Category Physics

Sequence modeling algorithms could eventually lead to new ways to fight diseases caused by genetic mutations. Newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) programs accurately predicted the role of DNA’s regulatory elements and three-dimensional (3D) structure based solely on its raw sequence, according to two recent studies in Nature Genetics. These tools could eventually shed new light on how genetic mutations lead to disease and could lead to new understanding of how genetic sequence influences the spatial organization and function of chromosomal DNA in the nucleus, said study author Jian Zhou, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UTSW.

“Taken together, these two programs provide a mor...

When humans, animals, and machines move throughout the world, they always push against something, whether it’s the ground, air, or water. Until recently, physicists believed this to be a constant, following the law of conservation momentum. Now, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have proven the opposite — when bodies exist in curved spaces, it turns out that they can in fact move without pushing against something.

The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 28, 2022...

Technology could benefit lidar applications from autonomous driving to virtual reality. Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective and high-performance lidar (or light detection and ranging) systems. Lidar, which uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object, is used in a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, free-space optical communications, 3D holography, biomedical sensing and virtual reality.

“Optical beam ste...

Researchers have designed smart, colour-controllable whitelight devices from quantum dots – tiny semiconductors just a few billionths of a metre in size – which are more efficient and have better colour saturation than standard LEDs, and can dynamically reproduce daylight conditions in a single light.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, designed the next-generation smart lighting system using a combination of nanotechnology, colour science, advanced computational methods, electronics and a unique fabrication process.

The team found that by using more than the three primary lighting colours used in typical LEDs, they were able to reproduce daylight more accu...