Materials

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A review in Fruit Research by researchers from Henan Agricultural University, China, explores the state of art of research on jujube witches’ broom (“Zaofeng”) disease, a fruit tree disease associated with phytoplasma. Phytoplasmas are insect-transmitted bacteria pathogen associated with more than 1,000 plant diseases worldwide. Phytoplasma infected plants exhibit extensive architectural … Read more

Reservoir computing hardware properties. a, Evoked response (raster plot and post-stimulation histogram) on a single bipolar voltage pulse stimulation (mean ± standard error of the mean (s.e.m.), n = 5 stimulation trials). b, Representative evoked normalized firing on pulses with different pulse times (tp) and pulse voltages (vp) (mean ± standard deviation, n = 5 stimulation trials . The red fitting curve (a … Read more

Credit: Yang et al. (Nature Electronics, 2023). Over the past few years, engineers have been trying to devise alternative hardware designs that would allow a single device to both perform computations and store data. These emerging electronics, known as computing-in-memory devices, could have numerous advantages, including faster speeds and enhanced data analysis capabilities. To store … Read more

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Even during a cost of living crisis, with interest rates and inflation high, the average spending per person for Christmas 2023 in the U.K. is expected to reach as much as £974. Retailers, advertisers and a sense of tradition continue to encourage us towards ever greater levels of consumption. Of course, … Read more

Left: Satellite image of the submerged northwest shelf region. Right: Drowned landscape map of the study area. Credit: US Geological Survey, Geoscience Australia For much of the 65,000 years of Australia’s human history, the now-submerged northwest continental shelf connected the Kimberley and western Arnhem Land. This vast, habitable realm covered nearly 390,000 square kilometers, an … Read more

Built using the same transformer models powering other large language models, a new AI tool is able to predict events in human lives, researchers say. Credit: Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University Researchers have created an artificial intelligence tool that uses sequences of life events—such as health history, education, job and income—to predict everything from a person’s personality … Read more

R-process nucleosynthesis. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The first stars of the universe were monstrous beasts. Comprised only of hydrogen and helium, they could be 300 times more massive than the sun. Within them, the first of the heavier elements were formed, then cast off into the cosmos at the end of their short lives. … Read more

Sketch of the imaging and holographic part of the transient holographic microscope, including the trains of pulses to illustrate the signal modulation approach. The array of diffraction limited excitation spots is created by imaging a pinhole array at the sample position, enabling simultaneous acquisition of transient data around 100 excitation spots. Credit: Ultrafast Science (2023). … Read more

NIST researchers placed a common type of Christmas tree in a sealed chamber for 17 days to monitor and measure the chemicals it emits. These chemicals called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) give that pine smell and can react with ozone to form byproducts. They found low amounts of these chemicals, which may be a potential … Read more

A child watching a robot provide accurate or inaccurate information. Credit: SUTD In this digital age, children are exposed to overwhelming amounts of information online, some of it unverified and increasingly generated by non-human sources, such as AI-driven language models. As children grow older, the ability to assess a source’s reliability is an important skill … Read more