A new, AI-powered training method created by UC Berkeley researchers helps robots learn complex tasks with startling speed and accuracy. The protocol combines human demonstrations and feedback with the robot’s own real-world attempts to help it master tasks such as assembling a computer motherboard, building a shelf or even “Jenga whipping” with a 100% success rate within a matter of hours.

Kyoto, Japan -- The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible for us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun.

Stars with masses more than eight times that of the sun are considered high mass stars. These form rapidly in a process that gives off stellar wind and radiation, which could not result in stars of such high mass without somehow overcoming this loss of mass, or feedback. Something is feeding these stars, but how exactly they can accumulate so much mass so quickly has remained a mystery.

Observations of enormous disk-like structures that form around a star -- accretion disks -- had been proposed as the chief way of rapidly feeding young stars. However, a team of researchers from several institutions including Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo, has discovered another possibility.

Researchers have revealed quantitative impacts of wolf hunts to provide policymakers with new data as they consider measures to combat livestock loss

A team of materials scientists at Rice has developed a new way to grow ultrathin semiconductors directly onto electronic components.

Sweat does more than just cool down an overheating body. Measuring the chemical makeup of an individual’s sweat — specifically the levels of chloride, a chemical component of salt — can serve as an early warning system to help inform the diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that damages the lungs and digestive system. 

Corn was domesticated from its ancestor teosinte in central Mexico beginning about 9,000 years ago by humans selectively breeding the wild plant, transforming its small, hard-shelled kernels into the large, palatable ears of corn we know today. Over the centuries, root traits of corn — now the most widely planted crop in the U.S., and second globally (by acreage) — evolved in response to both changing environmental conditions and human agricultural practices. Because the role of roots in crop domestication in response to shifting circumstances remains unclear — and because it may be relevant to the present when a warming climate is stressing corn and other crops — a team of researchers led by Penn State plant scientists conducted a study to understand how root traits evolved during corn domestication.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has renewed funding for BioPACIFIC MIP — Biomaterials, Polymers and Advanced Constructs from Integrated Chemistry Materials Innovation Platform — a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and UCLA that provides a unique scientific ecosystem for the United States. This $19.8 million renewal empowers BioPACIFIC MIP to continue advancing the frontier of biobased materials, uniting synthetic biology, chemistry, automation and artificial intelligence to reshape how materials are discovered, designed and deployed.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute researcher Catherine Whittington has been awarded a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop three distinct laboratory models for the study of fibrosis in pancreas, skin, and uterine fibroids.

In a first-of-its-kind breakthrough, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have turned a protein found in living cells into a functioning quantum bit, or qubit, the foundation of quantum technologies. The protein qubit can be used as a quantum sensor capable of detecting minute changes and ultimately offering unprecedented insight into biological processes.