Black Myth: Wukong is nothing if not ambitious. As many of its early trailers and tech demos implied, this was a game punching above its weight. It wasn't just a lavish retelling of the epic Chinese novel Journey to the West, a work that games have rarely engaged with outside of Asia (Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West notwithstanding), but it also seemed to be demonstrating a level of technical mastery and visual pizzazz we hadn't quite seen before. It immediately put developer Game Science on the map, even if it wasn't always for the most savoury of reasons.
But now, after spending upwards of 40 hours retracing the steps of its titular simian hero as the silent but deadly Destined One, Black Myth emerges as a game that frustrates more than it delights. Its plentiful supply of grand, sweeping boss battles set the heart alight at regular intervals, its mythological menagerie bristling with the same kind of malicious energy and intent as their FromSoft equivalents. They are the tentpoles that hold this game aloft, their sharp claws, vicious fangs and powerful hoofs often tearing up the screen in exquisite and sumptuous detail. Indeed, they're the kind of bosses that will probably go down as some of the most dramatic of this generation, with its glistening dragons that rage across icy lakes and rippling pools, muscular tigers that sup in temples of blood, and giant bears, wolves, rats and spiders that command the elements to devastating effect.
But outside of those pulse-racing encounters, Black Myth is an altogether more mind-numbing experience, its thrilling highs undone by baggy world design, an uneven difficulty curve and disjointed storytelling. Ostensibly, this is a quest about reviving the legendary Sun Wukong, who scattered himself to the wind in the form of six relics after being defeated in battle centuries earlier. As the Destined One, you'll travel through forests, sand, ice, ash and more to bring them back to your mountain home, winding your way through its alternately narrow and wide linear environments until you reach the big bad in possession of it.
If your response to boredom is to whip out your phone and scroll endlessly through TikTok, you might be doing it wrong. According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, this kind of "digital switching" intensifies boredom rather than relieving it. — Read the rest
Wandering through a forest at night, you might be treated to a strange symphony of creepy cracking sounds. In some cases, the source of the sounds are the trees. Temperature changes, especially between day and night, can cause the wood in trees to expand or contract. — Read the rest
A material with a high electron mobility is like a highway without traffic. Any electrons that flow into the material experience a commuter’s dream, breezing through without any obstacles or congestion to slow or scatter them off their path.
The higher a material’s electron mobility, the more efficient its electrical conductivity, and the less energy is lost or wasted as electrons zip through. Advanced materials that exhibit high electron mobility will be essential for more efficient and sustainable electronic devices that can do more work with less power.
Now, physicists at MIT, the Army Research Lab, and elsewhere have achieved a record-setting level of electron mobility in a thin film of ternary tetradymite — a class of mineral that is naturally found in deep hydrothermal deposits of gold and quartz.
For this study, the scientists grew pure, ultrathin films of the material, in a way that minimized defects in its crystalline structure. They found that this nearly perfect film — much thinner than a human hair — exhibits the highest electron mobility in its class.
The team was able to estimate the material’s electron mobility by detecting quantum oscillations when electric current passes through. These oscillations are a signature of the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons in a material. The researchers detected a particular rhythm of oscillations that is characteristic of high electron mobility — higher than any ternary thin films of this class to date.
“Before, what people had achieved in terms of electron mobility in these systems was like traffic on a road under construction — you’re backed up, you can’t drive, it’s dusty, and it’s a mess,” says Jagadeesh Moodera, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Physics. “In this newly optimized material, it’s like driving on the Mass Pike with no traffic.”
The team’s results, which appear today in the journal Materials Today Physics, point to ternary tetradymite thin films as a promising material for future electronics, such as wearable thermoelectric devices that efficiently convert waste heat into electricity. (Tetradymites are the active materials that cause the cooling effect in commercial thermoelectric coolers.) The material could also be the basis for spintronic devices, which process information using an electron’s spin, using far less power than conventional silicon-based devices.
The study also uses quantum oscillations as a highly effective tool for measuring a material’s electronic performance.
“We are using this oscillation as a rapid test kit,” says study author Hang Chi, a former research scientist at MIT who is now at the University of Ottawa. “By studying this delicate quantum dance of electrons, scientists can start to understand and identify new materials for the next generation of technologies that will power our world.”
Chi and Moodera’s co-authors include Patrick Taylor, formerly of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, along with Owen Vail and Harry Hier of the Army Research Lab, and Brandi Wooten and Joseph Heremans of Ohio State University.
Beam down
The name “tetradymite” derives from the Greek “tetra” for “four,” and “dymite,” meaning “twin.” Both terms describe the mineral’s crystal structure, which consists of rhombohedral crystals that are “twinned” in groups of four — i.e. they have identical crystal structures that share a side.
Tetradymites comprise combinations of bismuth, antimony tellurium, sulfur, and selenium. In the 1950s, scientists found that tetradymites exhibit semiconducting properties that could be ideal for thermoelectric applications: The mineral in its bulk crystal form was able to passively convert heat into electricity.
Then, in the 1990s, the late Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus proposed that the mineral’s thermoelectric properties might be significantly enhanced, not in its bulk form but within its microscopic, nanometer-scale surface, where the interactions of electrons is more pronounced. (Heremans happened to work in Dresselhaus’ group at the time.)
“It became clear that when you look at this material long enough and close enough, new things will happen,” Chi says. “This material was identified as a topological insulator, where scientists could see very interesting phenomena on their surface. But to keep uncovering new things, we have to master the material growth.”
To grow thin films of pure crystal, the researchers employed molecular beam epitaxy — a method by which a beam of molecules is fired at a substrate, typically in a vacuum, and with precisely controlled temperatures. When the molecules deposit on the substrate, they condense and build up slowly, one atomic layer at a time. By controlling the timing and type of molecules deposited, scientists can grow ultrathin crystal films in exact configurations, with few if any defects.
“Normally, bismuth and tellurium can interchange their position, which creates defects in the crystal,” co-author Taylor explains. “The system we used to grow these films came down with me from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where we use high purity materials to minimize impurities to undetectable limits. It is the perfect tool to explore this research.”
Free flow
The team grew thin films of ternary tetradymite, each about 100 nanometers thin. They then tested the film’s electronic properties by looking for Shubnikov-de Haas quantum oscillations — a phenomenon that was discovered by physicists Lev Shubnikov and Wander de Haas, who found that a material’s electrical conductivity can oscillate when exposed to a strong magnetic field at low temperatures. This effect occurs because the material’s electrons fill up specific energy levels that shift as the magnetic field changes.
Such quantum oscillations could serve as a signature of a material’s electronic structure, and the ways in which electrons behave and interact. Most notably for the MIT team, the oscillations could determine a material’s electron mobility: If oscillations exist, it must mean that the material’s electrical resistance is able to change, and by inference, electrons can be mobile, and made to easily flow.
The team looked for signs of quantum oscillations in their new films, by first exposing them to ultracold temperatures and a strong magnetic field, then running an electric current through the film and measuring the voltage along its path, as they tuned the magnetic field up and down.
“It turns out, to our great joy and excitement, that the material’s electrical resistance oscillates,” Chi says. “Immediately, that tells you that this has very high electron mobility.”
Specifically, the team estimates that the ternary tetradymite thin film exhibits an electron mobility of 10,000 cm2/V-s — the highest mobility of any ternary tetradymite film yet measured. The team suspects that the film’s record mobility has something to do with its low defects and impurities, which they were able to minimize with their precise growth strategies. The fewer a material’s defects, the fewer obstacles an electron encounters, and the more freely it can flow.
“This is showing it’s possible to go a giant step further, when properly controlling these complex systems,” Moodera says. “This tells us we’re in the right direction, and we have the right system to proceed further, to keep perfecting this material down to even much thinner films and proximity coupling for use in future spintronics and wearable thermoelectric devices.”
This research was supported in part by the Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Canada Research Chairs Program and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
MIT faculty members Nancy Kanwisher, Robert Langer, and Sara Seager are among eight researchers worldwide to receive this year’s Kavli Prizes.
A partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation, the Kavli Prizes are awarded every two years to “honor scientists for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience that transform our understanding of the big, the small and the complex.” The laureates in each field will share $1 million.
Understanding recognition of faces
Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute for Brain Research investigator, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Doris Tsao, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Winrich Freiwald, the Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery Professor at the Rockefeller University.
Kanwisher, Tsao, and Freiwald discovered a specialized system within the brain to recognize faces. Their discoveries have provided basic principles of neural organization and made the starting point for further research on how the processing of visual information is integrated with other cognitive functions.
Kanwisher was the first to prove that a specific area in the human neocortex is dedicated to recognizing faces, now called the fusiform face area. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she found individual differences in the location of this area and devised an analysis technique to effectively localize specialized functional regions in the brain. This technique is now widely used and applied to domains beyond the face recognition system.
Integrating nanomaterials for biomedical advances
Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with Paul Alivisatos, president of the University of Chicago and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Chad Mirkin, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University.
Langer, Alivisatos, and Mirkin each revolutionized the field of nanomedicine by demonstrating how engineering at the nano scale can advance biomedical research and application. Their discoveries contributed foundationally to the development of therapeutics, vaccines, bioimaging, and diagnostics.
Langer was the first to develop nanoengineered materials that enabled the controlled release, or regular flow, of drug molecules. This capability has had an immense impact for the treatment of a range of diseases, such as aggressive brain cancer, prostate cancer, and schizophrenia. His work also showed that tiny particles, containing protein antigens, can be used in vaccination, and was instrumental in the development of the delivery of messenger RNA vaccines.
Searching for life beyond Earth
Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics along with David Charbonneau, the Fred Kavli Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard University.
Seager and Charbonneau are recognized for discoveries of exoplanets and the characterization of their atmospheres. They pioneered methods for the detection of atomic species in planetary atmospheres and the measurement of their thermal infrared emission, setting the stage for finding the molecular fingerprints of atmospheres around both giant and rocky planets. Their contributions have been key to the enormous progress seen in the last 20 years in the exploration of myriad exoplanets.
Kanwisher, Langer, and Seager bring the number of all-time MIT faculty recipients of the Kavli Prize to eight. Prior winners include Rainer Weiss in astrophysics (2016), Alan Guth in astrophysics (2014), Mildred Dresselhaus in nanoscience (2012), Ann Graybiel in neuroscience (2012), and Jane Luu in astrophysics (2012).
“This discovery has direct implications for low-power electronic devices because no energy is lost during the propagation of electrons, which is not the case in regular materials where the electrons are scattered,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and corresponding author of the Science paper.
The phenomenon is akin to cars traveling down an open turnpike as opposed to those moving through neighborhoods. The neighborhood cars can be stopped or slowed by other drivers making abrupt stops or U-turns that disrupt an otherwise smooth commute.
A new material
The material behind this work, known as rhombohedral pentalayer graphene, was discovered two years ago by physicists led by Ju. “We found a goldmine, and every scoop is revealing something new,” says Ju, who is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory.
In a Nature Nanotechnology paper last October, Ju and colleagues reported the discovery of three important properties arising from rhombohedral graphene. For example, they showed that it could be topological, or allow the unimpeded movement of electrons around the edge of the material but not through the middle. That resulted in a superhighway, but required the application of a large magnetic field some tens of thousands times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.
In the current work, the team reports creating the superhighway without any magnetic field.
Tonghang Han, an MIT graduate student in physics, is a co-first author of the paper. “We are not the first to discover this general phenomenon, but we did so in a very different system. And compared to previous systems, ours is simpler and also supports more electron channels.” Explains Ju, “other materials can only support one lane of traffic on the edge of the material. We suddenly bumped it up to five.”
Additional co-first authors of the paper who contributed equally to the work are Zhengguang Lu and Yuxuan Yao. Lu is a postdoc in the Materials Research Laboratory. Yao conducted the work as a visiting undergraduate student from Tsinghua University. Other authors are MIT professor of physics Liang Fu; Jixiang Yang and Junseok Seo, both MIT graduate students in physics; Chiho Yoon and Fan Zhang of the University of Texas at Dallas; and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.
