Post Scientist

Queen Mary University researchers have developed a new AI-powered framework, MetaBeeAI, designed to help scientists review and analyze vast amounts of literature faster, more transparently, and with greater human oversight. Dr. Rachel Parkinson, who is the leading researcher on this project, states that MetaBeeAI could potentially transform how evidence is gathered across fields from environmental science to medicine. It is an intelligence system that combines large language models with human validation to accelerate systematic reviews of scientific research while maintaining traceability and scientific rigor. The research is published in the journal Ecological Informatics . As scientific publishing continues to grow rapidly, researchers face an increasing challenge: there are now simply too many papers for humans alone to process efficiently. This means that systematic reviews—considered one of the gold standards of evidence synthesis—can take months or even years to c...

Demand for lithium has surged in recent years as lithium-ion batteries increasingly power more of our world. And yet, even as places like the U.S., Europe, and Australia have abundant lithium resources within their borders, China dominates global lithium refining. The biggest hurdle to tapping into the U.S. and Australia's lithium is getting it out of hard rock minerals in a form that is useful. Extracting lithium from hard rock today is an energy- and waste-intensive process that is often far more expensive than getting lithium from brine water, which also has major environmental drawbacks. Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking t...

  A new invention from a team that includes a University of Maryland researcher halts the copper degradation cycle that turns statues, roofs, and even nickels green. Researchers have developed a liquid reactive ink that can print copper onto nearly any surface without oxidation or corrosion. Shenqiang Ren, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, along with Professor Liangbing Hu from Yale University and Senior Scientist Haimei Zheng from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, led a collaborative effort that spanned over a decade of discovery. The results of this work were published in Science as a cover article. Copper is a hidden backbone of modern life, carrying electricity in AI systems, ...

  Solar cells, devices that can convert sunlight into electricity, are now widely used in many countries and are contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on Earth. While most of the solar cells on the market today are based on silicon, energy engineers have been exploring the potential of other photovoltaic materials, including a class of materials known as perovskites. Perovskites are materials with a characteristic crystal structure; the same structure of the mineral calcium titanium oxide CaTiO 3 . A promising solar cell design introduced over the past decades entails the stacking of silicon and perovskite layers to produce so-called tandem cells, a type of photovoltaics that can capture a broader range of the solar spectrum than single-layer solar cells. Perovskite/silicon solar cells have been found to exhibit remarkable power conversion efficiencies, which essentially means that they convert a higher percentage of sunlight into electricity. Neve...

A popular sodium-ion battery designed by the company Hina and used in cars and large-scale energy storage systems in China matches performance parameters and production quality of Tesla's lithium-ion batteries, finds new research published in Cell Reports Physical Science . Once the Hina battery is tweaked to charge more effectively at low temperatures and function better at high energy densities, it could provide a cost-effective alternative for future electric vehicle batteries that depend on sodium—an abundant and easily sourced material—instead of lithium. "The combination of good uniformity, high power capability, and strong low-temperature performance makes these cells attractive for stationary storage, grid services, and shorter-range or commercial vehicles where potential lower cost and resource availability matter more than maximum driving range," says Moritz Schütte, a battery researcher at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. How the Hina cells wer...

  Today, magnetic field sensors are one of the invisible mass-produced products in the electronics industry. They measure movement, positions or distances and can be found in window contacts, steering wheels, hard disks, packaging and cell phones. Billions of these components are manufactured every year. "Many of these sensors contain materials like nickel or cobalt," says Dr. Denys Makarov, head of the Intelligent Materials and Systems Department at the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research at HZDR. "These are materials that can harm the environment and health when not properly disposed." At the same time, producing them often requires energy-intensive processes and complex manufacturing steps. The development of sustainable sensors is a technical challenge. While iron is easily available and biocompatible, on its own, it does not achieve the sensitivity required for many of today's magnetic field sensors. The research team therefor...

A Russian influence campaign hijacked hundreds of Bluesky accounts—many belonging to influential Americans—to spread propaganda, researchers said, in a striking disinformation tactic that weaponized authentic identities rather than relying on fake accounts.  The campaign, which the researchers at Clemson University linked to the Moscow-based firm Social Design Agency (SDA), targeted journalists, academics, and filmmakers on the tech platform. Many of the compromised accounts were used to post anti-Ukraine narratives, illustrating how pro-Kremlin propagandists are seeking novel ways to undermine support for the war-torn country that Russia invaded in 2022. "Looks like someone got into my account and posted some story about France and Ukraine," Wall Street Journal reporter Alex Ward wrote on Bluesky. The post in question has now been deleted and Ward said he had regained control of his account. A database of compromised accounts—created by an internet monitor tra...

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday it raised $65 billion in private funding that will push its valuation to $965 billion, a whopping number that makes the five-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot one of the world's most valuable startups as it careens toward a likely Wall Street debut. The announcement vaults Anthropic ahead of its chief rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, both in market value and in reported revenue. Anthropic said it's now making annualized revenue of $47 billion from selling its technology to people and organizations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf. Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk's rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to become publicly traded. All three are also still losing more money than they make, fueling concerns of an AI bubble. San Francisco-based Anthropic said the new round of funding was led by in...

  Elon Musk insists that his artificial intelligence venture xAI remains a serious competitor, pushing back against mounting doubts after revelations that the supercomputing facilities built to power his own AI models are being rented out to a rival. "Whether it is the best remains to be seen, but I will never give up. Never," Musk wrote on his X social media platform this week. The pledge came after SpaceX's newly filed stock market prospectus disclosed that Anthropic—the AI company behind the Claude chatbot—will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for access to the Colossus data centers, the vast computing facilities built to train Musk's Grok AI models. Musk said the arrangement is a short-term deal and that SpaceX, which owns xAI, could reclaim the capacity if needed. "We might need it back at some point," he wrote. XAI's main product is the Grok chatbot, now in its fourth generation, which is built into the X platform and competes with Cha...

