Researchers from California State University Northridge (CSUN), National University of Singapore (NUS), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have introduced a new concept called autonomous additive manufacturing (AAM), where AI agents take over tasks traditionally managed by human operators. This breakthrough represents a major step toward creating autonomous manufacturing systems, offering improvements in knowledge representation and multi-modal capabilities in additive manufacturing (AM) processes.

The lead Ph.D. candidate, Mr. Haolin Fan, explained: "In the era of generative AI, this research points out a future where human expertise and AI collaborate seamlessly, leading to more resilient and adaptable manufacturing systems that could transform industrial production."

New observations of a giant storm on Jupiter collected by the Juno space probe, combined with simulations of storm outbreaks on the planet, show how these storms move water vapor and ammonia from the upper atmosphere into the deep atmosphere, even below the level of the storm itself. The findings offer a more detailed look at how storms impact heat transfer within the atmosphere of a gas giant and help explain why the atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn are depleted of ammonia, according to Chris Moeckel and colleagues. They used observations from Juno’s Microwave Radiometer of a large storm in 2017 that was first identified by an amateur astronomer. Their analysis tracked the aftermath of the storm, revealing a coupling of temperature and ammonia cycles, such that storms raise the atmospheric temperatures as they deplete ammonia abundance. “These are the first observations to quantify the effect of these storms on the ammonia abundance and temperature structure below the visible cloud deck and show how deep the atmosphere is disrupted in the aftermath of the storm,” Moeckel et al. write. The storms deposit condensates far below the atmospheric depths where the storms were generated, the researchers conclude.

Philip Kurian, a theoretical physicist and founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has used the laws of quantum mechanics, the fundamental physics of computation, and the QBL’s discovery of cytoskeletal filaments exhibiting quantum optical features, to set a drastically revised upper bound on the computational capacity of carbon-based life in the entire history of Earth. Published as a single-author research article in Science Advances, Kurian’s latest work conjectures a relationship between this information-processing limit and that of all matter in the observable universe.

The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 prompted the government to establish a nationwide network to monitor seismic activity, and this unparalleled and sophisticated observation system is making it possible to instantaneously detect the changes occurring underground. Professor YOSHIOKA Shoichi of the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security is an expert in seismology and analyzes the data obtained from the network as he takes on the challenge of shedding light on the mechanism of major earthquakes. We asked him about his research which aims to unravel the mystery of how earthquakes occur by focusing on subsurface temperature structures and slow slip events that happen at the boundary between tectonic plates.