AI’s memory capacity is still limited. Solving that may be the key to unlocking superintelligence.
Category: innovation
Fluid gears rotate without teeth, offering new mechanical flexibility
A team of New York University scientists has created a gear mechanism that relies on fluids to generate rotation. The invention holds potential for a new generation of mechanical devices that offer greater flexibility and durability than do existing gears—whose origins date back to ancient China.
The breakthrough is reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“We invented new types of gears that engage by spinning up fluid rather than interlocking teeth—and we discovered new capabilities for controlling the rotation speed and even direction,” says Jun Zhang, a professor of mathematics and physics at NYU and NYU Shanghai and the senior author of the paper.
Texas takes charge of world’s most powerful telescope
AUSTIN (KXAN) — The group building what could become the world’s most powerful optical telescope, the Giant Magellan, has a new leader. The GMTO Corporation announced Tuesday that The University of Texas at Austin’s Daniel T. Jaffe will serve as its new president.
Jaffe joins fellow UT professor Taft Armandroff, who was elected in November to chair the GMTO board of directors.
“I’m very excited about the chance to lead this project. I’m very enthusiastic about its prospects. I think it’s going to be a major breakthrough for astronomical science in the coming decades,” Jaffe said.
Surprise Hair Loss Breakthrough: A DNA Sugar Gel Sparks Robust Regrowth
In 2024, scientists stumbled upon a potential new treatment for hereditary-patterned baldness, the most common cause of hair loss in both men and women worldwide.
It began with research on a naturally occurring sugar that helps form DNA: the ‘deoxyribose’ part of deoxyribonucleic acid.
While studying how these sugars aid wound healing in mice when applied topically, scientists at the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University in Pakistan noticed that the fur around treated lesions grew back faster than in untreated mice.
Deep contrastive learning enables genome-wide virtual screening
Recent breakthroughs in protein structure prediction have opened new avenues for genome-wide drug discovery, yet existing virtual screening methods remain computationally prohibitive. We present DrugCLIP, a contrastive learning framework that achieves ultrafast and accurate virtual screening, up to 10 million times faster than docking, while consistently outperforming various baselines on in silico benchmarks. In wet-lab validations, DrugCLIP achieved a 15% hit rate for norepinephrine transporter, and structures of two identified inhibitors were determined in complex with the target protein. For thyroid hormone receptor interactor 12, a target that lacks holo structures and small-molecule binders, DrugCLIP achieved a 17.5% hit rate using only AlphaFold2-predicted structures.
China’s DeepSeek promises AI that could outsmart ChatGPT in coding
DeepSeek V4 to challenge OpenAI GPT and Anthropic Claude with coding breakthroughs
New Breakthrough to Restore Aging Joints Could Help Treat Osteoarthritis
A study in mice by researchers from Stanford University has traced the loss of cartilage that comes with aging to a single protein, pointing to treatments that may one day restore mobility and ease discomfort in seniors.
The protein 15-PGDH has previously been extensively linked to aging: it becomes more abundant as we get older, and interferes with the molecules that repair tissue and reduce inflammation.
That led scientists to consider whether 15-PGDH might be involved in osteoarthritis, where stress on joints leads to the breakdown of collagen in cartilage, causing inflammation and pain.
Researchers build plasma accelerator that boosts electron energy and brightness at the same time
Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have designed innovative technology that can generate both high-energy and high-brightness electron bunches in an accelerator that is a fraction of the size of current particle accelerators.
This breakthrough has the potential to shrink the size of future particle colliders and X-ray free-electron lasers that researchers use to gain insight into nature’s fundamental building blocks and processes.
In the new study, the UCLA-led team developed a novel plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA), in which electrons gain energy by “surfing” a plasma wave rather than drawing energy from the electromagnetic field inside metal structures of conventional accelerators.
