Melinda Webster, a research scientist at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory, is the lead author on a new study that catalogs changes in Arctic and Antarctic sea ice over the past 50-plus years. She spoke with UW News about the story behind the numbers.

An international team including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Sir Roger Penrose has observed a long-predicted effect of gravity on a falling quantum object for the first time. The result shows that a fundamental principle at the heart of Einstein’s theory of gravity remains consistent with the behaviour of matter in the quantum world. The study, led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, The University of Ulm and the University of Oxford, has been published today (2 Sept) in Science Advances.

Researchers have demonstrated a label-free imaging technique that can identify immune cell subtypes and detect early immune activation within blood samples by measuring the natural fluorescence of metabolic molecules inside cells. Using optical metabolic imaging, the team analyzed thousands of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from healthy donors and showed that the method could distinguish activated from resting cells with 94% accuracy just two hours after stimulation, while also identifying monocytes and natural killer cells within mixed cell populations. The approach provides a nondestructive way to measure cellular metabolism at single-cell resolution, offering insights into immune-cell function and heterogeneity that are not captured by conventional surface-marker methods. The researchers say the technique could eventually support disease monitoring, drug development, and the production of cell therapies by providing rapid metabolic profiling of immune cells.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September 2 - Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”; HKEX: 3696), a clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, today announced the release of a series of frontier specialist models for chemistry and biology, trained through its MMAI Gym for Science framework. Across chemistry and biology, the models demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on more than 50 benchmark tasks.

A new, international, community-led scientific review warns that major gaps in knowledge along Antarctica’s coast are now one of the biggest obstacles to reliably predicting future global sea level rise.

A new software framework lets multiple artificial intelligence (AI) models plug directly into a fusion experiment’s control system, reading plasma measurements and issuing commands in about 20 milliseconds, far faster than any human operator. Researchers tested the framework in five experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a Department of Energy user facility in San Diego. The framework predicted and prevented plasma instabilities and cut the time to deploy a new AI model from months to days.

Most reservoir computers are built with fixed connections. Researchers have developed a 16-kb self-rectifying memristor array that can physically reconfigure those connections as dynamics change. The hardware predicts Lorenz chaos and improves 30-day atmospheric cloud-thickness forecasting by 7.6% over a fixed-topology reservoir.