In a paper recently published in Science Advances, researchers from the lab of University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Asst. Prof. Po-Chun Hsu developed a distributed carbon nanofiber direct air capture (DAC) filter that could potentially turn every home, office, school or other building into a small carbon-capture system working toward the global problem of airborne CO2. A life-cycle analysis shows that – even after factoring extra CO2 released by everything from manufacture and transportation to maintenance and disposal – the new filter is 92.1% efficient in removing carbon dioxide from the air.

Humans have the cognitive capacity to infer and reason about the minds and thoughts of other people. Our brains are very good at it—much better than the Large Language Models or LLMs.  Although LLMs were inspired by some concepts from neuroscience and cognitive science, they aren’t exact mimics of the human brain. Now, two scientists team up in a multi-disciplinary effort to tune the LLMs to make fewer redundant computations, so they operate closer to how a human brain does.