The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks (MOF). The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or break down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment. "Metal organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. According to Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, the new form of molecular architecture can be compared with the handbag of the fictional Harry Potter character Hermione Granger: small on the outside but very large on the inside.

This paper revisits classical works of Rauch (1963, et al. 1965) and develops a novel method for maximum likelihood (ML) smoothing estimation from incomplete information/data of stochastic state-space systems. Score function and conditional observed information matrices of incomplete data are introduced and their distributional identities are established. Using these identities, the ML smoother $\widehat{x}_{k\vert n}^s =\argmax_{x_k} \log f(x_k,\widehat{x}_{k+1\vert n}^s, y_{0:n}\vert\theta)$, $k\leq n-1$, is presented. The result shows that the ML smoother gives an estimate of state $x_k$ with more adherence of loglikehood having less standard errors than that of the ML state estimator $\widehat{x}_k=\argmax_{x_k} \log f(x_k,y_{0:k}\vert\theta)$, with $\widehat{x}_{n\vert n}^s=\widehat{x}_n$. Recursive estimation is given in terms of an EM-gradient-particle algorithm which extends the work of \cite{Lange} for ML smoothing estimation. The algorithm has an explicit iteration update which lacks in (\cite{Ramadan}) EM-algorithm for smoothing. A sequential Monte Carlo method is developed for valuation of the score function and observed information matrices. A recursive equation for the covariance matrix of estimation error is developed to calculate the standard errors. In the case of linear systems, the method shows that the Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) smoother is a fully efficient smoothing state-estimator whose covariance matrix coincides with the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound, the inverse of expected information matrix. Furthermore, the RTS smoother coincides with the Kalman filter having less covariance matrix. Numerical studies are performed, confirming the accuracy of the main results.

The ¥300,000 ($2,650) masks, made of resin and plastic by five employees at REAL-f Co., attempt to accurately duplicate an individual's face down to fine wrinkles and skin texture. Company founder Osamu Kitagawa came up with the idea while working at a printing machine manufacturer. But it took him two years of experimentation before he found a way to use three-dimensional facial data from high-quality photographs to make the masks, and started selling them in 2011. The company, based in Shiga Prefecture, receives about 100 orders every year from entertainment, automobile, technology and security companies, mainly in Japan. For example, a Japanese car company ordered a mask of a sleeping face to improve its facial recognition technology to detect if a driver had dozed off, Kitagawa said.

Superrealistic plastic face masks produced by a firm in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, have recently attracted attention at home and abroad, from facial-recognition system developers to a Saudi Arabian royal family member. "Look, it makes your heart pound, doesn't it?" The masks -- named Real Face -- are made of plastic resin roughly 1 to 2 millimeters thick. Kitagawa says he came up with the idea of making realistic masks more than a decade ago, when he was developing copy machines at a major printing device manufacturer. "I wanted to make copies of human beings," he said.

Microsoft for years has been trying to tackle the growing threat of Google's Chrome OS, which is siphoning PC market share away from Windows. The company's new Windows 10 S operating system, announced on Tuesday, will be Microsoft's latest attempt to tackle Google's surging Chrome OS. The OS is targeted at the education market, which in the U.S. is dominated by Chromebooks. Even with the new Windows OS, worldwide Chromebook shipments are expected to grow by double digits this year, analysts from IDC and Gartner said. The market share of Chromebooks has been growing up consistently since 2015. The new Windows OS is built like Chrome OS.

PC prices are going up due to a shortage of a number of components, and the situation isn't expected to change in the coming quarters. A shortage of DRAM, SSDs, batteries, and LCDs have conspired to drive up PC prices, Gianfranco Lanci, corporate president and chief operating officer at Lenovo, said during an earnings call on Thursday. It's difficult to pin a number on the price increase because of the number of PC configurations available. The cost of purchasing these components is going up, which is triggering PC prices to also rise, said Lanci, a PC industry veteran. The shortage of components like memory will continue, Lanci said.

With more and more people turning to either smartphones or tablets, sales of desk and laptop computers have plummeted. New figures have been released which show that 269.7 million computers were shipped last year – a 6.2 per cent decline from 2015. Experts suggest that new machines, such as tablets and hybrid laptops, have overtaken traditional PCs and laptops. While there has been growth in sales of innovative new machines such as hybrid laptops with removable tablet screens, the demand was not enough to offset a drop in sales of traditional models. Another factor was that people are putting off replacing desk or laptop computers because they use them infrequently, opting instead to go online with smartphones, according to Ms Kitagawa.

NEW YORK--Years before the iPhone showed up, Apple was synonymous with the Macintosh. But Apple's personal computers have played second fiddle to the iPhone for quite some time now, and a refreshed Mac lineup is long overdue. All signs point to just that happening on Thursday, at a press event taking place at Apple's Cupertino, Calif. The invite beckoned with "Hello Again" and the Apple icon, seemingly a subtle acknowledgement by the company that it is time to pay attention to the Mac again. While the Mac business contributes a far smaller piece to Apple's bottom line, it remains a large and important one for the company, which used to be known as Apple Computer.