How it works
Graphite, the primary component of pencil lead, is composed of many layers of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. Rhombohedral graphene is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order.
Ju and colleagues isolated rhombohedral graphene thanks to a novel microscope Ju built at MIT in 2021 that can quickly and relatively inexpensively determine a variety of important characteristics of a material at the nanoscale. Pentalayer rhombohedral stacked graphene is only a few billionths of a meter thick.
In the current work, the team tinkered with the original system, adding a layer of tungsten disulfide (WS2). “The interaction between the WS2 and the pentalayer rhombohedral graphene resulted in this five-lane superhighway that operates at zero magnetic field,” says Ju.
Comparison to superconductivity
The phenomenon that the Ju group discovered in rhombohedral graphene that allows electrons to travel with no resistance at zero magnetic field is known as the quantum anomalous Hall effect. Most people are more familiar with superconductivity, a completely different phenomenon that does the same thing but happens in very different materials.
Ju notes that although superconductors were discovered in the 1910s, it took some 100 years of research to coax the system to work at the higher temperatures necessary for applications. “And the world record is still well below room temperature,” he notes.
Similarly, the rhombohedral graphene superhighway currently operates at about 2 kelvins, or -456 degrees Fahrenheit. “It will take a lot of effort to elevate the temperature, but as physicists, our job is to provide the insight; a different way for realizing this [phenomenon],” Ju says.
Very exciting
The discoveries involving rhombohedral graphene came as a result of painstaking research that wasn’t guaranteed to work. “We tried many recipes over many months,” says Han, “so it was very exciting when we cooled the system to a very low temperature and [a five-lane superhighway operating at zero magnetic field] just popped out.”
Says Ju, “it’s very exciting to be the first to discover a phenomenon in a new system, especially in a material that we uncovered.”
This work was supported by a Sloan Fellowship; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the U.S. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI; and the World Premier International Research Initiative of Japan.
Artist’s rendition of a newly discovered superhighway for electrons that can occur in rhombohedral graphene. “We found a goldmine, and every scoop is revealing something new,” says MIT Assistant Professor Long Ju.
In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.
The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).
“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”
A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.
Finding inspiration in the archives
The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).
Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”
Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.
Incorporating MIT nerdiness
Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.
The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.
“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.
To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.
“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.
Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.
The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names.
Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names
In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.
Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.
“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”
Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”
Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).
A team of MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni fabricated a new One.MIT wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; Sloan Executive MBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).
Physics graduate student Jeong Min (Jane) Park is among the 32 exceptional early-career scientists worldwide chosen to receive the prestigious 2024 Schmidt Science Fellows award.
As a 2024 Schmidt Science Fellow, Park’s postdoctoral work will seek to directly detect phases that could host new particles by employing an instrument that can visualize subatomic-scale phenomena.
With her advisor, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, Park’s research at MIT focuses on discovering novel quantum phases of matter.
“When there are many electrons in a material, their interactions can lead to collective behaviors that are not expected from individual particles, known as emergent phenomena,” explains Park. “One example is superconductivity, where interacting electrons combine together as a pair at low temperatures to conduct electricity without energy loss.”
During her PhD studies, she has investigated novel types of superconductivity by designing new materials with targeted interactions and topology. In particular, she used graphene, atomically thin two-dimensional layers of graphite, the same material as pencil lead, and turned it into a “magic” material. This so-called magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene provided an extraordinarily strong form of superconductivity that is robust under high magnetic fields. Later, she found a whole “magic family” of these materials, elucidating the key mechanisms behind superconductivity and interaction-driven phenomena. These results have provided a new platform to study emergent phenomena in two dimensions, which can lead to innovations in electronics and quantum technology.
Park says she is looking forward to her postdoctoral studies with Princeton University physics professor Ali Yazdani's lab.
“I’m excited about the idea of discovering and studying new quantum phenomena that could further the understanding of fundamental physics,” says Park. “Having explored interaction-driven phenomena through the design of new materials, I’m now aiming to broaden my perspective and expertise to address a different kind of question, by combining my background in material design with the sophisticated local-scale measurements that I will adopt during my postdoc.”
She explains that elementary particles are classified as either bosons or fermions, with contrasting behaviors upon interchanging two identical particles, referred to as exchange statistics; bosons remain unchanged, while fermions acquire a minus sign in their quantum wavefunction.
Theories predict the existence of fundamentally different particles known as non-abelian anyons, whose wavefunctions braid upon particle exchange. Such a braiding process can be used to encode and store information, potentially opening the door to fault-tolerant quantum computing in the future.
Since 2018, this prestigious postdoctoral program has sought to break down silos among scientific fields to solve the world’s biggest challenges and support future leaders in STEM.
Schmidt Science Fellows, an initiative of Schmidt Sciences, delivered in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, identifies, develops, and amplifies the next generation of science leaders, by building a community of scientists and supporters of interdisciplinary science and leveraging this network to drive sector-wide change. The 2024 fellows consist of 17 nationalities across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Nominated candidates undergo a rigorous selection process that includes a paper-based academic review with panels of experts in their home disciplines and final interviews with panels, including senior representatives from across many scientific disciplines and different business sectors.
Physics graduate student Jeong Min (Jane) Park is among the 32 exceptional early-career scientists worldwide chosen to receive the prestigious 2024 Schmidt Science Fellows award.
John Joannopoulos, an innovator and mentor in the fields of theoretical condensed matter physics and nanophotonics, has been named the recipient of the 2024-2025 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award.
Joannopoulos is the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics and director of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. He has been a member of the MIT faculty for 50 years.
“Professor Joannopoulos’s profound and lasting impact on the field of theoretical condensed matter physics finds its roots in his pioneering work in harnessing ab initio physics to elucidate the behavior of materials at the atomic level,” states the award citation, which was announced at today’s faculty meeting by Roger White, chair of the Killian Award Selection Committee and professor of philosophy at MIT. “His seminal research in the development of photonic crystals has revolutionized understanding of light-matter interactions, laying the groundwork for transformative advancements in diverse fields ranging from telecommunications to biomedical engineering.”
The award also honors Joannopoulos’ service as a “legendary mentor to generations of students, inspiring them to achieve excellence in science while at the same time facilitating the practical benefit to society through entrepreneurship.”
The Killian Award was established in 1971 to recognize outstanding professional contributions by MIT faculty members. It is the highest honor that the faculty can give to one of its members.
“I have to tell you, it was a complete and utter surprise,” Joannopoulos told MIT News shortly after he received word of the award. “I didn’t expect it at all, and was extremely flattered, honored, and moved by it, frankly.”
Joannopoulous has spent his entire professional career at MIT. He came to the Institute in 1974, directly after receiving his PhD in physics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also earned his bachelor’s degree. Starting out as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, he quickly set up a research program focused on theoretical condensed matter physics.
Over the first half of his MIT career, Joannopoulos worked to elucidate the fundamental nature of the electronic, vibrational, and optical structure of crystalline and amorphous bulk solids, their surfaces, interfaces, and defects. He and his students developed numerous theoretical methods to enable tractable and accurate calculations of these complex systems.
In the 1990s, his work with microscopic material systems expanded to a new class of materials, called photonic crystals — materials that could be engineered at the micro- and nanoscale to manipulate light in ways that impart surprising and exotic optical qualities to the material as a whole.
“I saw that you could create photonic crystals with defects that can affect the properties of photons, in much the same way that defects in a semiconductor affect the properties of electrons,” Joannopoulos says. “So I started working in this area to try and explore what anomalous light phenomena can we discover using this approach?”
Among his various breakthroughs in the field was the realization of a “perfect dielectric mirror” — a multilayered optical device that reflects light from all angles as normal metallic mirrors do, and that can also be tuned to reflect and trap light at specific frequencies. He and his colleagues saw potential for the mirror to be made into a hollow fiber that could serve as a highly effective optical conduit, for use in a wide range of applications. To further advance the technology, he and his colleagues launched a startup, which has since developed the technology into a flexible, fiber-optic “surgical scalpel.”
Throughout his career, Joannopoulos has helped to launch numerous startups and photonics-based technologies.
“His ability to bridge the gap between academia and industry has not only advanced scientific knowledge but also led to the creation of dozens of new companies, thousands of jobs, and groundbreaking products that continue to benefit society to this day,” the award citation states.
In 2006, Joannopoulos accepted the position as director of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), a collaboration between MIT researchers, industry partners, and military defense experts, who seek innovations to protect and enhance soldiers’ survivability in the field. In his role as ISN head, Joannopoulos has worked across MIT, making connections and supporting new projects with researchers specializing in fields far from his own.
“I get a chance to explore and learn fascinating new things,” says Joannopoulos, who is currently overseeing projects related to hyperspectral imaging, smart and responsive fabrics, and nanodrug delivery. “I love that aspect of really getting to understand what people in other fields are doing. And they’re doing great work across many, many different fields.”
Throughout his career at MIT, Joannopoulos has been especially inspired and motivated by his students, many of whom have gone on to found companies, lead top academic and research institutions, and make significant contributions to their respective fields, including one student who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998.
“One’s proudest moments are the successes of one’s students, and in that regard, I’ve been extremely lucky to have had truly exceptional students over the years,” Joannopolous says.
His many contributions to academia and industry have earned Joannopoulos numerous honors and awards, including his election to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“The Selection Committee is delighted to have this opportunity to honor Professor John Joannopoulos: a visionary scientist, a beloved mentor, a great believer in the goodness of people, and a leader whose contributions to MIT and the broader scientific community are immeasurable,” the award citation concludes.
Proximity is key for many quantum phenomena, as interactions between atoms are stronger when the particles are close. In many quantum simulators, scientists arrange atoms as close together as possible to explore exotic states of matter and build new quantum materials.
They typically do this by cooling the atoms to a stand-still, then using laser light to position the particles as close as 500 nanometers apart — a limit that is set by the wavelength of light. Now, MIT physicists have developed a technique that allows them to arrange atoms in much closer proximity, down to a mere 50 nanometers. For context, a red blood cell is about 1,000 nanometers wide.
The physicists demonstrated the new approach in experiments with dysprosium, which is the most magnetic atom in nature. They used the new approach to manipulate two layers of dysprosium atoms, and positioned the layers precisely 50 nanometers apart. At this extreme proximity, the magnetic interactions were 1,000 times stronger than if the layers were separated by 500 nanometers.
What’s more, the scientists were able to measure two new effects caused by the atoms’ proximity. Their enhanced magnetic forces caused “thermalization,” or the transfer of heat from one layer to another, as well as synchronized oscillations between layers. These effects petered out as the layers were spaced farther apart.
“We have gone from positioning atoms from 500 nanometers to 50 nanometers apart, and there is a lot you can do with this,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “At 50 nanometers, the behavior of atoms is so much different that we’re really entering a new regime here.”
Ketterle and his colleagues say the new approach can be applied to many other atoms to study quantum phenomena. For their part, the group plans to use the technique to manipulate atoms into configurations that could generate the first purely magnetic quantum gate — a key building block for a new type of quantum computer.
The team has published their results today in the journal Science. The study’s co-authors include lead author and physics graduate student Li Du, along with Pierre Barral, Michael Cantara, Julius de Hond, and Yu-Kun Lu — all members of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Department of Physics, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.
Peaks and valleys
To manipulate and arrange atoms, physicists typically first cool a cloud of atoms to temperatures approaching absolute zero, then use a system of laser beams to corral the atoms into an optical trap.
Laser light is an electromagnetic wave with a specific wavelength (the distance between maxima of the electric field) and frequency. The wavelength limits the smallest pattern into which light can be shaped to typically 500 nanometers, the so-called optical resolution limit. Since atoms are attracted by laser light of certain frequencies, atoms will be positioned at the points of peak laser intensity. For this reason, existing techniques have been limited in how close they can position atomic particles, and could not be used to explore phenomena that happen at much shorter distances.
