Poliloop

Creating a fibrous and conductive cathode from a mix of copper, phosphorus, and sulfur served as a catalyst, dramatically speeding up oxygen’s reaction with water. This insight produced batteries that could be charged and discharged quickly and had high capacity, 460 watt-hours per kilogram (compared with about 75 Wh/kg for…

The nominating institute Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the breakthrough: Mouncey’s Joint Genome Institute has partners worldwide to facilitate access to groundbreaking genomic technologies. These characterise plants and microbes and their environmental interactions, and ultimately address grand challenges in bioenergy, nutrient cycling, and biogeochemistry. Through community collaborations, the JGI team…

How Artificial Intelligence Research Tries to Build Intelligent Autonomous Systems Can robots be creative enough to build their own language? Computational linguistics explores semiotics, its origins, evolution and dynamics with an interdisciplinary approach aimed at finding out statistics and rules to construct a computational model of natural language. Luc Steels,…

ImmerseMe is virtually breaking the wall of miscommunication by teaching language and culture through breakthrough technology virtual reality. We’ve partnered with educators around the globe to design a fully interactive platform with 1,000s of authentic lessons across 9 languages. So far 75,000 students have test driven our technology and we’ve…

ImmunoFeed is a company that plans to use artificial intelligence to predict the mutations a virus will acquire and produce a cheap edible duckweed vaccine in advance before viral zoonoses can occur.

Michèle Lamont explained how destigmatization happens on a societal level and how particular strategies may help marginalized groups to achieve greater inclusivity. At the same time, she asked all of us to broaden our conception of how inclusion is created and to participate in making spaces for more inclusion.

Oxide glasses are an integral part of the modern world, but their usefulness can be limited by their characteristic brittleness at room temperature. Megan Cordill et al. show that amorphous aluminum oxide can permanently deform without fracture at room temperature and high strain rate by a viscous creep mechanism. These…

New functional magnetic materials are in high demand, both for nano-technology, information storage and for green energy conversion in wind-mills and wave power generators. The recent increase in the cost of rare-earth elements, a key component in permanent magnets, call for new rare-earth free compounds. By means of data-filtering methods…

The production and ongoing stage performance of three original science plays viz. “The Square of a Sonnet” – which explores the history and science of black holes, “The Trial of Abdus Salam” – on the life and times of the first Muslim Nobel Laureate in Science and “The DNA of…

Roman Fasel obtained his PhD in Physics in 1996 from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and joined Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, after post-doctoral research fellowships at La Trobe University (Melbourne) and the Fritz-Haber-Institute (Berlin). He is the head of the nanotech@surfaces Laboratory of Empa,…