News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have trained computers to quickly and consistently detect and analyze microscopic radiation damage to materials under consideration for nuclear reactors. And the computers bested humans in this arduous task.

Two NASA satellites observed Tropical Storm Ampil in six and a half hours and found the storm's heaviest rainfall occurring in a band of thunderstorms shifted from north to south of the center. NASA's GPM satellite passed over the storm first and NASA's Aqua satellite made the second pass.

A paper published today in the Journal of Medical Imaging - "DeepLesion: Automated mining of large-scale lesion annotations and universal lesion detection with deep learning," -- announced the open availability of the largest CT lesion-image database accessible to the public. Such data are the foundations for the training sets of machine-learning algorithms; until now, large-scale annotated radiological image datasets, essential for the development of deep learning approaches, have not been publicly available.

In a perspective published in the July 20 issue of Science, a team of University of Tennessee faculty and a student from two unrelated disciplines -- plant sciences and architectural design -- explore the future of houseplants as aesthetically pleasing and functional sirens of home health. Their idea is to genetically engineer house plants to serve as subtle alarms that something is amiss in our home and office environments.

Wave energy converters are designed to generate the maximum energy possible in their location and take a typical year in the location as a reference. Alongside the Irish Centre for Ocean Energy Research, researchers from various UPV/EHU centres have been exploring how ocean energy in Ireland has evolved during the last century. The results reveal an increase of up to 40%, which directly affects the output of the converters.

An international team of scientists has discovered a new, exotic form of insulating material with a metallic surface that could enable more efficient electronics or even quantum computing. The researchers developed a new method for analyzing existing chemical compounds that relies on the mathematical properties like symmetry that govern the repeating patterns seen in everyday wallpaper.