“Conventional techniques stop at 500 nanometers, limited not by the atoms but by the wavelength of light,” Ketterle explains. “We have found now a new trick with light where we can break through that limit.”
The team’s new approach, like current techniques, starts by cooling a cloud of atoms — in this case, to about 1 microkelvin, just a hair above absolute zero — at which point, the atoms come to a near-standstill. Physicists can then use lasers to move the frozen particles into desired configurations.
Then, Du and his collaborators worked with two laser beams, each with a different frequency, or color, and circular polarization, or direction of the laser’s electric field. When the two beams travel through a super-cooled cloud of atoms, the atoms can orient their spin in opposite directions, following either of the two lasers’ polarization. The result is that the beams produce two groups of the same atoms, only with opposite spins.
Each laser beam formed a standing wave, a periodic pattern of electric field intensity with a spatial period of 500 nanometers. Due to their different polarizations, each standing wave attracted and corralled one of two groups of atoms, depending on their spin. The lasers could be overlaid and tuned such that the distance between their respective peaks is as small as 50 nanometers, meaning that the atoms gravitating to each respective laser’s peaks would be separated by the same 50 nanometers.
But in order for this to happen, the lasers would have to be extremely stable and immune to all external noise, such as from shaking or even breathing on the experiment. The team realized they could stabilize both lasers by directing them through an optical fiber, which served to lock the light beams in place in relation to each other.
“The idea of sending both beams through the optical fiber meant the whole machine could shake violently, but the two laser beams stayed absolutely stable with respect to each others,” Du says.
Magnetic forces at close range
As a first test of their new technique, the team used atoms of dysprosium — a rare-earth metal that is one of the strongest magnetic elements in the periodic table, particularly at ultracold temperatures. However, at the scale of atoms, the element’s magnetic interactions are relatively weak at distances of even 500 nanometers. As with common refrigerator magnets, the magnetic attraction between atoms increases with proximity, and the scientists suspected that if their new technique could space dysprosium atoms as close as 50 nanometers apart, they might observe the emergence of otherwise weak interactions between the magnetic atoms.
“We could suddenly have magnetic interactions, which used to be almost neglible but now are really strong,” Ketterle says.
The team applied their technique to dysprosium, first super-cooling the atoms, then passing two lasers through to split the atoms into two spin groups, or layers. They then directed the lasers through an optical fiber to stabilize them, and found that indeed, the two layers of dysprosium atoms gravitated to their respective laser peaks, which in effect separated the layers of atoms by 50 nanometers — the closest distance that any ultracold atom experiment has been able to achieve.
At this extremely close proximity, the atoms’ natural magnetic interactions were significantly enhanced, and were 1,000 times stronger than if they were positioned 500 nanometers apart. The team observed that these interactions resulted in two novel quantum phenomena: collective oscillation, in which one layer’s vibrations caused the other layer to vibrate in sync; and thermalization, in which one layer transferred heat to the other, purely through magnetic fluctuations in the atoms.
“Until now, heat between atoms could only by exchanged when they were in the same physical space and could collide,” Du notes. “Now we have seen atomic layers, separated by vacuum, and they exchange heat via fluctuating magnetic fields.”
The team’s results introduce a new technique that can be used to position many types of atom in close proximity. They also show that atoms, placed close enough together, can exhibit interesting quantum phenomena, that could be harnessed to build new quantum materials, and potentially, magnetically-driven atomic systems for quantum computers.
“We are really bringing super-resolution methods to the field, and it will become a general tool for doing quantum simulations,” Ketterle says. “There are many variants possible, which we are working on.”
This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.
MIT physicists developed a technique to arrange atoms (represented as spheres with arrows) in much closer proximity than previously possible, down to 50 nanometers. The group plans to use the method to manipulate atoms into configurations that could generate the first purely magnetic quantum gate — a key building block for a new type of quantum computer. In this image, the magnetic interaction is represented by the colorful lines.
VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.
With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.
“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”
With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.
“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”
The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:
Analog Devices
Edwards
Fujikura
IBM Research
Lam Research
Lockheed Martin
NC
NEC
Raith
Shell
UpNano
MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.
A group of VIAVI Solutions employees took a tour inside the cleanroom of MIT.nano last fall to familiarize themselves with the facility and MIT's environment for research and innovation.
MIT has a rich history of productive collaboration between the arts and the sciences, anchored by the conviction that these two conventionally opposed ways of thinking can form a deeply generative symbiosis that serves to advance and humanize new technologies.
This ethos was made tangible when the Bauhaus artist and educator György Kepes established the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) within the Department of Architecture in 1967. CAVS has since evolved into the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, which fosters close links to multiple other programs, centers, and labs at MIT. Class 4.373/4.374 (Creating Art, Thinking Science), open to undergraduates and master’s students of all disciplines as well as certain students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), is one of the program’s most innovative offerings, proposing a model for how the relationship between art and science might play out at a time of exponential technological growth.
Now in its third year, the class is supported by an Interdisciplinary Class Development Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) and draws upon the unparalleled resources of MIT.nano; an artist’s high-tech toolbox for investigating the hidden structures and beauty of our material universe.
High ambitions and critical thinking
The class was initiated by Tobias Putrih, lecturer in ACT, and is taught with the assistance of Ardalan SadeghiKivi MArch ’23, and Aubrie James SM ’24. Central to the success of the class has been the collaboration with co-instructor Vladimir Bulović, the founding director of MIT.nano and Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology, who has positioned the facility as an open-access resource for the campus at large — including MIT’s community of artists. “Creating Art, Thinking Science” unfolds the 100,000 square feet of cleanroom and lab space within the Lisa T. Su Building, inviting participating students to take advantage of cutting-edge equipment for nanoscale visualization and fabrication; in the hands of artists, devices for discovering nanostructures and manipulating atoms become tools for rendering the invisible visible and deconstructing the dynamics of perception itself.
The expansive goals of the class are tempered by an in-built criticality. “ACT has a unique position as an art program nested within a huge scientific institute — and the challenges of that partnership should not be underestimated,” reflects Putrih. “Science and art are wholly different knowledge systems with distinct historical perspectives. So, how do we communicate? How do we locate that middle ground, that third space?”
An evolving answer, tested and developed throughout the partnership between ACT and MIT.nano, involves a combination of attentive mentorship and sharing of artistic ideas, combined with access to advanced technological resources and hands-on practical training.
“MIT.nano currently accommodates more than 1,200 individuals to do their work, across 250 different research groups,” says Bulović. “The fact that we count artists among those is a matter of pride for us. We’ve found that the work of our scientists and technologists is enhanced by having access to the language of art as a form of expression — equally, the way that artists express themselves can be stretched beyond what could previously be imagined, simply by having access to the tools and instruments at MIT.nano.”
A playground for experimentation
True to the spirit of the scientific method and artistic iteration, the class is envisioned as a work in progress — a series of propositions and prototypes for how dialogue between scientists and artists might work in practice. The outcomes of those experiments can now be seen installed in the first and second floor galleries at MIT.nano. As part of the facility’s five-year anniversary celebration, the class premiered an exhibition showcasing works created during previous years of “Creating Art, Thinking Science.”
Visitors to the exhibition, “zero.zerozerozerozerozerozerozerozeroone” (named for the numerical notation for one nanometer), will encounter artworks ranging from a minimalist silicon wafer produced with two-photon polymerization (2PP) technology (“Obscured Invisibility,” 2021, Hyun Woo Park), to traces of an attempt to make vegetable soup in the cleanroom using equipment such as a cryostat, a fluorescing microscope, and a Micro-CT scanner (“May I Please Make You Some Soup?,” 2022, Simone Lasser).
These works set a precedent for the artworks produced during the fall 2023 iteration of the class. For Ryan Yang, in his senior year studying electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, the chance to engage in open discussion and experimental making has been a rare opportunity to “try something that might not work.” His project explores the possibilities of translating traditional block printing techniques to micron-scale 3D-printing in the MIT.nano labs.
Yang has taken advantage of the arts curriculum at MIT at an early stage in his academic career as an engineer; meanwhile, Ameen Kaleem started out as a filmmaker in New Delhi and is now pursuing a master’s degree in design engineering at Harvard GSD, cross-registered at MIT.
Kaleem’s project models the process of abiogenesis (the evolution of living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances) by bringing living moss into the MIT.nano cleanroom facilities to be examined at an atomic scale. “I was interested in the idea that, as a human being in the cleanroom, you are both the most sanitized version of yourself and the dirtiest thing in that space,” she reflects. “Drawing attention to the presence of organic life in the cleanroom is comparable to bringing art into spaces where it might not otherwise exist — a way of humanizing scientific and technological endeavors.”
Consciousness, immersion, and innovation
The students draw upon the legacies of landmark art-science initiatives — including international exhibitions such as “Cybernetic Serendipity” (London ICA, 1968), the “New Tendencies” series (Zagreb, 1961-73), and “Laboratorium” (Antwerp, 1999) — and take inspiration from the instructors’ own creative investigations of the inner workings of different knowledge systems. “In contemporary life, and at MIT in particular, we’re immersed in technology,” says Putrih. “It’s the nature of art to reveal that to us, so that we might see the implications of what we are producing and its potential impact.”
By fostering a mindset of imagination and criticality, combined with building the technical skills to address practical problems, “Creating Art, Thinking Science” seeks to create the conditions for a more expansive version of technological optimism; a culture of innovation in which social and environmental responsibility are seen as productive parameters for enriched creativity. The ripple effects of the class might be years in the making, but as Bulović observes while navigating the exhibition at MIT.nano, “The joy of the collaboration can be felt in the artworks.”
Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.
In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.
The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.
“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”
Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.
“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.
Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.
The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.
While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.
“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”
The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.
These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.
The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.
That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.
An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.
The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”
There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.
“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”
“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”
The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
A team of MIT researchers and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices. Team members include Madeleine Laitz, left, and lead author Dane deQuilettes.
While walking with a metal detector this spring, 22-year-old archeology student Gustav Bruunsgaard uncovered a hoard of silver that dates back to the Viking Age. The sparkly find has links to the British Isles, Ukraine, and Russia.
According to a translated statement from the Moesgaard Museum in Højbjerg, Denmark, the student from Denmark’s Aarhus University was walking in a field in Elsted, north of Aarhus. When the metal detector beeped loudly, Bruunsgaard grabbed a small shovel and uncovered a small silver bangle. He returned to the site a few days later and found six more bangles. Assessment from both Danish and international experts revealed that they date back to the early Viking Age (about 793 to 1066 CE), shortly after the foundation of the Viking Age city of Aarhus or Aros. Experts believe that it was made in Southern Scandinavia, likely Denmark.
Vikings had a fairly complex economic system. Recently, a new interpretation of an inscription on the Swedish Forsa Ring gave economic historians some new insights into how money and debts were handled at this time. Some of these hefty sums could be up to $9,610 today, but it is not clear what offense the fines covered.
During the Viking Age, silver like the rings uncovered in Elsted was a measure of value. The metal was a way to make payments and a type of collateral that demonstrated an owner’s financial means. The seven total bracelets that Bruunsgaard found weigh just over a pound and archaeological experts estimate that they would have had a significant value.
The coiled ring is a type of silver that originally came from present day Russia or Ukraine which was imitated in the Nordics. The three band-shaped, stamped rings are a type of South Scandinavian design that inspired bangles in present day Ireland, where they became very common. The three smooth bangles are a rare form of jewelry, but have been found in Scandinavia and England.
“The Elsted farm treasure is a fantastically interesting find from the Viking Age, which connects Aarhus with Russia and Ukraine in the east and the British Isles in the west,” Moesgaard Museum historian Kasper H. Andersen said in a statement. “In this way, the find emphasizes how Aarhus was a central hub in the Viking world, which went all the way from the North Atlantic to Asia.”
