The term “Sherpa” commonly denotes the guides who assist climbers on Mount Everest. Similarly, a research team led by Professor Yong-Tae Kim (MSE) and Ph.D. Candidate Kyu-Su Kim published a paper addressing the unsolved challenge of developing electrocatalysts for water electrolysis, which graced the cover of the academic journal, ACS Catalysis. Water electrolysis is an eco-friendly technique for extracting hydrogen from water. Nevertheless, the process is economically impractical due to the requirement of precious metal catalysts. Thus, in academia, extensive efforts are underway to overcome

With many controversies regarding abortion and scientific experiments on zygotes, whether a zygote is a human being has become an important question. Recently Professor Chunghyoung Lee (HSS) published a paper tackling this question in The Philosophical Review, and it has been selected as one of the “10 Best Philosophy Papers of 2022”. Prof. Lee argues against conceptionism, the view that a human being begins to exist at conception in the form of a zygote, by applying philosophical theories to results of recent biological research. Prof. Lee starts his thesis with arguments from twinning. Conce

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a long-standing and deeply entrenched dispute that has spanned over a century. It is rooted in historical, religious, territorial, and political complexities, and it continues to impact the lives of millions in the Middle East. In the early morning of Oct.7, Hamas, the armed group that rules the Palestinian Gaza Strip, fired thousands of rockets into southern and central Israel. Israel then defined this surprise attack as war and began to retaliate. This armed conflict is the largest since the ‘11-day war’ between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, which took place

A superconductor is a material that exhibits superconductivity under critical temperature, where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields expel from the material. Tremendous energy savings by superconductor are said to have the potential to address global energy challenges and enhance computing performances in addition to other possibilities. Room-temperature superconductors under ambient pressure may take the world to a new level. Numerous scientists have researched superconductors, but room-temperature superconductors remained elusive until July when the team published preprints de

Korea is classified as a “water stress country.” Even though the annual precipitation is approximately 1,300 mm, which is not small, it is concentrated in certain periods and regions, causing inconvenience due to water shortages. Also, the lack of drinking water extends beyond just inconvenience, but life-threatening for some. Nations across the globe are making various attempts to solve this problem. For example, seawater desalination, which uses seawater to obtain drinking water, offers a solution but it still requires fossil fuels to operate the process, and might cause pollution by releasi

In the information age, constructing security systems for protecting information is an important task. Specifically, computing the randomness of random numbers is crucial because it determines every security system’s safety level. Minimum entropy in the field of information theory is commonly used to quantify the randomness of random numbers. The joint research team of Professor Yongjune Kim (EEE), Jiheon Woo (EEE Ph.D. Candidate), DGIST Prof. Young-sik Kim, and Technion Prof. Yuval Cassuto successfully developed an algorithm to estimate the minimum entropy accurately, increasing the accuracy

In 2011, pro-democracy uprising called the Arab Spring spread across the Middle East and Northern African countries. These anti-government protests were successful in some countries, which resulted in overthrown regimes and the start of democratic governments. But in most countries, these protests backfired as the government violently suppressed the demonstration with military forces, and Syrian Arab Republic (Syria) is one of them. Syria is still under the same government that violently executed protestors to end the Arab Spring movement, and Syria has been suffering from a Civil War for the

Competition between the most high-profile names in Big Tech has been rekindled over determining who will dominate the next Social Network Service (SNS) market. Meta recently launched Threads, a new SNS countering Twitter, and Threads aggressively engaged users from Instagram. Meta, in 2021, dropped their former name Facebook and expanded their range of business so far as to metaverse, in accordance with the word Meta which means “beyond”. Amidst these actions of Meta, another movement has been detected in Twitter; its name was changed to X after being acquired by Elon Musk, the CEO of X, and h

According to Statistics Korea, cancer accounts for the majority of deaths in Korea, in 2021. Among cancers which constitutes 26% of all recorded cases, lung cancer stands out as the most prevalent. In drug screening research such as genetic modification and targeted therapy, scientists widely employ organoids that possess the genetic characteristics of individual patients. However, replicating the intricate internal environment of a lung cancer patient’s body by solely using organoids, remains a formidable task. Recently, a group of researchers including Professor Jinah Jang and Dr. Yoo-mi Cho

Researchers, spearheaded by Professor Su Seok Choi from POSTECH Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EE), have accomplished a remarkable feat in the realm of artificial electronic skin endowed with chameleon-like properties. Their pioneering work, utilizing chiral photonic elastomers (CPE), is poised for publication in the esteemed journal Advanced Materials. Taking inspiration from the chameleon's adaptive color-changing skin, the research team ingeniously engineered CPE with the unique ability to transition colors via self-assembled molecular rotations. This exceptional m

