Latest News Releases 12 May

While air pollution is on the rise throughout the world, researchers have discovered an achievable solution that may mitigate the effect of air pollutants in our bodies: Increasing daily intake of certain vegetables, including celery, carrots, parsnips and parsley.

Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, has received funding of £553,491 from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to lead a major study to investigate the impact of beavers as they spread northwards into the Arctic. This important new three-year project aims to understand the effects beavers are having on the Arctic landscape, on other animals, for example fish populations, and on Indigenous communities in Canada’s Inuvialuit Settlement Region.

Researchers at EPFL have built nanomechanical oscillators that oscillate billions of times before stopping. These record-low mechanical losses are enabled by the symmetry of mechanical resonators shaped as regular polygons.

According to ARRS’ American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), to ensure that patients with emergent or life-threatening imaging indications can continue receiving care, radiology practice leaders need to quickly assess their contrast inventories, prioritize examination findings, and reduce overall iodinated contrast media (ICM) usage.

Optical computing uses photons instead of electrons to perform computations, which can significantly increase the speed and energy efficiency of computations by overcoming the inherent limitations of electrons. The basic principle of optical computing is the light-matter interaction. Matrix computing has become one of the most widely used and indispensable information processing tools in science and engineering, contributing a large number of computational tasks to most signal processing, such as discrete Fourier transforms and convolution operations. As the basic building block of artificial neural networks (ANNs), matrix multiplication occupies most of the computational resources. Due to the properties of electronic components, performing simple matrix multiplications require a large number of transistors to work together, while matrix multiplications can be easily implemented by fundamental photonic components such as microring, Mach Zehnder interferometer (MZI), and diffractive plane. Therefore, the speed of optical computing is several orders of magnitude faster than electronic computing and consumes much less power. However, the traditional incoherent matrix-vector multiplication method focuses on real-valued operations and does not work well in complex-valued neural networks and discrete Fourier transforms.

The Event Horizon Telescope shared the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The view past the clouds of gas and dust — confirmed with the help of the Frontera supercomputer at The University of Texas at Austin — revealed a black hole that is hot, dense, and quickly changing, with a ring of superheated gas around its dark center. The EHT team’s results were published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Knowing what factors influence when and how much snowmelt from snow that falls and is stored in mountains ultimately makes it to streams, rivers and reservoirs is crucial for water managers trying to make the most of limited water resources. A new study led by researchers at University of Nevada, Reno and the Desert Research Institute (DRI) published in Environmental Research Letters identifies three major factors that influence snowmelt-driven water supplies and identifies regions where mountain water supplies respond differently to climate change. The study used data from 537 watersheds across the U.S.