Visitors to the Moesgaard Museum can now see the silver on exhibit.
In the throes of scorching summer and the dead of winter, electric and gas bills get expensive. Climate control is the biggest single power suck, making up more than half of all energy used in most homes. It’s bad for your wallet and the planet, and the cost makes staying comfortable difficult for many. There are lots of ways to make your home more efficient, from switching out old appliances for heat pumps or installing double-pane windows–but these options are big, expensive upgrades. It costs thousands of dollars to replace windows and HVAC systems.
Yet there’s a deceptively easy and much more affordable way to cut back on your heating and cooling costs, and it’s likely accessible even for renters: Reconsider your window coverings. Through insulation and control over radiant heat from sunlight, window coverings have the power to keep heat in or out, depending on the season. There are products to fit most budgets, and lots of what’s out there is likely better than the familiar, plastic or metal Venetian blinds or ill-fitting curtains that hang in most homes. One type of covering in particular, the cellular shade, is an unsung, energy efficient hero, according to multiple analyses from national labs.
Why windows?
First off, some necessary explanation. All the things that separate a building’s inside from the outside are collectively referred to as the “building envelope.” This term encapsulates doors, walls, windows, the foundation, and the roof. Altogether, that barrier is enormously important for indoor thermal efficiency, says Robert Hart, a technology researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). “An envelope-first approach reduces the need for energy in the first place,” he explains. If you’re able to effectively keep the outside out, then you’ll have to put way less work into making your home comfortable when the weather isn’t.
The biggest and most easily adjusted source of thermal flux within the matrix of materials that make up a building is generally the transparent, glass windows. “Windows tend to be the largest aspect of building envelope that you can focus on,” says Christian Kaltreider, a building energy research engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Yet most people opt for the window coverings that are already there or go for style over function. By doing so, they miss out on energy savings.
Efficiency researchers and engineers have tested all manner of window coverings, combinations, and use decisions in experimental houses around the country. Though many variables count towards power consumption, the right shades make a big difference.
The benefit of cellular shades
Adding a honeycomb or cellular shade (a style of fabric covering designed with one or more layers of air pockets between the material) can reduce heating costs in the winter by as much as 9 percent, compared with vinyl Venetian blinds, according to a 2018 PNNL report. Given that heating alone constitutes between 25 and 47 percent of home energy use, a 9 percent reduction isn’t trivial. Energy costs vary widely by state, home size, and appliances, but if you live somewhere with cold winters, you can expect to save around $10 a month on gas and electricity. In the summer, the potential benefit is even larger: up to 25 percent reductions in cooling cost in the best-case scenario, and up to 15 percent savings compared with Venetian blinds in a day-to-day use scenario.
“For ease of implementation… and bang for your buck, cellular shades are generally going to be your best bet,” says Kaltreider.
A 2022 analysis from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) found even more promising results. In winter, cellular shades can save up to 20 percent on heating costs, compared with blinds, per that assessment. In summer, ORNL researchers determined cooling savings were also up to 15 percent. Mahabir Bhandari, a co-author on that study and an efficiency and buildings researcher at ORNL, agrees that cellular shades are one of the most affordable and accessible options for boosting home energy efficiency. “You can go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and easily get whatever kind you want,” he says. Most are easily self-installed. The least expensive versions start around $25.
Simple alternatives
Not all cellular shades are created equal. Some are more transparent, others blackout opaque. They come in single and multi-layered versions, are made of different materials, and have variations in how they’re controlled–from fancy, automated kinds to your standard pull-down ones. Choosing one requires balancing personal needs (like privacy and light filtering) with budget and preference. More opaque, multi-layered shades will be more insulating and prevent more heat exchange, but they’ll also keep more light out in the summer. It’s all a trade-off, Hart says. Energy savings “really depend on the specific product,” he notes, and cellular shades aren’t the only option–but they are a good one.
Window quilts are another effective, seasonal alternative, says Bhandari. External shade structures like awnings, if you’re able to install them, can do a lot in the hot months and climates, note Hart and Kaltreider. And storm windows, secondary panes of glass added to existing window frames, are another great way to reduce heating and cooling costs that exist somewhere between the affordability of swapping out your shades and the expense of getting entirely new windows installed. All three efficiency experts recommended storm windows for their ability to minimize air leakage. Even just a simple tube of caulk can help fill gaps and reduce energy losses, says Bhandari.
How to choose the right shade
With so many variables and products to consider, online tools like this one, which Hart helped to develop, can help users narrow it down. You can also search for specific products through the website of the Attachments Energy Rating Council, a non-profit that offers comparable information about different window covering features.
No matter what you choose, the way you use it changes the outcome. “Operating [window coverings] smartly gives you the most benefit, no matter what shade,” says Hart. If you install a blackout cellular shade and then leave it up all the time, there’s no point, he explains. Investing in “efficient” coverings only pays off if you heed the operation advice, which is mostly common sense. And even the coverings you already have can be deployed to good effect.
Let the sun in if you want heat and keep it out if you don’t. Prioritize west and south facing windows, which can be the biggest sources of manipulatable heat gain. If it’s cooler outside than in during summer nights, leaving shades open can help heat to dissipate through the glass. In winter, leave your shades open on sunny days to catch warmth. When the sun isn’t shining, think about drawn shades as a means to keep heat from leaking out.
Your window coverings are more than just home decor; They’re a tool. Use them to slash your energy bill.
Scientists have previously experimented with using cone snail venoms for creating less addictive opioid alternatives and new diabetes treatments. In 2016, scientists unlocked the structure of a fast-acting insulin that the snails use to stun their prey; a similar structure could be used to create an insulin that works faster in humans. In the new study, consomatin also exhibited enough precision to target single types of molecules. Researchers hope that drugs could be developed with the same amount of precision.
“Venomous animals have, through evolution, fine-tuned venom components to hit a particular target in the prey and disrupt it,” study co-author and University of Utah biochemist Helena Safavi said in a statement. “If you take one individual component out of the venom mixture and look at how it disrupts normal physiology, that pathway is often really relevant in disease.”
The team looked at the human hormone somatostatin that prevents the levels of blood sugar in the body from rising to dangerously high levels. The cone snail toxin consomatin also keeps blood sugar levels from increasing, but uses that as a way to stun and kill its prey. However, the team found that consomatin is more chemically stable and longer-lasting than the human hormone. This makes it a particularly promising blueprint for new drugs and treatment.
In the study, the team looked at one of the most toxic marine cone snail–the geography cone. They are found along reefs in the Pacific and Indo-Pacific, where the snails stun and eat small fish. The team measured how the cone snail’s consomatin interacts with somatostatin’s targets in human cells in a dish. They found that consomatin mingles with one of the same proteins that somatostatin does. While human somatostatin directly interacts with several proteins, consomatin only works with one. This fine-tuned targeting means that the cone snail toxin can affect blood sugar levels and hormones, but not hit the other molecules around it.
According to the team, the cone snail toxin can hit its targets even more precisely than most specific synthetic drugs designed to regulate hormone levels. However, in its current form, the consomatin’s effects on blood sugar could make it dangerous to use to treat diabetes in humans. Studying its structure could help researchers design drugs for endocrine disorders that have fewer side effects in the future.
Earth’s chemists
Consomatin and somatostatin share an evolutionary history. Over millions of years, the cone snail turned its own hormone into a weapon. Importantly, consomatin doesn’t work alone. A 2022 study found that cone snail venom also includes another toxin which resembles insulin. This lowers blood sugar levels so quickly that the cone snail’s prey becomes unresponsive. Consomatin will then keep blood sugar levels from recovering, and the prey will ultimately die.
“Cone snails are just really good chemists,” study co-author and University of Utah postdoctoral researcher Ho Yan Yeung said in a statement. “We think the cone snail developed this highly selective toxin to work together with the insulin-like toxin to bring down blood glucose to a really low level.”
Since several parts of the cone snail’s venom target blood sugar regulation, the venom may have other molecules with similar functions, including regulating glucose properties. A better understanding of the process at the molecular level could then be used to design better medications.
Want to hunt for black holes, but lack access to a mountaintop observatory or deep-space telescope? There’s an app for that—and you can help out astronomers by using it.
Developed by the Dutch Black Hole Consortium, an interdisciplinary research project based in the Netherlands, Black Hole Finder is a free program available both on smartphones and as a desktop website. After reviewing a quick tutorial, all you need to do is study images taken by BlackGEM, a telescope array in Northern Chile tasked with searching the skies for cosmic events called kilonovas. Although launched in March 2024, as Space.com noted on August 19, the project’s recently expanded from just English and Dutch to support Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian.
Due to the sometimes very high number of transients we have in one night we decided to make things simpler. Everyone who does more than 1000 transients will be granted the Super User status. After that you can help us do a follow up. The follow up process has also been updated. We disabled it a while ago as we were requesting a lot of follow-ups. So many that we ran out of telescope time at LCO. We now have new telescope time available and based on the brightness of the transient you will request a different follow up. Once you reach Super User status you will receive a notification, the tutorial becomes available for you and you can requests follow-ups for transients that are less than 16 hours old.
Examples of verified kilonova images. Credit: Dutch Black Hole Consortium
Formed during the collision of a neutron star and a black hole, kilonovas generate a blinding—but brief—burst of electromagnetic radiation, which sometimes also results in the creation of a stellar-mass black hole. Although 1,000 times brighter than a regular nova, kilonovas are between 1/10th and 1/100th the brightness of their much more well-known relatives, supernovas. This can make them difficult to spot, especially given their comparatively short lifespans. Each accurately identified kilonova offers astronomers a potential location to study further for evidence of newly formed black holes. But given there are thousands of images to peruse and less than 40 people in the Dutch Black Hole Consortium, the organization could use some citizen scientist volunteers.
After loading up the app, users are presented with a trio of grainy, black-and-white images of a single focal point—the newest available photo, a reference picture of that same region, and an overlay image displaying the difference between the first two photos. A real kilonova is characterized by a few key details. First off, they are round, extremely white shapes roughly 5-10 pixels in diameter. Comparing the new and reference photos, each kilonova’s brightness can vary in either image, such as fading, growing brighter, completely disappearing, and becoming newly visible.
False positives, however, are pretty identifiable based on their tells. No matter their cause—cosmic-ray interference, reflections, or data processing error—they aren’t rounded like kilonovas, don’t fall within the 5-10 pixel range, and often appear stretched or distorted. After examining each set, users then click whether or not their potential kilonova is “Real” or “Bogus,” and move on to the next entry. Don’t worry, though, if you’re stumped on a particular example, you can simply select “Unknown” to hedge your bets. Black Hole Finder even debuted a new phase on August 1 that opens up the possibility of becoming a “Super User” after reviewing 1,000 or more image sets. Once attained, Super Users can request the newest obtained follow-up images to review.
There’s no high score or prize payout to using the Black Hole Finder, but the knowledge that you are contributing to humanity’s understanding of astrophysics and the cosmos arguably beats bragging rights any day of the week.
Among the numerous snakes on planet Earth, pythons are well known for their incredible ability to swallow their prey whole. Some python species have been spotted taking down deer, cows, and even alligators, but they don’t generally eat every single day the way that most animals do. While scientists have observed their eating patterns for decades, less is known about how this affects their hearts. It turns out that to eat this way, pythons rapidly increase their heart rate, body mass, and energy output just for a meal.
In the wild, pythons must often go for months at a time without eating due to food scarcity. When they do eventually find food, they will really go for it and often eat a meal that can equal their body mass.
“It [is] crucial to their survival to be able to have long fasting periods that are not harmful to them and to be able to consume these large meals intermittently,” study co-author and University of Colorado biologist Leslie Leinwand tells Popular Science. “One adaptive response to such a lifestyle is that almost all of the organs in their body get much larger in the first week after such meal consumption and after the meal is consumed, their organs shrink back to a little bigger than their fasting size.”
