Circa 2016
MIT has been developing a small fusion reactor prototype, three of which could power the City of Boston if they were fully built. Though the project lost federal funding for its current fusion device, the school plans to press ahead on building a new, more advanced prototype.
In the simplest terms, nearly every modern car on the planet uses disk brakes: a rotor attached to a hub with a caliper with brake pads fixed to the control arm at each wheel. The driver presses the brake pedal and hydraulic fluid is pushed down the brake lines into the caliper, expanding the pistons and pushing the brake pads against the rotor, slowing down the rotation of the rotor connected to the hub, thus slowing down the wheel.
There are other systems, like drum brakes, air brakes, band brakes, the Flintstones method, et cetera, that have also been around since the dawn of the automotive industry. The concept almost always remains the same: using friction to slow down. And so it doesn’t go unsaid, yes, there are compression brake systems as well, but that’s entirely different.
Mercedes-Benz has put a new spin on an age-old concept with what it calls “in-drive brakes” for electric vehicles. The system being developed at the company’s research and development department in Sindelfingen, Germany, integrates the brakes right into the drivetrain, in an arrangement that works very much like a transmission brake. It resembles clutch plates – but with a unique twist.
In an era where AI has been sold to us as a panacea, able to make significant improvements at a fast rate, it was undoubtedly going to fail to keep up. Yes, adopting AI agents involves a leap of faith, particularly for those who have been disillusioned by previous AI solutions. But with lower costs, enhanced accuracy and a manageable onboarding curve, the benefits of AI agents have the potential to far outweigh the perceived risks. As industries grapple with labor shortages and rising operational costs, those willing to embrace digital transformation could find themselves ahead of the curve.
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While LLMs are trained on massive, diverse datasets, SLMs concentrate on domain-specific data. In such cases, the data is often from within the enterprise. This makes SLMs tailored to industries or use cases, thereby ensuring both relevance and privacy.
As AI technologies expand, so do concerns about cybersecurity and ethics. The rise of unsanctioned and unmanaged AI applications within organisations, also referred to as ‘Shadow AI’, poses challenges for security leaders in safeguarding against potential vulnerabilities.
Predictions for 2025 suggest that AI will become mainstream, speeding up the adoption of cloud-based solutions across industries. This shift is expected to bring significant operational benefits, including improved risk assessment and enhanced decision-making capabilities.
Whether it’s our phones, cars, televisions, medical devices or even washing machines, we now have computers everywhere.
Using bigger computers, we solve bigger problems like managing the operation of a power grid, designing an aircraft, predicting the weather or providing different types of artificial intelligence (AI).
But all these machines work by manipulating data in the form of ones and zeros (bits) using classical techniques that have not changed since the abacus was invented in antiquity.
In case you thought science was going to take a day off, researchers have just figured out a way of reversing brain aging – in fruit flies, but still.
They previously did something similar in lab mice, claiming to “reverse and repair” damage done by Alzheimer’s disease. The brain is a fascinating thing: it behaves weirdly after midnight, performs a magical reset while sleeping to “save memories,” and automatically corrects spelling errors even when you don’t see them yourself. Whatever next, health experts?!
When a common type of protein builds up in the brain, it stops cells from getting rid of “unnecessary or dysfunctional components,” i.e., waste.
It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth.
The next step will be building SPARC, a smaller-scale version of the planned ARC power plant. The successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical, clearing the way for rapid design and construction of that pioneering device can then proceed full speed.
Zuber says that “I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy, based on the demonstrated performance of the magnets. The next step is to scale up, to build an actual power plant. There are still many challenges ahead, not the least of which is developing a design that allows for reliable, sustained operation. And realizing that the goal here is commercialization, another major challenge will be economic. How do you design these power plants so it will be cost effective to build and deploy them?”
Continue reading “Designed Project Achieves Major Advance Toward Fusion Energy” »
Data is power. According to Dinesh Bharadia, an associate professor at UC San Diego in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Qualcomm Institute (QI), “data will be the next decade’s ‘silicon.’”
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things means that data is more readily available and easily accessible than ever. Sensors, “smart” devices and software connect our world to the cloud, gathering information and enabling new types of data sharing and analysis. However, most of these tools are battery-powered and have difficulty sensing changes in real time.
Now, the tide is turning.
Recent research reveals that the immune system interacts with the body’s internal clock, influencing both fat storage and temperature regulation.
The discovery hints at why shift workers and others with irregular work, eating, or sleep patterns driven by the demands of modern life fall out of metabolic sync, and may hold potential for developing therapies to address obesity and prevent wasting.
The key finding—that an immune molecule within adipose (fat) tissue, known as interleukin-17A (IL-17A), plays a regulatory role in fat storage—holds significant therapeutic potential for addressing obesity, preventing wasting, and mitigating other metabolic disorders. By targeting this molecule, drug developers may gain a valuable new pathway for creating treatments aimed at these conditions.
