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A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Riverside have found a way to produce a long-hypothesized phenomenon—the transfer of energy between silicon and organic, carbon-based molecules—in a breakthrough that has implications for information storage in quantum computing, solar energy conversion and medical imaging.
…..silicon has some problems when it comes to converting light into electricity…..
The new discovery provides scientists with a way to boost silicon’s efficiency by pairing it with a carbon-based material that converts blue photons into pairs of red photons that can be more efficiently used by silicon. This hybrid material can also be tweaked to operate in reverse, taking in red light and converting it into blue light, which has implications for medical treatments and quantum computing.
“The organic molecule we’ve paired silicon with is a type of carbon ash called anthracene. It’s basically soot,” said Sean Roberts, a UT Austin assistant professor of chemistry…..
“We now can finely tune this material to react to different wavelengths of light. Imagine, for quantum computing, being able to tweak and optimize a material to turn one blue photon into two red photons or two red photons into one blue. It’s perfect for information storage.” -
Discovery of an Unusual Protein Playing a Significant Role in Earth’s Nitrogen Cycle – Scitech Daily
The new pro¬tein is in the cen¬ter of a very ex¬cit¬ing and rel¬ev¬ant pro¬cess. Anam¬mox bac¬teria pro-duce only at¬mo¬spheric ni¬tro¬gen (N2) from ni¬trite or nitric ox¬ide (NO) and am¬monium, as Kartal previously showed.
Un¬like many mi¬croor¬gan¬isms, they do not con¬vert nitric ox¬ide to the green¬house gas ni¬trous ox-ide (N2O). Con¬sequently, each mo¬lecule of NO that is trans¬formed into N2 in¬stead of N2O is one less mo¬lecule adding to cli¬mate change. Anam¬mox bac¬teria re¬duce the amount of NO avail¬able for N2O pro¬duc¬tion, and there¬fore, the amount of re¬leased green¬house gas.
This rel¬ev¬ance in mind, Kartal and his col¬leagues car¬ried out a data¬base search to in¬vest¬ig¬ate how wide¬spread pro¬teins with the newly dis¬covered pat¬tern are in nature. “Re¬mark¬ably, this pat¬tern is very com¬mon,” says Kartal. Pro¬teins with the four-amino-acid pat¬tern are present in a large vari-ety of mi¬croor¬gan¬isms throughout the bac¬terial and ar¬chaeal do¬mains….” -
Combining the results from all of the brain imaging studies available, the researchers looked for evidence of structural, functional, and molecular alterations in the brain that could increase risk of suicide. They identified two brain networks — and the connections between them — that appear to play an important role.
The first of these networks involves areas towards the front of the brain known as the medial and lateral ventral prefrontal cortex and their connections to other brain regions involved in emotion. Alterations in this network may lead to excessive negative thoughts and difficulties regulating emotions, stimulating thoughts of suicide.
The second network involves regions known as the dorsal prefrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus system. Alterations in this network may influence suicide attempt, in part, due to its role in decision making, generating alternative solutions to problems, and controlling behavior.
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“AI models that support text writing and video production can be used to rapidly disseminate customized and highly believable fake content that serves as the new breed of cyber weapons,” Litan said in the study. “Tracking assets and proving provenance are two key successful use cases for permissioned blockchain and can be readily applied to tracking the provenance of news content.”
In August, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began developing software that can discover fake news hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. And in September, Facebook formed an industry group to develop deep fake video detection tools. Facebook’s Partnership on AI includes Microsoft Amazon, Google, DeepMind, and IBM, as well as academics from Oxford, MIT, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley and other schools.
If successful, the efforts by DARPA, Facebook and others will “blacklist” fake content to block it from reaching target victims and create an algorithm that authenticates and tracks content movement to “whitelists,” ensuring its provenance.
“Blockchain technology is proven to excel at supporting this use case as it enables a ‘shared single version of truth’ across multiple entities based on immutable data and audit trails,” Litan wrote. -
…..researchers study how certain techniques lead to the most effective gameplay. In 2011, Memorial University of Newfoundland computer scientist David Churchill co-authored a paper on build order in StarCraft II, studying how the prioritization of resource-building could affect success in the game.
The research, Churchill says, gives us a clearer understanding of how machine-learning algorithms work to solve problems in a simulated environment.
“There’s a certain sexiness to game AI that allows it to be digested by the general public,” Churchill says. And games also provide a way to test the “intelligence” of an algorithm — how well it learns, computes and carries out commands autonomously.
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