To learn more about the effects that their feeding style has on their bodies, Leinwand and the team compared the hearts of ball pythons (Python regius). One group of pythons had fasted for 28 days. The other group ate a meal of whole rats that were equivalent to a quarter of the snake’s body mass.
A ball python from Leinwand’s lab. CREDIT: Yuxiao Tan.
In the fed pythons, the cardiac myofibrils–individual units in cardiac muscle cells that help the heart contract–had generated more force to eat. The cardiac myofibrils also relaxed more slowly and were less tense than myofibrils in the hearts of fasted pythons. The chromatin in the heart muscle cells that alters how genes respond to physiological stress in the fed pythons was also less condensed in the fed pythons compared to fasted pythons.
The cardiac ventricle tissues that help the heart pump blood were also less stiff in the fed pythons than the fasted ones. According to the study, it only took 24 hours after eating a large meal for the python heart to become much less stiff.
Stiffness in the heart can be troublesome in animal hearts because it can prevent blood from flowing properly. In humans, cardiac amyloidosis or “stiff heart syndrome” can lead to abnormal heartbeats and faulty heart signals. For pythons, their hearts appear to be avoiding the pitfalls of a stiff heart. Their hearts become much more stretchy while still producing the immense forces required to eat their prey.
“We have shown that this organ size increase is what we call physiological–or healthy,” says Leinwend. “In the heart, such an increase is what is seen in highly conditioned athletes.”
However, there is still more research needed to determine how this can be used to help human hearts.
“If we could apply the biology of pythons that do this healthy thing in their hearts, it could be very helpful to people with heart disease,” says Leinwend. “There is a lot of fascinating biology in the world that can lead to better understanding and treatment of disease.”
The dodo is one of the most iconic—and misunderstood—extinct animals. Four hundred years after its extinction, the popular narrative remains that the flightless bird was simply too dumb, slow, and ungainly to withstand modern society’s arrival to its native island of Mauritius. But researchers are seeking justice for the unfairly maligned dodo and its extinct relative, the solitaire, by synthesizing centuries of scientific literature, historical accounts, and biological information into a single work providing clarification and revised taxonomic records.
In a study published in the August 2024 issue of Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, a team collaborating between the University of Southampton, Oxford University, and the Natural History Museum attempted to correct the record for Raphus cucullatus. According to an accompanying August 16 announcement, the paper represents “the most comprehensive review of the taxonomy of the Dodo and its closest relative, the Rodriguez Island Solitaire.” Neil Gostling, the study’s supervising author and University of Southampton professor of evolution and paleobiology, argues that most people’s idea of the dodo isn’t simply inaccurate—it ignores the larger issues behind its extinction.
“If you picture the dodo, you picture… this dumpy, slightly stupid bird that kind of deserved to go extinct. That’s not the case,” Gostling says in a university video profile. “It was neither fat nor stupid, it was adapted to the ecosystem in the isle of Mauritius that it had been living in for millions of years.”
What the dodo and its sister species, the Rodrigues solitaire, were not adapted for, however, was the violent, colonizing force of modern society. Dutch sailors first encountered the dodo in 1598 after arriving on the island, located roughly 705 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Having evolved without any significant predators, the birds had no instinctual wariness of humans, making them easy prey for both hungry ship crews and international trade. In less than a century, the dodo was wiped out—but not due to their popularity on menus or in zoos.
The dodo’s main enemies weren’t humans themselves, but everything they brought with them while establishing a provisioning port for the Dutch East India Company on Mauritius. Livestock such as pigs trampled the ground birds’ nests, while rats devoured their eggs and small chicks. Meanwhile, dogs, cats, and other invasive animals preyed on the birds themselves while also competing for the island’s limited food sources. By 1662, the dodo was done. Barely a century later, the Rodrigues solitaire followed it into extinction. And with just 64 years of human documentation of the former, it didn’t take long before bird fact blended with bird fiction.
The dodo was critical to its native ecosystem. Credit: Julian Pender Hume
“The dodo was the first living thing that was recorded as being present and then disappeared,” Gostling said, adding that before their extinction, “it hadn’t been thought possible” that human beings could exert so much influence on the environment.
By the early 19th century, some circles even considered both the dodo and the solitaire “mythological beasts,” added Mark Young, a University of Southampton professor specializing in human transport and paper lead author. During the 1800’s, however, Victorian scientists finally proved both bird species did once exist. But over time, the dodo’s image transitioned largely from an emblem of humanity’s often disastrous environmental impact, to an inaccurate, misunderstood example of “survival of the fittest.”
Meanwhile, more than 400 years of subsequent taxonomic confusion led experts to debate just how many dodo and solitaire species originally existed—some biologists argued in favor of three separate variations, while others contended as many as five once roamed the region. These possibilities included the Nazarene Dodo, the White Dodo, and the White Solitaire, among others.
But after a painstaking review of four centuries’ worth of scientific writings and physical remains—including the only surviving dodo soft tissue—Gostling, Young, and their teammates believe they have some answers. Most notably, there were only ever the two species, dodo and solitaire, and they belonged to the columbid family along with pigeons and doves.
As for its “dumpy” reputation, a closer look at its anatomy indicates the dodo was far from a clumsy, slow-moving bird. Skeletal remains studied by the team show that the dodo possessed a tendon in its leg almost the same diameter as the bone itself. This feature can be found today in other avian species known for their speed and climbing agility, indicating the dodo was actually an incredibly fast and active animal.
“Even four centuries later, we have so much to learn about these remarkable birds,” Young said. “The few written accounts of live Dodos say it was a fast-moving animal that loved the forest.”
Researchers believe that further reevaluations of the dodo and the solitaire will not only help dispel inaccurate myths, but refocus their legacies. Ultimately, their extinction isn’t the result of any evolutionary failings, but rather the effects of humans when we are at our most environmentally reckless.
“Dodos held an integral place in their ecosystems. If we understand them, we might be able to support ecosystem recovery in Mauritius, perhaps starting to undo the damage that began with the arrival of humans nearly half a millennium ago,” Gostling explained, adding that, “There are no other birds alive today like these two species of giant ground dove.”
When orb-weaving spiders (Araneus ventricosus) trap male fireflies in their webs, they manipulate the flashing signals to mimic the typical flashes made by female fireflies. These feigned flashes then lure other males into the web where they become the spider’s next meal. However, we still don’t know if the spider’s venom or a bite itself is manipulating the firefly’s signal.
The discovery arose after Xinhua Fu, a study co-author and entomologist at Huazhong Agricultural University in China observed several male fireflies entangled in orb-weaving spider webs while working in the field. He rarely saw a female firefly trapped in a web and additional field trips revealed this sexually skewed pattern. Fu hypothesized that the spiders may be somehow manipulating the fireflies’ behavior to attract others.
To test this hypothesis that the spiders are manipulating the firefly’s signal, he recruited behavioral ecologists Daiqin Li and Shichang Zhang from Hubei University. The team conducted field experiments where they observed the firefly signals and spider behavior. The observations showed that the spider’s web captured male fireflies more often when the spider was there, compared to when it was away from the web.
After further analysis, they found that the signals created by male fireflies in webs with spiders present looked more like the signals made by free flying females. The trapped males used single-pulse signals that use only one lantern and not both.
An orb-weaving spider (Araneus ventricosus) with two ensnared male fireflies (Abscondita terminalis), one of which has a luminescent lantern (right). CREDIT: Xinhua Fu.
Interestingly, the ensnared male fireflies very rarely lured other males when they were alone in the web and the spider was not around. This suggests that the males were not altering their flashes as a kind of distress signal. The team believes that the spiders are altering the firefly’s signal.
“While the eyes of orb-web spiders typically support limited spatial acuity, they rely more on temporal acuity rather than spatial acuity for discriminating flash signals,” Li said in a statement. “Upon detecting the bioluminescent signals of ensnared male fireflies, the spider deploys a specialized prey-handling procedure involving repeated wrap-bite attacks.”
According to the team, the experiment reveals that some animals are capable of using indirect yet dynamic signaling to go after a very specific category of prey in nature. The team also believes that there could be many other undescribed examples of this kind of mimicry in nature waiting to be uncovered. Predators could be using sound, pheromones, or other means, and not just visual signals to fool their prey. This deceptive ability is not exclusive to the animal kingdom either. The South African daisy appears to trick flies into mating with it and depositing pollen.
“We propose that in response to seeing the ensnared male fireflies’ bioluminescent signals, the spider deployed a specialized-prey handling procedure based on repeated wrap bite attacks,” the team wrote in the study. “We also hypothesize that the male firefly’s neurotransmitters may generate a female-like flashing pattern.”
However, additional study is needed to determine what exactly is changing in the trapped firefly’s flashing pattern.
Kristy Murray was there at the very beginning. In 1999, the epidemiologist and tropical medicine expert, now a professor of pediatrics at Emory University, was part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) team responding to the initial U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus in New York City. “It was my very first outbreak assignment,” Murray tells Popular Science. Thirty cases of unexplained encephalitis had been reported in the city, and it was up to Murray and her colleagues to figure out why. The cause was initially baffling. People had symptoms of paralysis, “which is very unusual to see in encephalitis,” she explains, and older adults comprised the majority of those worst off, despite viral paralysis often being most common in children. None of the patients had any relation or apparent connection to one another.
To figure out what was happening, Murray says she and the rest of the CDC team acted as “disease detectives.” The first clue came from interviewing family members of those who were sick. “The one thing that kept coming up is that many of them were active, and spent a lot of time outside,” says Muray. From there, and through home visits, a CDC entomologist narrowed the potential sources down to Culex mosquitoes. More false leads and confusing test results finally gave way to a West Nile virus identification, after birds in the Bronx Zoo also began to fall ill with encephalitis. In total, the investigation took about three weeks, says Murray.
Though the initial mystery was resolved relatively quickly (“especially for 1999,” notes Murray), uncertainties surrounding West Nile have lingered. When and where the worst outbreaks will occur remains unpredictable. Exactly why some people have no symptoms, while other infections prove deadly is unclear. There’s still no available vaccine or proven treatment.
It’s been 25 years since the mosquito borne virus was first found in the U.S.. In that quarter century, the disease has spread from New York City across all 48 contiguous states. “It’s everywhere–all over the map, literally,” says Murray. “There is no place in the [lower 48] where you can really hide from this pathogen.” Each year, 2024 included, West Nile virus cases are reported, with a peak between late July and October. Here’s what to know as this year’s season unfolds, what we still don’t know, and how experts recommend you protect yourself.
How does West Nile virus spread?
Birds are the primary host and reservoir for West Nile virus. The pathogen is mainly passed from host to host via mosquito bites. Culex mosquitos, a genus found worldwide and especially common in major cities, are the primary vector, transmitting the virus between birds or from birds to humans or horses. People and other mammals infected with the illness don’t produce a high enough concentration of viral particles to act as a reservoir and subsequently infect additional mosquitos. “Humans are what we call a dead end host,” says Gonzalo Vazquez-Propkopec, a disease ecologist and professor of environmental science at Emory University. Only a small proportion of cases are transferred between humans through blood transfusions and organ transplants.
Yet though we can’t generally pass the virus on to each other, mosquitos do plenty of work to spread it themselves. “It’s the most widespread viral vector borne disease in the United States, without a doubt,” says Murray. “It far surpasses any other.” Other non-viral vector-borne illnesses, like tick-borne Lyme’s disease, may affect more people each year. But Lyme is a bacterial disease with an effective antibiotic treatment. There is no approved therapeutic for treating West Nile.
Is 2024 a bad year for West Nile?
