Enabling the design of hybrid glasses

A new method of manufacturing glass could lead to the production of “designer glasses” with applications in advanced photonics, whilst also facilitating industrial scale carbon capture and storage. An international team of researchers, writing in Nature Communications, report how they have managed to use a relatively new family of sponge-like porous materials to develop new hybrid glasses.

The work revolves around a family of compounds called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are cage-like structures consisting of metal ions, linked by organic bonds. Their porous properties have led to proposed application in carbon capture, hydrogen storage and toxic gas separations, due to their ability to selectively adsorb and store pre-selected target molecules, much like a building a sieve which discriminates not only on size, but also chemical identity.

DNA “clews” helps shuttle CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool into cells

Researchers from North Carolina State Univ. and the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have for the first time created and used a nanoscale vehicle made of DNA to deliver a CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool into cells in both cell culture and an animal model.

The CRISPR-Cas system, which is found in bacteria and archaea, protects bacteria from invaders such as viruses. It does this by creating small strands of RNA called CRISPR RNAs, which match DNA sequences specific to a given invader. When those CRISPR RNAs find a match, they unleash Cas9 proteins that cut the DNA. In recent years, the CRISPR-Cas system has garnered a great deal of attention in the research community for its potential use as a gene editing tool—with the CRISPR RNA identifying the targeted portion of the relevant DNA, and the Cas protein cleaving it.

Gaming computers offer huge, untapped energy savings potential

In the world of computer gaming, bragging rights are accorded to those who can boast of blazing-fast graphics cards, the most powerful processors, the highest-resolution monitors, and the coolest decorative lighting. They are not bestowed upon those crowing about the energy efficiency of their system. If they were, gaming computers worldwide might well be consuming billions of dollars less in electricity use annually, with no loss in performance, according to new research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

In the first study of its kind, Berkeley Lab researcher Evan Mills co-authored an investigation of the aggregate global energy use of personal computers designed for gaming—including taking direct measurements using industry benchmarking tools—and found that gamers can achieve energy savings of more than 75% by changing some settings and swapping out some components, while also improving reliability and performance.

Language analysis predicts a coming betrayal

Being betrayed is worse than just being attacked. Someone you trusted as a friend and ally suddenly stabs you in the back.

According to a team of researchers at Cornell Univ., the Univ. of Maryland and the Univ. of Colorado, there are subtle linguistic clues that predict when a betrayal is coming. Humans are poor at noticing them, but computer analysis can detect them.

Crash-tolerant data storage

In a computer operating system, the file system is the part that writes data to disk and tracks where the data is stored. If the computer crashes while it’s writing data, the file system’s records can become corrupt. Hours of work could be lost, or programs could stop working properly.

At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers will present the first file system that is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes. Although the file system is slow by today’s standards, the techniques the researchers used to verify its performance can be extended to more sophisticated designs. Ultimately, formal verification could make it much easier to develop reliable, efficient file systems.

Searching big data faster

For more than a decade, gene sequencers have been improving more rapidly than the computers required to make sense of their outputs. Searching for DNA sequences in existing genomic databases can already take hours, and the problem is likely to get worse.

Recently, Bonnie Berger’s group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been investigating techniques to make biological and chemical data easier to analyze by, in some sense, compressing it.

Supercomputers enlisted to shed light on photosynthesis

Computing—the creation of supercomputers, above all—enables scientists and engineers to analyze highly complex physical processes using simulation techniques. In this case, researchers in the UPV/EHU's Dept. of Computer Architecture and Technology and the Dept. of Materials Physics are collaborating with researchers from various universities (including the Univ. de Coimbra, Univ. de Barcelona, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Martin-Luther-Univ. Halle-Wittenberg, Univ. of Liege) to analyze the photosynthesis process basing themselves on various theories because the way in which plants absorb light remains a mystery.