News by Subject Technology & Engineering

A team of scientists spent six months co-designing robots with informal caregivers for people with dementia, such as family members. They found that caregivers wanted the robots to fulfill two major roles: support positive moments shared by caregivers and their loved ones; and lessen caregivers' emotional stress by taking on difficult tasks, such as answering repeated questions and restricting unhealthy food.

An interface system that uses augmented reality technology could help individuals with profound motor impairments operate a humanoid robot to feed themselves and perform routine personal care tasks such as scratching an itch and applying skin lotion. The web-based interface displays a 'robot's eye view' of surroundings to help users interact with the world through the machine.

Scientists from the Higher School of Economics and Yandex have developed a method that accelerates the simulation of processes at the Large Hadron Collider. The research findings were published in Nuclear Instruments and Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment.

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is known for its energy footprint. Now, researcher Alex de Vries, from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in the Netherlands, suggests that renewable hydropower production cannot supply the large quantities of energy needed to power machinery used to validate Bitcoin transactions. In a Commentary publishing March 14 in the journal Joule, he highlights the vast quantities of electronic waste produced by the Bitcoin network and calls for alternative strategies to curb the cryptocurrency's environmental impact.

Transistors have been miniaturized for the past 50 years, but we've reached the point where they can't continue to be scaled any further. In Applied Physics Letters, researchers review negative capacitance field-effect transistors, a new device concept that suggests traditional transistors can be made much more efficient by simply adding a thin layer of ferroelectric material. If it works, the same chip could compute far more, yet require less frequent charging of its battery.

To find out how planets form astrophysicists run complicated and time consuming computer calculations. Members of the NCCR PlanetS at the University of Bern have now developed a totally novel approach to speed up this process dramatically. They use deep learning based on artificial neural networks, a method that is well known in image recognition.