The total amount of data generated worldwide is expected to reach 175 zettabytes (1 ZB equals 1 billion terabytes) by 2025. If 175 ZB were stored on Blu-ray disks, the stack would be 23 times the distance to the moon. There is an urgent need to develop storage technologies that can accommodate this enormous amount of data.

The demand to store ever-increasing volumes of information has resulted in the widespread implementation of data centers for Big Data. These centers consume massive amounts of energy (about 3% of global electricity supply) and rely on magnetization-based harddisk drives with limited storage capacity (up to 2 TB per disk) and lifespan (three to five years)...

Researchers have detected cosmic pipelines supplying the cold gases necessary for the formation of massive galaxies and the creation of stars. It is the first direct observational evidence of the phenomenon in the early universe.

To come into being, galaxies need a steady diet of cold gases to undergo gravitational collapse. The larger the galaxy, the more cold gas it needs to coalesce and to grow.

Massive galaxies found in the early universe needed a lot of cold gas — a store totaling as much as 10...

Responding to artificial intelligence’s exploding demands on computer networks, Princeton University researchers in recent years have radically increased the speed and slashed the energy use of specialized AI systems. Now, the researchers have moved their innovation closer to 0003Verma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton and a leader of the research team. “The hope is that designers can keep using the same software system — and just have it work ten times faster or more efficiently.”

Volcanic rock samples collected during NASA’s Apollo missions bear the isotopic signature of key events in the early evolution of the Moon, a new analysis found. Those events include the formation of the Moon’s iron core, as well as the crystallization of the lunar magma ocean — the sea of molten rock thought to have covered the Moon for around 100 million years after the it formed.

The analysis, published in the journal Science Advances, used a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to study volcanic glasses returned from the Apollo 15 and 17 missions, which are thought to represent some of the most primitive volcanic material on the Moon...