Technology

Artificial intelligence has been used in a variety of places, but for the first time, a neural network has been employed to detect holes in the sun's corona, with magnificent results. Sci-Tech Daily mentions that a combination of scientists from Austria, Germany, and the US has worked to build a neural network that can accurately predict coronal holes []. Holes in the sun's corona aren't anything new. Scientists have known about them for quite some time, but their impact on our daily lives has become more pronounced with the march of technology. For years, we've monitored the formation of…

The evolution of hard disk storage shows how we've managed to shrink down technology over decades. From having a room full of disks and tapes to owning a single drive that one could hold in the palm of one's hands, we've managed to develop portable devices for storing data. However, one thing has plagued all storage media to this day. Reading and writing have traditionally been done using magnetic heads. Thus, the disk layers themselves would have to be magnetizable. Hyper Physics notes that ferromagnetism is a unique property of some metals that enable them to become magnetized. New research…

Most people don't recall the LinkedIn data breach from nine years ago, the Adobe customer cyber attackers from eight years back, that Equifax exposed private information of millions of people just four years ago. Those are the high profile ones but most participants in a recent University of Michigan study remained unaware that their email addresses and other personal information had been compromised in five data breaches on average. Most breaches never make the news, and often they involved little or no notification to those impacted.  In the first known study to ask participants…

There are lots of advertisements for 5G cellular service but it still isn't available in most places, and devices that take advantage of it are in relatively low use. Better quality cat videos on a 5-inch screen are not all that compelling Sooner rather than later, people are going to want the haptic internet - a virtual reality tactile experience far more advanced than a vibrating Xbox controller - and businesses will want holographic conferencing and both will require more mobile edge computing - mini-clouds closer to users than current centralized storage. Those will require the next…

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and AVITA Medical have halted recruitment for the ongoing pediatric burn study of RECELL spray-on skin for the best possible reason; it has been shown to work. This expanded use just received FDA approval for pediatric burn patients as well as extensive burns covering more than 50 percent of a body’s total surface area. The most common treatment for burns is skin grafting – a painful treatment that can be disfiguring, and sometimes results in additional complications as a…

The Swedish government might ban the sale of new combustion cars in 2030 - and a new paper wants to get even more Draconian. Their computer estimate suggests that banning all combustion cars, even older ones already in use, might be the only way they will meet their climate targets. The replacement: electric vehicles. It could work. But isn't that a headfake? In most countries, yes. Electricity in much of the world is gained from fossil fuels, so converting those to DC electricity, which then gets transformed with losses to AC electricity, when then gets turned back with losses into DC…

Researchers working with a paralyzed participant who has sensors implanted in his brain have deciphered the brain activity associated with trying to write letters by hand. They used an algorithm to identify letters as he attempted to write them. Then, the system displayed the text on a screen - in real time.  Brain-computer interfaces convert thought into action. By attempting handwriting, the study participant typed 90 characters per minute - more than double the previous record for typing with such a "brain-computer interface." Two tiny arrays of implanted electrodes relayed…

Quantum computers (QCs) operate totally differently than classical computers. Due to the quantum effects known as superposition and entanglement, quantum bits (called qubits) can take on non-binary states represented by complex numbers. This facilitates computational solutions to mathematical problems that cannot be solved by classical computers because they require sequentially computing an astronomical number of combinations or permutations.  This ability of QCs mean that they particularly excel at optimization problems, where the optimal combination is only found after trying out an…

The ClinicalTrials.gov data bank, managed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Library of Medicine, requires trial sponsors to register applicable clinical trials within 21 days after the first human subject is enrolled and submit certain summary results information for those trials, generally no later than one year after the study’s completion date unless a deadline extension is obtained. That's really not a high bar to jump but the goal is simply to provide greater transparency regarding clinical trials, ultimately allowing the broader scientific community to build on the…

In 2019, Christiansburg, Virginia's 22,000 residents became the first place in the U.S. to have a residential drone delivery service. Yellow-winged drones with small cardboard boxes owned by Wing, a company owned by Alphabet (basically, Google) are now one of numerous trial services operating today. But regulations for giant planes full of fuel are not ready for delivery of the future, and the only way to make government get ready is public interest. Without proactive guidelines, the public will be stuck with activists doing to drones what they did to agriculture and cell phones. The…