As of 2022, approximately...

The transformative changes brought by deep learning and artificial intelligence are accompanied by immense costs. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT algorithm costs at least $100,000 every day to operate. This could be reduced with accelerators, or computer hardware designed to efficiently perform the specific operations of deep learning. However, such a device is only viable if it can be integrated with mainstream silicon-based computing hardware on the material level.

This was preventing the implementation of one highly promising deep learning accelerator—arrays of electrochemical random-access memory, or ECRAM—until a research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign achieved...

We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs.

Two colliding neutron stars—each the super-dense core of an exploded star—produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a “supramassive” neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole.

Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory—an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst—vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct.

Brief and powerful
FRBs are in...

Continued warming of the climate would see a rise in the number and spread of potentially fatal infections caused by bacteria found along parts of the coast of the United States.

Vibrio vulnificus bacteria grow in warm shallow coastal waters and infect a cut or insect bite during contact with seawater. A new study led by the UK’s University of East Anglia (UEA) shows that the number of V. vulnificus infections along the East Coast of the US, a global hotspot for such infections, has gone up from 10 to 80 per year over a 30-year period.

In addition, every year cases occur further north. In the late 1980s, cases were found in the Gulf of Mexico and along the southern Atlantic coast but were rare north of Georgia. Today they can be found as far north as Philadelphia.