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Carbon-Rich Exoplanets may be made of Diamonds

llustration of a carbon-rich planet with diamond and silica as main minerals. Water can convert a carbide planet into a diamond-rich planet. In the interior, the main minerals would be diamond and silica (a layer with crystals in the illustration). The core (dark blue) might be iron-carbon alloy. Credit: Shim/ASU/Vecteezy

As missions like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, TESS and Kepler continue to provide insights into the properties of exoplanets (planets around other stars), scientists are increasingly able to piece together what these planets look like, what they are made of, and if they could be habitable or even inhabited.

In a new study published recently in The Planetary Science Journal, a team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Chicago ha...

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Artificial Intelligence Aids Gene Activation Discovery

With the aid of artificial intelligence, UC San Diego scientists have solved a long-standing puzzle in human gene activation. The discovery described in the journal Nature could be used to control gene activation in biotechnology and biomedical applications.

Machine learning enables long-awaited code breakthrough with potential applications in biomedicine. Scientists have long known that human genes spring into action through instructions delivered by the precise order of our DNA, directed by the four different types of individual links, or “bases,” coded A, C, G and T.

Nearly 25% of our genes are widely known to be transcribed by sequences that resemble TATAAA, which is called the “TATA box...

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Seeing Objects through Clouds and Fog

A three-dimensional reconstruction of the reflective letter “S,” as seen through the 1-inch-thick foam. (Image credit: Stanford Computational Imaging Lab)

Using a new algorithm, researchers have reconstructed the movements of individual particles of light to see through clouds, fog and other obstructions. Like a comic book come to life, researchers at Stanford University have developed a kind of Xray vision — only without the X-rays. Working with hardware similar to what enables autonomous cars to “see” the world around them, the researchers enhanced their system with a highly efficient algorithm that can reconstruct three-dimensional hidden scenes based on the movement of photons. In tests, detailed in a paper published Sept...

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AI used to show how Hydrogen becomes a Metal inside Giant Planets

Bingqing Cheng et al. ‘Evidence for supercritical behaviour of high-pressure liquid hydrogen.’ Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2677-y.

Dense metallic hydrogen – a phase of hydrogen which behaves like an electrical conductor – makes up the interior of giant planets, but it is difficult to study and poorly understood. By combining artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics, researchers have found how hydrogen becomes a metal under the extreme pressure conditions of these planets.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, IBM Research and EPFL, used machine learning to mimic the interactions between hydrogen atoms in order to overcome the size and timescale limitations of even the most powerful supercomputers...

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