The CDC tracks West Nile cases, along with other arthropod-borne illnesses, through ArboNET. As of August 13, the federal agency has confirmed 174 West Nile cases in 30 different states, with double digit numbers in Texas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Arizona. Of these, 113 have been “neuroinvasive,” or the more severe variant of infection that causes neurological symptoms like encephalitis (brain swelling), or meningitis, which is swelling of the membrane surrounding the brain. So far, eight of those reported cases have proved deadly.
If you look at past years’ West Nile case numbers, fewer than 200 cases nationwide may not sound like much. However, it’s relatively early in the season and each confirmed case at this point likely represents many more hidden ones, says Murray.
In general, cases are vastly underreported because many cases are asymptomatic and many symptomatic infections are mild and difficult to distinguish from other viral infections, she explains. Fever, a rash on the torso, fatigue, aches, and malaise are how the majority of symptomatic West Nile cases present. Often, those infected don’t seek any treatment or testing. A small proportion of infections, less than one percent, turn more serious, affecting the brain and nervous system and becoming “neuroinvasive.” These cases can be life threatening. Survivors of neuroinvasive illness often end up with lifelong disabilities, says Kiran Thakur, a neurology professor at Columbia University who studies neuroinfectious disease.
Yet even those severe cases are undercounted because providers don’t always test and tests don’t always come back positive, she says. In 2022, 827 confirmed neuroinvasive cases were reported to the CDC, but the agency estimates that between 24,810 and 57,890 neuroinvasive infections occurred. Up to 15 percent of neuroinvasive cases are estimated to be fatal, notes Thakur.
Delays in testing and reporting also mean that it takes time for the CDC to learn about a confirmed case. “There’s a lag in reporting cases, typically by about two weeks,” Murray says, and we’re just getting into the peak transmission time now.
Given those caveats, “we are seeing a few more cases than we [usually] would at this time of year, and some earlier cases,” says Erin Staples, a physician and medical epidemiologist with CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases. The biggest wave of illness onset tends to come at the end of August and beginning of September, Staples says.
However, that doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed to have a terrible West Nile season nationwide. Predicting how this year’s season will progress over the next couple of months “is very difficult,” Staples tells Popular Science. Trends can shift rapidly and lots of variables contribute to an outbreak’s severity.
Year-to-year, West Nile levels and epicenters vary a lot. The virus may spike in the Northeast one season and then the Southwest the next. In 2003, there was a major outbreak, another came in 2012. As a result, experts consider it “cyclic”, peaking in waves that come about once a decade, says Vazquez-Prokopec. “It seems, roughly, that we’re due for another spike,” he adds.
Climate and rainfall are important. Warm temperatures and the right level of moisture can contribute to a mosquito boom. Bird immunity levels also play a role, he says. If most birds in a region have antibodies and are avoiding illness in a given year, then there will also be fewer human cases, as the reservoir is smaller, Vazquez-Prokopec explains. “It’s a very complex cycle,” he adds– which makes accurate forecasting hard.
Regardless of what unfolds in the next couple of months, Staples notes that right now is a critical time to take preventative measures.
How can we manage West Nile virus?
Through surveillance of mosquito populations and birds, cities keep tabs on the viral threat year to year. In addition, many municipalities also treat for Culex mosquitos with pesticide sprays dispersed from fogging vehicles and by targeting the aquatic larvae. Mosquitoes need water to breed, so applying insecticide to drainage ditches and catchment basins can help reduce their populations without inadvertently killing beneficial insects like pollinators, says Vazquez-Prokopec.
The CDC is researching preventative vaccines and antiviral treatments (and has been for years), says Staples–though the development process, which requires large scale human trials to prove efficacy, is challenging for such an unpredictable virus. A silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it made alternate pathways to FDA approval and licensure clearer, she adds.
But in the meantime, without a vaccine or medication to rely on, iIndividual people can mitigate their own risk by eliminating sources of standing moisture around their homes (ex: emptying buckets and kiddie pools). Then, there’s behavioral interventions.
“We have to exercise–not panic, but caution,” says Vazquez-Prokopec. Mosquitoes are more than a nuisance, they’re a public health problem, he says. So, he advises that people take earnest steps to avoid bites.
Insect repellents, specifically ones registered with the Environmental Protection Agency and recommended by the CDC, are a critical tool. Wearing loose fitting long sleeve shirts and pants helps to prevent bites as well. And people should be particularly mindful when going out around dusk and dawn when mosquitoes are most active. “I have a can of repellent by my front door and another by my back door, so I remember to [apply] before I walk outside,” says Staples.
It’s still not completely understood why some people become very sick while others have asymptomatic infections. However, some trends are clear and certain groups are known to be more vulnerable to severe West Nile virus. People who are immunocompromised, including those who take medications for autoimmune diseases, should be more vigilant, says Staples. People over the age of 50 are also at higher risk, says Murray. Severe neuroinvasive illness is more commonly reported among men, though that could be because men share a higher level of other risk factors, like working outdoors or comorbidities such as diabetes, notes Thakur. And ultimately, anyone can end up with a severe case.
West Nile virus may be benign for most people, and the worst consequences may be rare, but preventative steps are simple and accessible. When the stakes are so high, it’s best to take the risk seriously, says Thakur. Plus, the same strategies for avoiding West Nile will also help to minimize exposure to other vector borne diseases like Dengue or Powassan, Staples adds. ” “Another great reason to use your repellent,” she says.
Getting in the habit now will be good practice for our warming future, where we’ll all want to take biting bugs more seriously. Under climate change, mosquito seasons are likely to grow longer, and vector–borne illnesses, including West Nile, are set to spread into new regions where people have no prior exposure or immunity. As global warming progresses, “it’s a disease category I worry about a lot,” says Thakur.
Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science fiction to apps on your phone. But there’s another AI-influenced frontier that is developing rapidly and remains untamed: robotics. Can the technologies that have helped computers get smarter now bring similar improvements to the robots that will work...
Yonsei University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Lincoln University College, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and Ewha Womans University
In rural India, stormy weather, a lack of knowledge, and scant protections are combining to kill thousands every year, with climate change likely to raise the threat as lightning becomes more common.
Black Myth: Wukong was released today, and already it has set new records on Steam.
At the time of writing, the game is being played by 2.13 million concurrent users making it the best performing single-player game of all time by this metric.
It more than doubles the record Cyberpunk 2077 set when it launched in 2020, when it reached one million concurrent users within two hours of its debut. It has even passed the peak of another 2024 hit, Palworld, which VG247 reports topped out at 2.1 million concurrent users.
Developer Game Science has been asked to justify a document circulated to influencers and content creators that demanded coverage of Black Myth: Wukong did not include covid-19 references, "politics", or "feminist propaganda."
When the document first leaked online over the weekend, journalists were quick to point out that it did not match paperwork given to critics reviewing the game, leading some to assume it was fake.
However, further investigation by VideoGames.si and Forbes reporter Paul Tassi confirmed the document – circulated on behalf of Game Science by marketers Hero Games – was authentic.
Enlarge/ Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. "Ralph" refers to Steward's CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht. (credit: Getty | Suzanne Kreiter)
As the more than 30 hospitals in the Steward Health Care System scrounged for cash to cover supplies, shuttered pediatric and neonatal units, closed maternity wards, laid off hundreds of health care workers, and put patients in danger, the system paid out at least $250 million to its CEO and his companies, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
The newly revealed financial details bring yet more scrutiny to Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who, in 2020, took over majority ownership of Steward from the private equity firm Cerberus. De la Torre and his companies were reportedly paid at least $250 million since that takeover. In May, Steward, which has hospitals in eight states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Critics—including members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—allege that de la Torre and stripped the system's hospitals of assets, siphoned payments from them, and loaded them with debt, all while reaping huge payouts that made him obscenely wealthy.
Back in 2010, Gary Wolf, then the editor of Wired magazine, delivered a TED talk in Cannes called “the quantified self.” It was about what he termed a “new fad” among tech enthusiasts. These early adopters were using gadgets to monitor everything from their physiological data to their mood and even the number of nappies their children used.
Wolf acknowledged that these people were outliers—tech geeks fascinated by data—but their behavior has since permeated mainstream culture.
From the smartwatches that track our steps and heart rate, to the fitness bands that log sleep patterns and calories burned, these gadgets are now ubiquitous. Their popularity is emblematic of a modern obsession with quantification—the idea that if something isn’t logged, it doesn’t count.
Enlarge/ The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing. (credit: Astro Forge)
When I first spoke with space entrepreneurs Jose Acain and Matt Gialich a little more than two years ago, I wondered whether I would ever talk to them again.
That is not meant to be offensive; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that the business they entered into—mining asteroids for platinum and other precious metals—is a perilous one. To date, NASA and other space agencies have spent billions of dollars returning a few grams of rocky material from asteroids. Humanity has never visited a metal-rich asteroid, although that will finally change with NASA's $1.4 billion Psyche mission in 2029. And so commercial asteroid mining seems like a stretch, and indeed, other similarly minded startups have come and gone.
But it turns out that I did hear from Acain and Gialich again about their asteroid mining venture, AstroForge. On Tuesday the co-founders announced that they have successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding and shared plans for their next two missions. AstroForge has now raised a total of $55 million to date.
One of the odder propaganda phenomena in Russia, of late, is seemingly spontaneous groups of elderly Russian pensioners gathering outdoors and espousing some random bit of agitprop.
From a Western perspective, these are obviously staged and hilarious to behold. For example, last year a very earnest-looking group of elderly women and a few men urged Russia to "take back Alaska" in an attempt to preserve the United States from fascism. One of the women in the video also advocated for a military alliance with Mexico, saying, "In order to effectively fight fascism, we must establish military relations with Mexico to prevent the fascism from spreading further. We must form a military alliance with Mexico."
There are entire Telegram channels devoted to these "Putin's squads" videos, and you can find them on YouTube as well. It is not clear whether these "man on the street" videos are having any impact on Russian opinion, but evidently someone in the Kremlin believes they are helping to shape domestic opinions.
The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, the company said.
The German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit.
Within the last few months, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) delivered all three stages of its first rocket, named RFA One, to its launch site at SaxaVord Spaceport, located on Unst, one of the Shetland Islands and the northernmost inhabited island in the United Kingdom. The company is based in Augsburg, Germany.
With the country experiencing a relatively large summer wave of COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration is considering signing off on this year's strain-matched COVID-19 vaccines as soon as this week, according to a report by CNN that cited unnamed officials familiar with the matter.
Last year, the FDA gave the green light for the 2023–2024 COVID shots on September 11, close to the peak of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in that year's summer wave. This year, the summer wave began earlier and, by some metrics, is peaking at much higher levels than in previous years.
Currently, wastewater detection of SARS-CoV-2 shows "very high" virus levels in 32 states and the District of Columbia. An additional 11 states are listed as having "high" levels. Looking at trends, the southern and western regions of the country are currently reporting SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater that rival the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 winter waves, which both peaked at the very end of December.
In April, the National Library of France removed four 19th century books, all published in Great Britain, from its shelves because the covers were likely laced with arsenic. The books have been placed in quarantine for further analysis to determine exactly how much arsenic is present. It's part of an ongoing global effort to test cloth-bound books from the 19th and early 20th centuries because of the common practice of using toxic dyes during that period.
Chemists from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, have also been studying Victorian books from that university's library collection in order to identify and quantify levels of poisonous substances in the covers. They reported their initial findings this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver. Using a combination of spectroscopic techniques, they found that several books had lead concentrations more than twice the limit imposed by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
The Lipscomb effort was inspired by the University of Delaware's Poison Book Project, established in 2019 as an interdisciplinary crowdsourced collaboration between university scientists and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The initial objective was to analyze all the Victorian-era books in the Winterthur circulating and rare books collection for the presence of an arsenic compound called cooper acetoarsenite, an emerald green pigment that was very popular at the time to dye wallpaper, clothing, and cloth book covers. Book covers dyed with chrome yellow—favored by Vincent van Gogh—aka lead chromate, were also examined, and the project's scope has since expanded worldwide.
