Osteoporosis is a silent disease where bone loss develops gradually before fractures occur. Current clinical screening recommendations mainly focus on older women and selected high-risk groups, leaving some men, younger adults, and individuals with normal body weight completely outside routine screening pathways.

To close this care gap, researchers from St. Paul’s Hospital and National Taiwan University have demonstrated how AI can leverage routine chest X-rays to detect asymptomatic bone loss, closing critical gaps in screening healthy Asian populations. Their paper is published in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Strikingly, the study found that more than half of the confirmed abnormal bone-density cases...

Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on moving large amounts of data between memory and processors, a design that limits speed and increases energy use. The human brain works differently: it combines memory and computation within synapses, allowing fast, efficient learning and perception. Replicating this approach in hardware is a central goal of neuromorphic computing, especially for tasks like vision, where most real-world information is gathered and processed.

A fully optical artificial synapse
In...

Life exists because elements combine to form complex organic molecules. Astrochemistry studies this process, trying to understand how nature creates carbon-based molecules critical for life. One source for these types of molecules is the outflows emitted by protostars.

Protostars grow by accreting gas, and while they do so, they also emit energy. Protostars haven’t begun fusing hydrogen yet, so their energy comes from shocks on its surface generated by in-falling gas. They can also emit high speed streams of gas as astrophysical jets. These jets carry away excess angular momentum, allowing the protostars to keep growing. These jets also create illuminated shocks in the interstellar medium (ISM).

Shock fronts like these are where energy and matter are concentrated, and that’s whe...

By stacking transistors on top of one another, rather than laying them side by side on a flat chip, many electronic engineers are hopeful that vast amounts of computing power could be packed into tiny spaces, all while cutting energy use. So far, however, the ability to build these monolithic 3D integrated circuits has proven stubbornly difficult, largely because the fabrication processes required can damage the layers already in place.

Through new research published in Nature, Qing Cao and colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new approach that sidesteps these problems, bringing high-performance 3D chips a step closer to reality.

Overheated stacks of transistors
Modern computer chips are built on thin wafers of silicon, with transistors (the ...