Sam's News — tech-research — 2026-08-11¶
Technology¶
6 New process for generating clean hydrogen from rocks and water¶
Researchers developed a method to generate clean hydrogen by applying electrical charges to rocks and water, tapping into natural serpentinization processes, with a Canadian mine study showing the approach could power hundreds of homes annually from depths of 2-3 kilometers.
- Method involves lowering electrodes into boreholes to fracture rocks and trigger hydrogen production
- Kidd Creek mine, Ontario produces ~140 tons hydrogen annually from 15,000 boreholes at 2-3 km depth
- Hydrogen generation via serpentinization: water reacting with iron-containing Earth's crust minerals
- Over 70% of continental crust potentially suitable for this hydrogen generation
- Eden GeoPower pioneering technology; offers advantage of using hydrogen where found vs. long-distance transport
Sources: IEEE Spectrum AI Web Searched, Singularity Hub AI Web Searched
6 Microsoft Research introduces CARE-X for clinically useful radiology AI¶
Microsoft Research unveiled CARE-X on August 11, 2026, a research-only vision-language model combining reasoning and measurement tools for chest X-ray interpretation.
- Uses reinforcement learning method DAPO to reward clinical correctness across multiple tasks
- Pairs deterministic measurement tools with visual analysis to improve accuracy on measurement-dependent conditions
- Validated on real-world data from Narayana Health, India, including rare ICU cases
- Separate experiment paired Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct with measurement tools
- Microsoft stresses it's a research model, not cleared for clinical diagnosis or patient care
Sources: Microsoft Research AI Web Searched, Microsoft Research Blog RSS
AI¶
6 AMIE advances toward expert-level audio-visual clinical consultations¶
Google's AMIE medical AI system showed expert-level performance conducting real-time audio-visual clinical consultations in a randomized controlled study.
- Announced Aug 11, 2026 by Google researchers Anil Palepu and Mike Schaekermann
- System integrates visual cues like gait, breathing, and physical exam maneuvers with spoken history
- Tested via simulated consultations in a randomized controlled study
Sources: Google Research Blog AI Web Searched