically translate the signs into words, known as word-level sign language recognition, has now gained a boost in accuracy through the work of an Osaka Metropolitan University-led research group. Previous research methods have been focused on capturing information about the signer’s ...

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Technology15 Jan 2025

AI helps to identify subjective cognitive decline during the menopause transition

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Jan 15, 2025)—Artificial intelligence (AI) is positioned to make a major impact on almost every industry, including healthcare. A new study suggests that machine learning models can more quickly and affordably identify women with severe subjective cognitive decline during the menopause transition, effectively opening the door to better management of cognitive health. Results of the study are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society. Subjective cognitive decline refers to a person’s ...

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Technology15 Jan 2025

Machine learning assisted plasmonic absorbers

Light absorption is a cornerstone for several applications such as solar cells, photodetectors, and optical sensors, to name a few. Yet, the trade-off between the thickness of the absorber and its efficiency has long limited the performance of such devices. The goal in this investigation is to get the best of both worlds—ultra-thin materials with maximized absorption. In a recent paper published in Light: Science & Applications, a group of researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), led by Prof. Ying Wu and Prof. Xiangliang Zhang (now at University of Notre Dame), successfully put forward an efficient broadband light absorber ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

UC Irvine, Columbia University researchers invent soft, bioelectronic sensor implant

Irvine, Calif., Jan. 14, 2025 — Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and New York’s Columbia University have embedded transistors in a soft, conformable material to create a biocompatible sensor implant that monitors neurological functions through successive phases of a patient’s development. In a paper published recently in Nature Communications, the UC Irvine scientists describe their construction of complementary, internal, ion-gated, organic electrochemical transistors that are more amenable ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

Following a 2005 policy, episiotomy rates have reduced in France without an overall increase in anal sphincter injuries during labor, with more research needed to confirm the safest rate of episiotomi

Following a 2005 policy, episiotomy rates have reduced in France without an overall increase in anal sphincter injuries during labor, with more research needed to confirm the safest rate of episiotomies and the risks to specific subgroups In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Medicine: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004501 Article title: Episiotomies and obstetric anal sphincter injuries following a restrictive episiotomy policy in France: An analysis of the 2010, 2016, and 2021 National Perinatal Surveys Author countries: France, Switzerland Funding: ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

Rats anticipate location of food-guarding robots when foraging

Researchers find that rats create neurological maps of places to avoid after experiencing a threat and think about these locations when exhibiting worry-related behaviors. These findings—which A. David Redish of the University of Minnesota, US, and colleagues presented in the open-access journal PLOS Biology on January 14th—may provide insight into the neuroscience of common psychological conditions like anxiety. There are many theories as to why people experience anxiety. One is that anxiety is associated with a psychological phenomenon called “approach-avoidance conflict,” where ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

Automatic speech recognition on par with humans in noisy conditions

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has made incredible advances in the past few years, especially for widely spoken languages such as English. Prior to 2020, it was typically assumed that human abilities for speech recognition far exceeded automatic systems, yet some current systems have started to match human performance. The goal in developing ASR systems has always been to lower the error rate, regardless of how people perform in the same environment. After all, not even people will recognize speech with 100% accuracy in a noisy environment. In a new study, UZH computational linguistics specialist Eleanor Chodroff and a fellow researcher from Cambridge ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

Digital meditation to target employee stress

About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that a brief, digital mindfulness-based program is an easily accessible and scalable method for reducing perceptions of stress. Future work should seek to clarify mechanisms by which such interventions contribute to improvements in work-specific well-being. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Aric A. Prather, PhD, email aric.prather@ucsf.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.54435) Editor’s Note: Please see ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

This metaphorical cat is both dead and alive – and it will help quantum engineers detect computing errors

UNSW engineers have demonstrated a well-known quantum thought experiment in the real world. Their findings deliver a new and more robust way to perform quantum computations – and they have important implications for error correction, one of the biggest obstacles standing between them and a working quantum computer. Quantum mechanics has puzzled scientists and philosophers for more than a century. One of the most famous quantum thought experiments is that of the “Schrödinger’s cat” – a cat whose life or death depends on the decay of a radioactive atom. According to quantum mechanics, unless the atom is directly observed, ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

Diamond continues to shine: new properties discovered in diamond semiconductors

CLEVELAND and CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, ILL.—Diamond, often celebrated for its unmatched hardness and transparency, has emerged as an exceptional material for high-power electronics and next-generation quantum optics. Diamond can be engineered to be as electrically conductive as a metal, by introducing impurities such as the element boron. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have now discovered another interesting property in diamonds with added boron, known as boron-doped diamonds. Their findings could pave the way for new types ...

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Technology14 Jan 2025

Researchers find the key to Artificial Intelligence’s learning power – an inbuilt, special kind of Occam’s razor

A new study from Oxford University has uncovered why the deep neural networks (DNNs) that power modern artificial intelligence are so effective at learning from data. The new findings demonstrate that DNNs have an inbuilt ‘Occam's razor,’ meaning that when presented with multiple solutions that fit training data, they tend to favour those that are simpler. What is special about this version of Occam’s razor is that the bias exactly cancels the exponential growth of the number of possible solutions with complexity. The study has been published ...