Enlarge/ The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California. (credit: Rocket Lab)
Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket.
These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.
Last November, the space agency confirmed the $79 million ESCAPADE mission will launch on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. With this piece of information, the opaque schedule for Blue Origin's long-delayed first New Glenn mission suddenly became more clear.
One of our favourite things is sharing the stories of amazing young people, volunteers, and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.
Recently, we had the pleasure of speaking with Isabel, a computer science teacher at Barton Peveril Sixth Form College in Eastleigh, England. She told us her fascinating journey from industry to education, along with how she is helping to make the tech space inviting to all.
From industry to the classroom: Isabel’s journey to encourage diversity in tech
Isabel’s path to working in the tech sector started with her early exposure to engineering thanks to her father’s career in telecoms.
“I find this is true for a lot of female engineers my age: you will find that their dad or their uncle was an engineer. I remember that when I made the decision to study engineering, my teachers asked me if I was sure that it was something I wanted to do.”
Isabel pursued a degree in engineering because she loved the technical aspects, and during her studies she found a passion for programming. She went to work as a software engineer in Hampshire, contributing to the development of 3G mobile phone technology.
Despite enjoying her career in tech, Isabel felt a strong pull towards teaching due to her long-standing involvement with youth groups and a desire to give back to the community.
“While I was at university in London, I took part in a scheme where we could go into local primary schools and help with their science teaching. At the time, I just thought this was my way of giving back, I hadn’t really thought of it as a career. But actually, after a while, I thought ‘I’m enjoying this programming, but I really liked helping the young kids as well’.”
The transition wasn’t easy, as Computer Science was not widely taught in schools at the time, but Isabel persevered, teaching IT and Media to her classes as well.
Once Isabel settled into her teaching role, she began thinking about how she could tackle a problem she noticed in the STEM field.
Championing diversity in tech
Having experienced first-hand what it was like to be the only woman in STEM spaces, Isabel’s commitment to diversity in technology is at the core of her teaching philosophy. She works hard to create an inclusive environment and a diversity of opportunities in her classroom, making sure girls feel encouraged to pursue careers in tech through exploring various enrichment activities.
Isabel focuses on enrichment activities that bridge the gap between academic learning and real-world application. She runs various projects and competitions, ensuring a balanced representation of girls in these initiatives, and gives her students the opportunity to participate in programs like the Industrial Cadets, Student Robotics, and Coolest Projects.
Isabel told us that she feels these opportunities provide essential soft skills that are crucial for success in any career.
“The A level environment is so academic; it is heavily focused on working on your own on very abstract topics. Having worked in industry and knowing the need to collaborate, I found that really hard. So I’ve always made sure to do lots of projects with my students where we actually work with real engineers, do real-world projects. I believe strongly in teaching soft skills like team working, project management, and time management.”
Harnessing trusted resources
A key resource in Isabel’s teaching toolkit is the Ada Computer Science platform. She values its reliability and the timely updates to the topics, which are crucial in a rapidly evolving subject like Computer Science.
She said she encourages both her students and fellow teachers, especially those who have retrained in Computer Science, to use the platform as a resource.
“Ada Computer Science is amazing. We know we can rely on saying to the students ‘look on Ada, the information will be correct’ because I trust the people creating the resources. And we even found ourselves as teachers double-checking things on there. We struggle to get Computer science teachers, so actually only two of us are Computer Science teachers, and the other three are Maths teachers we have trained up. To be able to say ‘if you are not sure about something, look on Ada’ is a really nice thing to have.”
The ongoing challenge and hope for the future
Despite her efforts, Isabel acknowledges that progress in getting more girls to pursue tech careers is slow. Many girls still view tech as an uninviting space and feel like they don’t belong when they find themselves as one of a few girls — if not the only one — in a class. But Isabel remains hopeful that continuous exposure and positive experiences can change these perceptions.
“I talk to students who are often the only girl in the class and they find that really hard. So, if at GCSE they are the only girl in the class, they won’t do [the subject] at A level. So, if we leave it until A level, it is almost too late. Because of this, I try as much as I can to get as many girls as possible onto my engineering enrichment projects to show them as many opportunities in engineering as possible early on.”
Her work with organisations like the UK Electronics Skills Foundation reflects her commitment to raising awareness about careers in electronics and engineering. Through her outreach and enrichment projects, Isabel educates younger students about the opportunities in these fields, hoping to inspire more girls to consider them as viable career paths.
Looking ahead
As new technology continues to be built, Isabel recognises the challenges in keeping up with rapid changes, especially with fields like artificial intelligence (AI). She stays updated through continuous learning and collaborating with her peers, and encourages her students to be adaptable and open to new developments. “The world of AI is both exciting and daunting,” she admits. “We need to prepare our students for a future that we can hardly predict.”
Isabel’s dedication to teaching, her advocacy for diversity, and her efforts to provide real-world learning opportunities make her an inspiring educator. Her commitment was recognised by the Era Foundation in 2023: Isabel was named as one of their David Clark Prize recipients. The award recognises those who “have gone above and beyond the curriculum to inspire students and showcase real-world engineering in the classroom”.
Isabel not only imparts technical knowledge — she inspires her students to believe in their potential, encouraging a new generation of diverse tech professionals.
If Isabel’s story has inspired you to encourage the next generation of young tech creators, check out the free teaching and training resources we provide to support your journey.
If you are working in Computer Science teaching for learners age 14 and up, take a look at how Ada Computer Science will support you.
Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this.
Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this.
Modern laptop computers have more processing power than ever, with many also offering features like long battery life, thin and light designs and… AI, I guess. And for the most part, laptops are versatile and powerful enough to serve as desktop replacements for most users. But there are a few areas where desktop hardware continues […]
PC Benchmark pro očekávaný AAA titul Black Myth Wukong je nyní k dispozici ke stažení ve službě Steam.
Black Myth Wukong, vyvinutý čínským studiem Game Science, je zcela nová IP hra se zaměřením na mechanismy akčních RPG. Hra vychází z čínského románu Journey to The West (Cesta na západ) a budete v ní ovládat „Osudem určeného“, který bude putovat po mýtické zemi a bojovat s velmi unikátními nepřáteli.
Hra se minulý týden dostala do stav GOLD a byla následována působivým trailerem, který nám dává ochutnat úžasnou vizuální stránku, kterou tato hra nabídne. Po technické stránce bude Black Myth Wukong velmi náročný na základě systémových požadavků, které vyžadují až RTX 4070 a RX 7800 XT pro Ultra kvalitu bez ray tracingu. Pro dosažení maximální kvality RT budete potřebovat výkonnější GPU, například GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER nebo vyšší. Požadavky na CPU jsou nominální s vývojáři doporučenými 6 a 8jádrovými čipy od AMD a Intelu (9. generace / Ryzen 5000).
Zdroj: Game Science
Pokud jde o nastavení grafiky, Black Myth Wukong má základní panel konfigurace zobrazení, který umožňuje měnit rozlišení, režim zobrazení, poměr stran, framerate-cap, V-Sync a Motion Blur. Nastavení grafiky nabízí podrobnější přizpůsobení, které má úplně nahoře možnost použít „Doporučené nastavení grafiky“, za níž následují možnosti konfigurace Super rozlišení.
Zdroj: Game Science
Hra podporuje všechny tři technologie Super Resolution od společností NVIDIA, AMD a Intel včetně DLSS, FSR a XeSS. K dispozici je také čtvrtá možnost „TSR“ (Temporal Super Resolution). Generování snímků lze použít s DLSS, FSR a TSR, ale zdá se, že karty NVIDIA v současné době nepodporují FSR Frame-Gen DLSS Frame-Gen funguje dobře.
Zdroj: Game Science
Kvalitu Super rozlišení lze nastavit pomocí posuvníku. Posuvník 100 % znamená, že vzorkování je aplikováno na nativní rozlišení, což je v podstatě DLAA/FSR AA/XeSS AA, zatímco posunutím posuvníku dolů se zobrazí předvolba odpovídající procentuálnímu podílu (Kvalita/Vyvážený/Výkon/Ultra výkon). Možnosti Ray Tracing se vztahují pouze na grafické procesory NVIDIA a jsou uvedeny jako „NVIDIA Full Ray Tracing“, protože karty NVIDIA je budou schopny spustit nejlépe. Nastavení RT „Very High“ umožňuje sledování cest, což má smysl u grafických procesorů NVIDIA vzhledem k jejich lepším hardwarovým možnostem RT.
Pokud je tato možnost povolena, můžete si vybrat z možností Nízká, Střední a Velmi vysoká. Zbytek jsou standardní nastavení kvality, kde je uvedeno „Cinematic“ pro nejlepší kvalitu. Uživatelé mohou ručně upravit různá nastavení, například vzdálenost pohledu, antialiasing, efekty následného zpracování, stíny, textury, vizuální efekty, vlasy, vegetaci, globální osvětlení a odrazy.
Nástroj také obsahuje proces předkompilování shaderů, který trvá přibližně 1-2 minuty. Vzhledem k tomu, že se jedná o titul pro Unreal Engine 5, můžeme očekávat, že u mnoha uživatelů Intelu dojde během tohoto procesu k pádům, a proto je nejlepší použít profily „Intel Baseline“ nebo prostě čipy podtaktovat či podvoltovat ručně a nechat proces dokončit. Doba načítání je malá, protože se kompilují pouze prostředky benchmarku, a ne celá hra.
About two weeks before its worldwide launch, Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong has completed development. The developer announced the same on Twitter while reaffirming the hack-and-slash title would “release as scheduled.”
“Right now, our entire team is working hard on the final stages of experiencing, testing, and deploying the game,” it said. However, it will release a new trailer on August 8th, 10 AM Beijing time (August 7th, 7 PM PT). It also asked players to refrain from leaking information or posting spoilers for “unreleased content.”
“We sincerely hope that all the mysteries and surprises of Black Myth: Wukong remain intact until the moment you embark on your journey. Your anticipation and trust given in the past four years are always remembered.”
Black Myth: Wukong launches on August 20th for PS5 and PC. Based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West, the title focuses on the Destined One, who battles many challenges. Though it has some Souls-lite mechanics, the protagonist can also transform into different enemies and bosses to unleash their moves. Check out our feature for things you should know before buying.
Unfortunately, the Xbox Series X/S version won’t be released on the same day. It was delayed for more polish, but rumors indicate that Game Science has some exclusivity agreement with PlayStation. Head here for more details.
Dear Destined Ones,
Thank you for your patience! We’re thrilled to announce that the full development of #BlackMythWukong is complete, and the game will be released as scheduled.😉
Right now, our entire team is working hard on the final stages of experiencing, testing, and… pic.twitter.com/KOpj6F6xtJ
Activision has published a 25-page white paper exploring the impact of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) on its multiplayer lobbies, determining that SBMM is better for all players.
As spotted by indie game developer and consultant Rami Ismail, the report – which can be read in full on Activision's official website – outlines an "amazing A/B test" where Activision "secretly progressively turned off SBMM and monitored retention… and turns out everyone hated it, with more quitting, less playing, and more negative blowouts".
Activision announced plans to launch the series of white papers back in April, and has already considered the impact connections and Time to Match has on online play.
I recently learned how important sniffing is for dogs, and it's changed my entire approach to dog walking for the better! I used to see walks as a chance to get some good exercise and always attempted to walk briskly. My dogs never wanted to cooperate, though, and would constantly stop to sniff things. — Read the rest
A material with a high electron mobility is like a highway without traffic. Any electrons that flow into the material experience a commuter’s dream, breezing through without any obstacles or congestion to slow or scatter them off their path.
The higher a material’s electron mobility, the more efficient its electrical conductivity, and the less energy is lost or wasted as electrons zip through. Advanced materials that exhibit high electron mobility will be essential for more efficient and sustainable electronic devices that can do more work with less power.
Now, physicists at MIT, the Army Research Lab, and elsewhere have achieved a record-setting level of electron mobility in a thin film of ternary tetradymite — a class of mineral that is naturally found in deep hydrothermal deposits of gold and quartz.
For this study, the scientists grew pure, ultrathin films of the material, in a way that minimized defects in its crystalline structure. They found that this nearly perfect film — much thinner than a human hair — exhibits the highest electron mobility in its class.
The team was able to estimate the material’s electron mobility by detecting quantum oscillations when electric current passes through. These oscillations are a signature of the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons in a material. The researchers detected a particular rhythm of oscillations that is characteristic of high electron mobility — higher than any ternary thin films of this class to date.
“Before, what people had achieved in terms of electron mobility in these systems was like traffic on a road under construction — you’re backed up, you can’t drive, it’s dusty, and it’s a mess,” says Jagadeesh Moodera, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Physics. “In this newly optimized material, it’s like driving on the Mass Pike with no traffic.”
The team’s results, which appear today in the journal Materials Today Physics, point to ternary tetradymite thin films as a promising material for future electronics, such as wearable thermoelectric devices that efficiently convert waste heat into electricity. (Tetradymites are the active materials that cause the cooling effect in commercial thermoelectric coolers.) The material could also be the basis for spintronic devices, which process information using an electron’s spin, using far less power than conventional silicon-based devices.
The study also uses quantum oscillations as a highly effective tool for measuring a material’s electronic performance.
“We are using this oscillation as a rapid test kit,” says study author Hang Chi, a former research scientist at MIT who is now at the University of Ottawa. “By studying this delicate quantum dance of electrons, scientists can start to understand and identify new materials for the next generation of technologies that will power our world.”
Chi and Moodera’s co-authors include Patrick Taylor, formerly of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, along with Owen Vail and Harry Hier of the Army Research Lab, and Brandi Wooten and Joseph Heremans of Ohio State University.
Beam down
The name “tetradymite” derives from the Greek “tetra” for “four,” and “dymite,” meaning “twin.” Both terms describe the mineral’s crystal structure, which consists of rhombohedral crystals that are “twinned” in groups of four — i.e. they have identical crystal structures that share a side.
Tetradymites comprise combinations of bismuth, antimony tellurium, sulfur, and selenium. In the 1950s, scientists found that tetradymites exhibit semiconducting properties that could be ideal for thermoelectric applications: The mineral in its bulk crystal form was able to passively convert heat into electricity.
Then, in the 1990s, the late Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus proposed that the mineral’s thermoelectric properties might be significantly enhanced, not in its bulk form but within its microscopic, nanometer-scale surface, where the interactions of electrons is more pronounced. (Heremans happened to work in Dresselhaus’ group at the time.)
“It became clear that when you look at this material long enough and close enough, new things will happen,” Chi says. “This material was identified as a topological insulator, where scientists could see very interesting phenomena on their surface. But to keep uncovering new things, we have to master the material growth.”
To grow thin films of pure crystal, the researchers employed molecular beam epitaxy — a method by which a beam of molecules is fired at a substrate, typically in a vacuum, and with precisely controlled temperatures. When the molecules deposit on the substrate, they condense and build up slowly, one atomic layer at a time. By controlling the timing and type of molecules deposited, scientists can grow ultrathin crystal films in exact configurations, with few if any defects.
“Normally, bismuth and tellurium can interchange their position, which creates defects in the crystal,” co-author Taylor explains. “The system we used to grow these films came down with me from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where we use high purity materials to minimize impurities to undetectable limits. It is the perfect tool to explore this research.”
Free flow
The team grew thin films of ternary tetradymite, each about 100 nanometers thin. They then tested the film’s electronic properties by looking for Shubnikov-de Haas quantum oscillations — a phenomenon that was discovered by physicists Lev Shubnikov and Wander de Haas, who found that a material’s electrical conductivity can oscillate when exposed to a strong magnetic field at low temperatures. This effect occurs because the material’s electrons fill up specific energy levels that shift as the magnetic field changes.
Such quantum oscillations could serve as a signature of a material’s electronic structure, and the ways in which electrons behave and interact. Most notably for the MIT team, the oscillations could determine a material’s electron mobility: If oscillations exist, it must mean that the material’s electrical resistance is able to change, and by inference, electrons can be mobile, and made to easily flow.
The team looked for signs of quantum oscillations in their new films, by first exposing them to ultracold temperatures and a strong magnetic field, then running an electric current through the film and measuring the voltage along its path, as they tuned the magnetic field up and down.
“It turns out, to our great joy and excitement, that the material’s electrical resistance oscillates,” Chi says. “Immediately, that tells you that this has very high electron mobility.”
Specifically, the team estimates that the ternary tetradymite thin film exhibits an electron mobility of 10,000 cm2/V-s — the highest mobility of any ternary tetradymite film yet measured. The team suspects that the film’s record mobility has something to do with its low defects and impurities, which they were able to minimize with their precise growth strategies. The fewer a material’s defects, the fewer obstacles an electron encounters, and the more freely it can flow.
“This is showing it’s possible to go a giant step further, when properly controlling these complex systems,” Moodera says. “This tells us we’re in the right direction, and we have the right system to proceed further, to keep perfecting this material down to even much thinner films and proximity coupling for use in future spintronics and wearable thermoelectric devices.”
This research was supported in part by the Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Canada Research Chairs Program and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
MIT faculty members Nancy Kanwisher, Robert Langer, and Sara Seager are among eight researchers worldwide to receive this year’s Kavli Prizes.
A partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation, the Kavli Prizes are awarded every two years to “honor scientists for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience that transform our understanding of the big, the small and the complex.” The laureates in each field will share $1 million.
Understanding recognition of faces
Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute for Brain Research investigator, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Doris Tsao, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Winrich Freiwald, the Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery Professor at the Rockefeller University.
Kanwisher, Tsao, and Freiwald discovered a specialized system within the brain to recognize faces. Their discoveries have provided basic principles of neural organization and made the starting point for further research on how the processing of visual information is integrated with other cognitive functions.
Kanwisher was the first to prove that a specific area in the human neocortex is dedicated to recognizing faces, now called the fusiform face area. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she found individual differences in the location of this area and devised an analysis technique to effectively localize specialized functional regions in the brain. This technique is now widely used and applied to domains beyond the face recognition system.
Integrating nanomaterials for biomedical advances
Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with Paul Alivisatos, president of the University of Chicago and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Chad Mirkin, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University.
Langer, Alivisatos, and Mirkin each revolutionized the field of nanomedicine by demonstrating how engineering at the nano scale can advance biomedical research and application. Their discoveries contributed foundationally to the development of therapeutics, vaccines, bioimaging, and diagnostics.
Langer was the first to develop nanoengineered materials that enabled the controlled release, or regular flow, of drug molecules. This capability has had an immense impact for the treatment of a range of diseases, such as aggressive brain cancer, prostate cancer, and schizophrenia. His work also showed that tiny particles, containing protein antigens, can be used in vaccination, and was instrumental in the development of the delivery of messenger RNA vaccines.
Searching for life beyond Earth
Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics along with David Charbonneau, the Fred Kavli Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard University.
Seager and Charbonneau are recognized for discoveries of exoplanets and the characterization of their atmospheres. They pioneered methods for the detection of atomic species in planetary atmospheres and the measurement of their thermal infrared emission, setting the stage for finding the molecular fingerprints of atmospheres around both giant and rocky planets. Their contributions have been key to the enormous progress seen in the last 20 years in the exploration of myriad exoplanets.
Kanwisher, Langer, and Seager bring the number of all-time MIT faculty recipients of the Kavli Prize to eight. Prior winners include Rainer Weiss in astrophysics (2016), Alan Guth in astrophysics (2014), Mildred Dresselhaus in nanoscience (2012), Ann Graybiel in neuroscience (2012), and Jane Luu in astrophysics (2012).
“This discovery has direct implications for low-power electronic devices because no energy is lost during the propagation of electrons, which is not the case in regular materials where the electrons are scattered,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and corresponding author of the Science paper.
The phenomenon is akin to cars traveling down an open turnpike as opposed to those moving through neighborhoods. The neighborhood cars can be stopped or slowed by other drivers making abrupt stops or U-turns that disrupt an otherwise smooth commute.
A new material
The material behind this work, known as rhombohedral pentalayer graphene, was discovered two years ago by physicists led by Ju. “We found a goldmine, and every scoop is revealing something new,” says Ju, who is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory.
In a Nature Nanotechnology paper last October, Ju and colleagues reported the discovery of three important properties arising from rhombohedral graphene. For example, they showed that it could be topological, or allow the unimpeded movement of electrons around the edge of the material but not through the middle. That resulted in a superhighway, but required the application of a large magnetic field some tens of thousands times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.
In the current work, the team reports creating the superhighway without any magnetic field.
Tonghang Han, an MIT graduate student in physics, is a co-first author of the paper. “We are not the first to discover this general phenomenon, but we did so in a very different system. And compared to previous systems, ours is simpler and also supports more electron channels.” Explains Ju, “other materials can only support one lane of traffic on the edge of the material. We suddenly bumped it up to five.”
Additional co-first authors of the paper who contributed equally to the work are Zhengguang Lu and Yuxuan Yao. Lu is a postdoc in the Materials Research Laboratory. Yao conducted the work as a visiting undergraduate student from Tsinghua University. Other authors are MIT professor of physics Liang Fu; Jixiang Yang and Junseok Seo, both MIT graduate students in physics; Chiho Yoon and Fan Zhang of the University of Texas at Dallas; and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.
How it works
Graphite, the primary component of pencil lead, is composed of many layers of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. Rhombohedral graphene is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order.
Ju and colleagues isolated rhombohedral graphene thanks to a novel microscope Ju built at MIT in 2021 that can quickly and relatively inexpensively determine a variety of important characteristics of a material at the nanoscale. Pentalayer rhombohedral stacked graphene is only a few billionths of a meter thick.
In the current work, the team tinkered with the original system, adding a layer of tungsten disulfide (WS2). “The interaction between the WS2 and the pentalayer rhombohedral graphene resulted in this five-lane superhighway that operates at zero magnetic field,” says Ju.
Comparison to superconductivity
The phenomenon that the Ju group discovered in rhombohedral graphene that allows electrons to travel with no resistance at zero magnetic field is known as the quantum anomalous Hall effect. Most people are more familiar with superconductivity, a completely different phenomenon that does the same thing but happens in very different materials.
Ju notes that although superconductors were discovered in the 1910s, it took some 100 years of research to coax the system to work at the higher temperatures necessary for applications. “And the world record is still well below room temperature,” he notes.
Similarly, the rhombohedral graphene superhighway currently operates at about 2 kelvins, or -456 degrees Fahrenheit. “It will take a lot of effort to elevate the temperature, but as physicists, our job is to provide the insight; a different way for realizing this [phenomenon],” Ju says.
Very exciting
The discoveries involving rhombohedral graphene came as a result of painstaking research that wasn’t guaranteed to work. “We tried many recipes over many months,” says Han, “so it was very exciting when we cooled the system to a very low temperature and [a five-lane superhighway operating at zero magnetic field] just popped out.”
Says Ju, “it’s very exciting to be the first to discover a phenomenon in a new system, especially in a material that we uncovered.”
This work was supported by a Sloan Fellowship; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the U.S. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI; and the World Premier International Research Initiative of Japan.
Artist’s rendition of a newly discovered superhighway for electrons that can occur in rhombohedral graphene. “We found a goldmine, and every scoop is revealing something new,” says MIT Assistant Professor Long Ju.
In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.
The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).
“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”
A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.
Finding inspiration in the archives
The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).
Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”
Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.
Incorporating MIT nerdiness
Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.
The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.
“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.
To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.
“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.
Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.
The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names.
Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names
In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.
Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.
“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”
Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”
Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).
A team of MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni fabricated a new One.MIT wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; Sloan Executive MBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).
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