  Every second, the data behind billions of emails, TikTok videos and AI queries travels around the world as pulses of light through fiber-optic networks. Along the way, these signals pass through tiny components that act as channels for light: photonic chips. These devices don't just carry signals—they direct and combine them, ensuring information moves efficiently across complex networks. But photonic chips still have limits. They struggle to perform certain key light-processing operations. Tasks such as signal conversion and amplification still rely on additional components—components that are bulky, consume energy and generate heat. AI is creat...

  As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly sophisticated, questions once confined to philosophy are rapidly entering mainstream scientific and public debate: Can AI possess consciousness? Could animals, organoids, or even fetuses have subjective experiences? Study questions how we measure consciousness A research team led by Director Hakwan LAU of the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), together with collaborators from the Université de Montréal and New York University, has published a new analysis in the journal Neuron arguing that current scientific methods may not yet be capable of reliably answering such questions. The paper critically examines how consciousness is currently studied in neuroscience and argues that many widely used experimental approaches fail to clearly distinguish subjective experience from general information processing. The researchers emphasize that the study does not attempt to...

  New research from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, has significant implications for understanding both human language development and the behavior of large-scale artificial intelligence language models. Culture is key, as well as an understanding of "iterated learning," which posits that language evolves over generations (in humans and computers) to become more structured. "We built a computer brain with similar characteristics to a child's, and compared it to behaviors we see in children's brains. We then fed it data with similar properties found in human language and watched how the generations (versions) of the computer brain learn." "It turns out, computer brains find the structure in the data in the same way that children favor certain properties of language in learning. It also showed that the dataset (language) becomes more structured over generations because it makes learning easier," says lead author Dr. Dev...

  The United Nations estimates that 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and communities from California to the Middle East rely on desalination plants to convert ocean water to fresh water. Common desalination techniques such as reverse osmosis and thermal distillation are energy-intensive, require pre- and post-water treatment, and leave behind a concentrated saltwater byproduct called brine that wreaks havoc on sea life when it's deposited back into the ocean by raising the salt level and lowering oxygen in the water. But a novel approach developed at the University of Rochester offers a way to overcome these drawbacks. Researchers at URochester's Institute of Optics developed a new solar-thermal desalination process to produce fresh water in an energy-efficient way that does not leave behind brine and requires no chemical additives to pre-treat the water. A team led by Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics and of physics and a senior scientist a...

  When people watch a scene in the film "Jurassic Park" where a giant dinosaur walks toward them, they naturally imagine a heavy, rumbling sound, as if the ground were shaking. This is because humans predict sound by considering not only the shape of an object, but also physical properties such as its size, weight, and speed of movement. However, existing video-to-audio generation AI mainly generates sound based on the category of objects or scene information in the video, and has not sufficiently reflected physical properties that vary depending on weight or speed. New physics-aware sound technology A collaborative research team involving Pr...

  Lithium-ion batteries dominate the market for large-scale energy storage today. However, the element's uneven global distribution and rising costs are driving the search for alternatives. Sodium is roughly a thousand times more abundant in Earth's crust and can be extracted from seawater, making sodium-ion batteries a compelling option for grid-scale storage where cost and supply security are paramount. The safety aspect of such batteries has been an obstacle. Most sodium-ion batteries rely on liquid electrolytes that are flammable and prone to leakage, posing risks in large-scale installations. Solid polymer electrolytes could eliminate these hazards, but they conduct sodium ions too slowly and form unstable contact with the sodium metal negative electrode. Over time, needle-like metal growths called dendrites push through the polymer, short-circuiting the battery, leading to thermal runaway. A team led by Associate Professor Palani Balaya from the Department o...

  Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an optical device that reveals hidden images and changes colors in response to different levels of humidity. The technology, published in Light: Science & Applications , could lead to the development of new anti-counterfeiting labels, secure data storage, interactive displays, and environmental sensors. The device works by displaying different images depending on moisture levels in the air. Under normal conditions or low humidity levels, one image (UC San Diego Triton logo) is visible. When humidity increases, a second image (UC San Diego library logo) emerges and conceals the first. This transition can be triggered even when a person breathes on the device. It happens in a fraction of a second and can be repeated many times. "You can imagine using this as a built-in security feature with the environment acting like a key that unlocks different pieces of information," said study first autho...

  As quantum computing moves closer to large-scale deployment, new research is examining its future energy, water, and material demands. David McCollum, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory distinguished scientist, is leading the project. McCollum is also a joint faculty professor in the Center for Energy, Transportation, and Environmental Policy (CETEP) at the Howard H. Baker Jr. School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The work aims to inform the rollout of quantum infrastructure over the coming decades. It examines technologies evolving from experimental environments to commercial-scale use. Quantum computing is expected to unlock advances in drug discovery, material science, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. "Quantum computing presents extraordinary opportunities, from accelerating scientific discovery to solving complex optimization problems," McCollum said. "At the same time, it introduces new question...

  Artificial intelligence models using electronic health records and patient-reported outcomes may help identify cancer survivors at increased risk for emergency department visits, hospitalizations and worsening symptoms after treatment, according to a new study from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The findings suggest AI-driven risk forecasting could help care teams intervene earlier with more proactive survivorship support. Published in JCO–Clinical Cancer Informatics , the study demonstrates how machine learning models applied to clinical data and patient‑reported outcomes, or PROs, can help identify survivors at increased risk for unplanned health care use and elevated symptom burden during the survivorship continuum. By transforming medical records and patient-reported data into predictive signals, the research offers a potential pathway toward more proactive, personalized survivorship care. Canc...