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Technology13 Jan 2025

Engineering quantum entanglement at the nanoscale

Physicists have spent more than a century measuring and making sense of the strange ways that photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles interact at extremely small scales. Engineers have spent decades figuring out how to take advantage of these phenomena to create new technologies. In one such phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, pairs of photons become interconnected in such a way that the state of one photon instantly changes to match the state of its paired photon, no matter how far apart they are. Nearly 80 years ago, Albert Einstein referred to this phenomenon as "spooky action at a distance." Today, entanglement is the subject of research ...

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Technology13 Jan 2025

Picking the right doctor? AI could help

Years ago, as she sat in waiting rooms, Maytal Saar-Tsechansky began to wonder how people chose a good doctor when they had no way of knowing a doctor’s track record on accurate diagnoses. Talking to other patients, she found they sometimes based choices on a physician’s personality or even the quality of their office furniture. “I realized all these signals people are using are just not the right ones,” says Saar-Tsechansky, professor of information, risk, and operations management at Texas McCombs. “We were operating in complete darkness, like there’s no transparency on these things.” In new research, she uses artificial ...

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Technology13 Jan 2025

Biophotovoltaics: A step forward in sustainable energy technology

In a groundbreaking study published in Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, researchers have advanced our understanding of biophotovoltaic (BPV) systems—innovative devices that merge photosynthetic microbes with electrochemical systems to convert sunlight into electricity. Using the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, the study provides critical insights into the molecular mechanisms driving this green energy technology. Central to BPV systems is the process of extracellular electron transfer (EET), where electrons generated during photosynthesis are harvested by an electrode via mediators such as ferricyanide. The research reveals that EET ...

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Technology13 Jan 2025

Yu & Martin adapting mixed reality training programs to real-world scenes to enhance human-AI teaming in emergency responses

Lap Fai (Craig) Yu, Associate Professor, Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computing, and Joel Martin, Associate Professor, Kinesiology, College of Education and Human Development, received funding for the project: “EAGER: TaskDCL: Adapting Mixed Reality Training Programs to Real-World Scenes to enhance Human-AI Teaming in Emergency Responses.” This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project funds research that intends to speed up the development of mixed reality and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help ...

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Technology13 Jan 2025

Understanding bias and discrimination in AI: Why sociolinguistics holds the key to better Large Language Models and a fairer world

The language ‘engines’ that power generative artificial intelligence (AI) are plagued by a wide range of issues that can hurt society, most notably through the spread of misinformation and discriminatory content, including racist and sexist stereotypes. In large part these failings of popular AI systems, such as ChatGPT, are due to shortcomings with the language databases upon which they are trained. To address these issues, researchers from the University of Birmingham have developed a novel framework for better understanding large language ...

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Technology10 Jan 2025

Lower access to air conditioning may increase need for emergency care for wildfire smoke exposure

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 10, 2025 Contact: Jillian McKoy, jpmckoy@bu.edu Michael Saunders, msaunder@bu.edu ## Lower Access to Air Conditioning May Increase Need for Emergency Care for Wildfire Smoke Exposure As Los Angeles County battles the most destructive wildfires in its history, a new study suggest that US policies should prioritize equity and education regarding the measures people can take to protect themselves from the harmful pollutants in wildfire smoke. People who have limited access to air ...

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Technology10 Jan 2025

Transfer learning-enhanced physics-informed neural network (TLE-PINN): A breakthrough in melt pool prediction for laser melting

Researchers have developed a transfer learning-enhanced physics-informed neural network (TLE-PINN) for predicting melt pool morphology in selective laser melting (SLM). This novel approach combines physics-informed constraints with deep learning techniques, achieving superior accuracy, faster training times, and reduced computational demands. Published in Advanced Manufacturing, this breakthrough has significant potential to improve the efficiency of SLM processes, enable intelligent real-time process control, and enhance manufacturing quality. Selective Laser Melting ...

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Technology9 Jan 2025

Mount Sinai-led team enhances automated method to detect common sleep disorder affecting millions

A Mount Sinai-led team of researchers has enhanced an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered algorithm to analyze video recordings of clinical sleep tests, ultimately improving accurate diagnosis of a common sleep disorder affecting more than 80 million people worldwide. The study findings were published in the journal Annals of Neurology on January 9. REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) is a sleep condition that causes abnormal movements, or the physical acting out of dreams, during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. RBD that occurs in otherwise healthy adults ...

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Technology9 Jan 2025

Novel ‘quantum refrigerator’ is great at erasing quantum computer’s chalkboard

If you’d like to solve a math problem on a good old-fashioned chalkboard, you want the board clean and free of any previous markings so that you have space to work. Quantum computers have a similar need for a clean workspace, and a team including scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found an innovative and effective way to create and maintain it. The research effort, a collaboration with physicists at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, could address one of the main issues confronting quantum computer designers: ...

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Technology9 Jan 2025

Record cold quantum refrigerator paves way for reliable quantum computers

Quantum computers require extreme cooling to perform reliable calculations. One of the challenges preventing quantum computers from entering society is the difficulty of freezing the qubits to temperatures close to absolute zero. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Maryland, USA, have engineered a new type of refrigerator that can autonomously cool superconducting qubits to record low temperatures, paving the way for more reliable quantum computation. Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionise fundamental technologies in various sectors of society, with applications in medicine, energy, encryption, AI, and logistics. While the building ...

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