Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) obtains almost four million euros to develop two research projects of excellence focused on estimating turbulent air flows with sensors and analyzing the consent of losers in the survival of democracy. Andrea Ianiro, from the Dept. of Aerospace Engineering, and Ignacio Jurado, from the Dept. of Social Sciences at UC3M, have each received two million euros after being awarded Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC).

Flexible portable devices, also known as FlexPVs, have great potential in multiple applications, for example wearable technology, intelligent fabrics, curved surfaces such as car roofs or lightweight applications such as drones or aerospace transportation. In recent years FlexPVs have made great strides in efficiency, and are now able to generate levels of power very close to those of rigid solar panels. However, the lack of a standardized protocol regarding their stability and mechanical performance makes it difficult to compare and evaluate their flexibility, durability and efficiency in real-life conditions, which in turn limits their design and development. Now, the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) has led a team of 23 experts in photovoltaic energy and mechanical performance from 12 countries in designing a unified testing protocol so that flexible solar cells and panels can be evaluated in a more consistent manner.

A research team introduces phenomic selection (PS) as a low-cost, high-throughput alternative to genomic selection (GS) in hybrid rapeseed breeding.

 In this cohort study of 1,600 emergency medicine patient medical records, large language model (LLM)-generated emergency medicine-to-inpatient handoff notes were determined superior compared with physician-written summaries via conventional automated evaluation methods, but marginally inferior in usefulness and safety via a novel evaluation framework. This study suggests the importance of a physician-in-loop implementation design for this model and demonstrates an effective strategy to measure pre-implementation patient safety of LLM models. 

MIT engineers designed a new type of gastric balloon that can be inflated and deflated as needed. It could offer an alternative for people who don’t want to undergo more invasive treatments such as gastric bypass surgery, or people who don’t respond well to weight-loss drugs.