The American Physical Society has recognized the Graphite Reactor, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as an APS historic site. APS President Young-Kee Kim presented a plaque commemorating the recognition on Monday, Nov. 4, the 81st anniversary of the reactor’s first achieving criticality in 1943.

Renowned astronomer, Dr. Jill Tarter, SETI Institute co-founder and pioneering SETI researcher, will be honored with the inaugural Tarter Award for Innovation in the Search for Life Beyond Earth at the SETI Institute’s 40^th Anniversary celebration on November 20, 2024, in Menlo Park, CA. This new award recognizes individuals whose projects or ideas significantly advance humanity’s search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence. The Tarter Award honors contributions across science, technology, education, art, philosophy, law and ethics that support SETI’s mission to search for life and intelligence beyond Earth.

“Anyone who has had the privilege of knowing Jill, knows one thing about her—she never, never gives up the fight for what she believes in,” said Jim Bildner who serves on the Tarter Award Selection Committee.  “And the quest to search for life beyond our planet exists in no small part due to her tireless efforts over decades. And yes, as the inspiration to Carl Sagan for his character Ellie Arroway played by Jody Foster in Contact, she has inspired thousands of women to pursue their dreams in science and astronomy. In a world full of challenges, Jill shows us the power of one human life to make a difference in the lives of others."

Covered recently in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, BiomedGPT is a new a new type of artificial intelligence (AI) designed to support a wide range of medical and scientific tasks. This new study, conducted in collaboration with multiple institutions, is described in the article as "the first open-source and lightweight vision–language foundation model, designed as a generalist capable of performing various biomedical tasks."

"This work combines two types of AI into a decision support tool for medical providers," explains Lichao Sun, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University and a lead author of the study. "One side of the system is trained to understand biomedical images, and one is trained to understand and assess biomedical text. The combination of these allows the model to tackle a wide range of biomedical challenges, using insight gleaned from databases of biomedical imagery and from the analysis and synthesis of scientific and medical research reports."

What if farmers could not only prevent excess phosphorus from polluting downstream waterways, but also recycle that nutrient as a slow-release fertilizer, all without spending a lot of money? In a first-of-its-kind field study, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers show it’s possible and economical. 

According to their proposal, the project will “simultaneously create a new educational track for architecture and engineering students to learn about and test their ideas for adaptive building concepts.” By providing this test bed and dataset, the researchers will create these new origami-based design processes, coupled with new instructional methods for future students.