News by Subject Technology & Engineering

A new tool for analyzing tissue damage seen on MRI brain scans can detect with more than 70% accuracy early signs of cognitive decline, new research shows.

With a training technique commonly used to teach dogs to sit and stay, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists showed a robot how to teach itself several new tricks, including stacking blocks. With the method, the robot, named Spot, was able to learn in days what typically takes a month.

Dr Constantino Carlos Reyes-Aldasoro and Dr Cefa Karabag collaborate with the Francis Crick Institute on a novel approach published in the PLoS ONE journal, which significantly reduces the amount of time taken to analyse the cell line named after Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose contribution to medical science was only formally acknowledged decades after her death.

Plant biology researchers at the University of Illinois and computer scientists at the University of California Irvine have developed a new method of fossil pollen identification through the combination of super-resolution microscopy and machine learning. The team developed and trained three convolutional neural network models to identify fossil pollen specimens from an unknown group of legumes.

Time crystals sound like something out of science fiction, but they may be the next major leap in quantum network research. A team based in Japan has proposed a method to use time crystals to simulate massive networks with very little computing power. They published their results on October 16 Science Advances.

Computational astrophysics study modeled for the first time faint supernovae of metal-free first stars, yielding carbon-enhanced abundance patterns for star formation. Study investigated formation of first stars and the origin of elements heavier than hydrogen, helium, lithium. XSEDE allocations on systems Stampede2 of TACC and Comet of SDSC; Georgia Tech PACE Hive cluster aided researchers explorations of carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars.