SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
A leading expert in data ethics at Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, believes the establishment of principles for the governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not guarantee its trustworthy or ethical use by companies and organisations. Dr Brent Mittelstadt’s paper ‘Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI’, published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, argues that a … Read more
Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich have developed a micromachine that can perform different actions. First nanomagnets in the components of the microrobots are magnetically programmed and then the various movements are controlled by magnetic fields. Such machines, which are only a few tens of micrometres across, could be used, for … Read more
Solar and wind farms are popping up around the country to lower carbon emissions, and these renewables also have another important effect: keeping more water in the ground. A new Princeton University-led study in Nature Communications is among the first to show that solar and wind energy not only enhance drought resilience, but also aid in groundwater … Read more
Like humans, Machine Learning (ML)-based systems sometimes make the wrong decision. However, while humans are able to reason about and explain their decisions, ML-based systems do not have a means of reliably informing users of the reasoning behind a decision. This fault is exacerbated by the instability of ML-based systems: they can yield a completely … Read more
University of Queensland researchers are developing a new generation of sustainable composite materials designed specifically for electric vehicles. Queensland-founded startup Australian Clean Energy Electric Vehicle Group (ACE-EV) launched its electric van (pictured below) in Australia in August and is now working to ensure the vehicle is designed and built onshore, using Australian research expertise. Australian … Read more
The sight of a RoboBee careening towards a wall or crashing into a glass box may have once triggered panic in the researchers in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), but no more. Researchers at SEAS and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering … Read more
Scientists have created an “artificial leaf” to fight climate change by inexpensively converting harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) into a useful alternative fuel. The new technology, outlined in a paper published today in the journal Nature Energy, was inspired by the way plants use energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into food. “We call it an … Read more
Practise makes perfect – it is an adage that has helped humans become highly dexterous and now it is an approach that is being applied to robots. Computer scientists at the University of Leeds are using the artificial intelligence (AI) techniques of automated planning and reinforcement learning to “train” a robot to find an object … Read more
Bacteria and other swimming microorganisms evolved to thrive in challenging environments, and researchers struggle to mimic their unique abilities for biomedical technologies, but fabrication challenges created a manufacturing bottleneck. Microscopic, 3D-printed, tori – donuts - coated with nickel and platinum may bridge the gap between biological and synthetic swimmers, according to an international team of … Read more
In a development offering great promise for additive manufacturing, Princeton University researchers have created a method to precisely create droplets using a jet of liquid. The technique allows manufacturers to quickly generate drops of material, finely control their size and locate them within a 3D space. Although both 3D printers and traditional manufacturers already use … Read more