The University of Birmingham is a major UK research university with strengths spanning cyber security, physics, chemistry, and life sciences.
University of Birmingham engineers and partners built a robotic time crystal that holds one rhythm through random disturbances. The authors see a route to robots with no central controller, but the tests described are two small structures.
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University of Birmingham-led chemists built a metal-organic framework that holds 16 different metals in one crystal, the most yet reported for a MOF. The case for choosing such a material's properties in advance rests so far on varying just two of them, dysprosium and lanthanum.
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Chemists at Warwick and Birmingham watched precursors decompose under heat and found several unknown phases, including a new form of bismuth vanadate. Its band gap is significantly larger than that of the known forms, so its value for solar hydrogen has yet to be measured.
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University of Birmingham researchers report in Brain that blocking the P2X7 receptor halted inflammatory cytokine release in living human brain slices. That makes existing P2X7 drugs fair candidates for brain-disease trials, though the evidence so far comes from tissue kept alive outside the body.
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Astronomers led by Benjamin Gompertz found GRB 220706A's central engine still flaring 27 rest-frame days after the burst, about 20 days past the old record. In their preprint, black hole accretion and magnetar models both have to be stretched to explain an engine that ran that long.
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Researchers at IIT Gandhinagar, Cambridge and Birmingham report a copper MOF that holds 490 mg of lead or 351 mg of neodymium per gram of material. Whether that lets cleanup pay for itself through recovery depends on cost and scale-up work the team says still has to be done.
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Petter Brodin's team found 39% of infants with a strong first-week immune 'seeding' reaction had eczema or food allergy by age 1, against 12% of the rest. The data, from nearly 600 Swedish babies, tie the risk to gut bacteria and feeding, and would put any prevention window within days of birth if the link proves causal.
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University of Bath researchers' boronic-acid probes detected glucose changes in living zebrafish and told insulin-deficient fish from healthy siblings. The work shows sugar can be read optically in a live vertebrate, though the clinical uses the team describes are still untested.
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A preprint led by UC Santa Cruz graduate student C. Evan Davis modelled Earth-like planets around M dwarfs of two ages. The star's ultraviolet output alone changed how much methane the atmospheres held by up to a factor of ten.
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Flight 14 opens its window on 22 September carrying real payload for the first time, though neither stage will attempt a landing and Starship is flying at roughly four a year against the 25 test flights SpaceX officials once hoped for.
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Researchers at Mount Sinai counted drug trials collecting wearable data on ClinicalTrials.gov, and ten years of growth turned out to be gradual, with the researchers quoted by Nature split on whether sensor capability or validation work is the holdup.
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Researchers at Emergence say agents built on frontier models from the US, China and France coined shared phrases without being asked to, and the exchanges grew more opaque the more the agents talked. Log reading weakens as an oversight control.
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A signal LIGO Hanford and Virgo recorded in October 2024 was loud and lopsided enough to pin down how spin deforms its 19.6-solar-mass object. Rotating boson stars with quartic self-interactions cannot fit it.
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The Guardian's 2027 university guide puts 28% of computer science graduates in professional coding jobs last year, down from about 40%, and the two analysts reading the data disagree over how much of the drop AI explains.
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An international team reconstructed speciation and extinction rates for the reptile group that produced dinosaurs and crocodiles. The shape matches what family trees have shown, and three hypotheses still compete to explain the slowdown.
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A Birmingham-led team grew the sample from 55 observed tropical-origin cyclones to several thousand simulated ones, and the return period that falls out for a Lili-scale wind event is shorter than the observed record could ever have revealed.
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A framework in AI & Society names the loop "robotoid humanness." It is an argument rather than a measurement, and the customer side of the exchange is the part nobody is instrumenting.
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Birmingham and Durham researchers rewrote a DIMM's configuration chip in software to alias in-use memory, then reached into VBS enclaves, revived blocklisted drivers and killed EDR.
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