Witching Hour, a hard tech startup and member of Cohort 2025 of Innovation Crossroads, is wielding the support of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop technology that reduces wildfire risk by retrofitting powerlines with insulation in fire-prone areas. ORNL is the site of the Powerline Conductor Accelerated Testing Facility, one of the only facilities in the country where companies can try out new transmission line technologies for long time periods in a real-world environment.

A new study by researchers at the Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg reveals surprising effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in emotional conversations.

Under certain conditions, participants even experienced more emotional closeness to AI than to humans.

The findings have been published in the journal Communications Psychology.

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool accurately predicted which patients would need a skilled nursing facility after leaving the hospital.

Multicellularity is one of the most profound phenomena in biology, and relies on the ability of a single cell to reorganize itself into a complex organism. It underpins the diversity in the animal kingdom, from insects to frogs, to humans. But how do cells establish and maintain their individuality with such precision? A team led by Jan Brugués at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at Dresden University of Technology has uncovered fundamental mechanisms that shed light on this question. The findings, now published in the scientific journal Nature, reveal how cells establish physical boundaries through an inherently unstable process, and how different species have evolved distinct strategies to circumvent this process.

A new study led by Northern Arizona University doctoral student Beatrice M. Bock used a specialized language model called BioBERT to develop an automated workflow that assesses scientific abstracts using AI and accurately identifies whether a fungus has a single lifestyle or a dual, flexible one. Understanding the flexibility of fungi could play a vital role in predicting how forests and farms will react to climate change.