Category Physics

Patients are 20% less likely to die of sepsis because a new AI system developed at Johns Hopkins University catches symptoms hours earlier than traditional methods, an extensive hospital study demonstrates.

The system, created by a Johns Hopkins researcher whose young nephew died from sepsis, scours medical records and clinical notes to identify patients at risk of life-threatening complications. The work, which could significantly cut patient mortality from one of the top causes of hospital deaths worldwide, is published today in Nature Medicine and npj Digital Medicine.

“It is the first instance where AI is implemented at the bedside, used by thousands of providers, and where we’re seeing lives saved,” said Suchi Saria, founding research director of the Malone Center for Engin...

A material known as cubic boron arsenide has two major advantages over silicon, research shows. It provides high mobility to both electrons and holes, and it has excellent thermal conductivity. It is, the researchers say, the best semiconductor material ever found.

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, and in its pure form the material has become the foundation of much of modern technology, from solar cells to computer chips. But silicon’s properties as a semiconductor are far from ideal.

For one thing, although silicon lets electrons whizz through its structure easily, it is much less accommodating...

Researchers have designed a fuel production system that uses water, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sunlight to produce aviation fuel. They have implemented the system in the field, and the design, publishing July 20 in the journal Joule, could help the aviation industry become carbon neutral.

“We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system,” says Aldo Steinfeld (@solarfuels), ...

A general theory describing how life depends on temperature has been lacking – until now. In a paper pubished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Jose Ignacio Arroyo, a Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, introduce a simple framework that rigorously predicts how temperature affects living things, at all scales.

“It is very fundamental,” says SFI External Professor Pablo Marquet, an ecologist at the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile, in Santiago. Marquet, Arroyo’s Ph.D. thesis advisor, also worked on the model. “You can apply this to pretty much every process that is affected by temperature. We hope it will be a landmark contribution.”

Marquet notes that such a theory could help researchers make accurate predictions in a range of a...