The US is still known as the land of opportunity. Before the pandemic, around 2.5 million immigrants flowed into the country every year from nations around the world. For young international students, US college admission is the first gateway towards entering society in a fairly legitimate and secure way. Therefore, the fairness of college admissions has often been the topic of social controversy. Many parents from within and outside the country seek to have their child placed at a US university, and with all but impressive pool of applicants, these decisions might as well be a “coin flip”. Gi

On Aug. 1, the 25th World Scout Jamboree opened in Saemangeum, Jeollabuk-Do. The World Scout Jamboree is a youth international camping competition held every four years by the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM), and this Jamboree reached a highest all-time scale with about 43,000 participants from 152 countries. However, this Jamboree has received tremendous criticism from day one and has caused various controversies. On the day of the opening ceremony, participants suffered from thermal diseases that continued to occur due to the hot heat wave. Since Saemangeum is a reclaimed lan

Bruce, from the movie Bruce Almighty, receives the power to control the world from God. The film ends as Bruce loses his superpower and returns to normalcy, but for a moment, he lives the sweetest dream of being almighty. Likewise, things do not go as one wishes, especially when dealing with light. Nevertheless, the POSTECH research team of Professor Kyoung-Duck Park (PHYS) and Hyeongwoo Lee successfully controlled trions, which can be an essential element in optical communication development. They utilized nanoplasmonic waveguides to produce high-purity trions and manipulate where the particl

Three-dimensional (3D) printers are used in various industrial fields. Using 3D printing technology, even buildings or artificial organs could be constructed. However, many biopolymers, such as nucleic acids, proteins, and enzymes, have their own inherent structures and properties at nanoscales, making it difficult to artificially construct them with high resolution in a desired size and shape. The research team from the Department of Material Science and Engineering of Professor Seung Soo Oh, Prof. Emeritus Jung Ho Je, Dr. Moon-Jung Yong, and Ph.D. candidates Un Yang and Byunghwa Kang has dev

In Korea, readers consume news written by a diverse press through a platform called portal. One feature of this portal is that readers interact with both the reporter and other readers through the comment section. But this is becoming hard to spot in many portals due to the takeover of malicious comments in the comment section. Now these internet trolls have shifted their target to SNS and online communities. Public figures like celebrities and sports stars are hesitant when defending themselves against internet trolls because their profession is based on the public’s recognition. These circum

More and more hospitals are unable to operate emergency rooms or patients are no longer hospitalized because there are no doctors in charge of pediatrics. Furthermore, it is not just about pediatrics. Obstetrics, gynecology and surgery are representative majors that doctors avoid, as the phenomenon of a concentration on dermatology and plastic surgery continues. South Korea’s average number of doctors for 1,000 patients is 2.1 which is just 56% of the OECD average. There is also a significant difference between Seoul and other regions. Since people have a hard time meeting doctors in their reg

70% of the Earth’s surface is taken up by water, and 97% of that water consists of seawater. The seawater’s abundance is drawing attention to it as ‘the’ energy resource for the next generation. Recently the research team of Professor Changshin Jo (GIFT, CE) and Hyebin Jeong (Ph.D. candidate in CE) identified the outstanding performance of chelating agent-applied seawater batteries (SWBs). The research was published recently in the international journal Chemical Engineering Journal. Lithium-ion batteries are widely used in mobile electronics and electric vehicles. But it has a danger of explos

Would there be any optical element that can eliminate the camera lens of the part of the smartphone which protrudes? The answer is yes. In 2019, the World Economic Forum, (WEF) has chosen metalens as one of the Top 10 future technologies. Metalens is a very thin and light planar optical device consisting of an array of nanostructure and has recently attracted so much attention that it is composed of a special issue in the world-renowned journal Nature Photonics. However, due to the necessity of precise technology and high-cost burden, making metalens is not simple. Recently, a research team le

A number of technologies to combat climate change are actively under research. Among them are radical ideas to alter the behavior of the global climate system or to remove carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere. To meet the goals set by The Paris Agreement, cutting down emissions alone is no longer sufficient, although it would have been a couple of decades earlier. The global emission rate is still on the rising curve, especially for countries that are just emerging out of poverty. To meet the 2-degree goal solely by cutting down emissions would require profound transformations in nearly

Voice phishing has been mainly targeted to the elderly who do not know much about finances. However, in recent years, the amount of voice phishing damage among young people in their 20s has continued to increase. The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) recently released data titled “The Status and Key Characteristics of Voice Phishing Damage in 2022.” According to this, the amount of voice phishing damage continued to decrease. However, the amount of damage in the 20s age group increased from 6.6 billion KRW in 2020 to 9.2 billion KRW last year 2022, and the proportion of the affected age grou