When it comes to teaching massive language models, the final exam isn’t a single test—it’s a lifelong conversation. Pretraining gives these models their broad vocabulary and world knowledge, but the post-training phase is where they learn to follow instructions, reason, and stay reliable enough to be trusted in the wild. The paper Bridging Offline and…
Imagine a world where your walls aren’t just barriers, but active participants in your wireless network, intelligently routing signals to boost performance and efficiency. It sounds like science fiction, but researchers at Imperial College London are making it a reality. Their work explores how reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) – essentially smart wallpaper – can be…
In a quiet corner of the quantum world, a handful of ultracold polar molecules dance to an unusual tune. The trick is microwave shielding: a highly elliptic microwave field makes the long-range attraction between molecules behave as if they were bound in one dimension. The result is a surprisingly clean, almost architectural set of bound…
Gravity has long stood as the stubborn gap between the quantum world and the vast, curving canvas of spacetime. We’ve learned to measure how gravity tugs on planets, bends light, and stretches time itself, mostly through the mathematics of general relativity. Yet at the scale of atoms and photons, gravity remains a curious afterthought, whispering…
In the grand quest for artificial intelligence that can roam beyond its training data, researchers chase a delicate, almost human trait: curiosity that doesn’t burn out. Open-ended learning is the dream that an AI could keep picking up new tasks, remixing old skills, and solving problems it has never seen before. It’s not just about…
Medical imaging is undergoing a quiet revolution. For decades, radiologists have painstakingly traced the outlines of organs on MRI scans, a process that’s both time-consuming and prone to human error. But now, artificial intelligence is stepping in, offering the potential to automate this crucial task and vastly improve the speed and accuracy of diagnoses. The…
In the quiet math of crystals, electrons swirl not just through real space but through a hidden landscape called momentum space. Here, a geometric twist—known as Berry curvature—acts like an invisible wind that can bend charge in ways conventional electric and magnetic fields cannot. The anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) is one measurable whisper of that…
Why trusting AI to grade essays feels like handing your novel to a stranger In the age of AI, the idea that a machine could grade your university essay sounds like a dream come true. No more waiting weeks for feedback, no more human bias or fatigue. Instead, a super-smart algorithm reads your words, judges…
Winds Write the Radio Script In the bustling dance of a neutron star paired with an OB supergiant, the radio and millimeter glow at the edges of the system carry a story that X-ray eyes miss. A team led by J. van den Eijnden of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of…
Unraveling the Top Quark’s Mystery The top quark, the heaviest known fundamental particle, dances to a beat all its own. Its immense mass, almost double that of the next heaviest, makes it a crucial player in the Standard Model, physics’ most successful theory of matter. But accurately measuring its mass remains surprisingly challenging, and that’s…
Imagine the universe whispering secrets to us, its voice a faint tremor in the fabric of spacetime. These whispers are gravitational waves, ripples generated by cataclysmic events like colliding black holes. Ground-based detectors, like LIGO and Virgo, painstakingly listen for these cosmic murmurs, but their hearing is limited. A new experimental concept from researchers at…
The plane is a stage where graphs perform: vertices as dancers, edges as lines that sometimes cross. In this choreography, researchers ask not just how fast the performers move, but how many lines must cross to keep the dance intact when there are many dancers on stage. A 1-planar graph is a drawing in which…
Biometric security feels like magic at first glance: a fingerprint that unlocks a phone, an iris scan that logs you into a car, a face that replaces a password. But the real story is messier and more human. Behind every smooth unlock is a constant balancing act between convenience, privacy, and the risk that data…
The world of quantum gases hides a strange landscape called flat bands, where an astonishing number of quantum states share the same energy. In that flat-energy terrain, even tiny interactions can tilt reality in surprising ways, turning a seemingly inert system into a stage for dramatic collective motion. A new paper led by Yi-Cai Zhang…
Intro The internet hums with science: fresh findings, dramatic headlines, and countless threads debating what a study means for our lives. Yet the stream isn’t always faithful to the original work. Dustin Wright, at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Computer Science, spent years building a toolbox to study that translation layer between papers, news,…
A team spanning Neuro Industry Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The University of Alabama, and the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Hsinchu, Taiwan, walked into the vast, noisy arena of financial markets with a provocative question: could quantum computing amplify the decision-making brains behind money, stability, and risk? The study, led by Chi-Sheng Chen with coauthors…
In the hidden world of binary analysis, researchers hunt for the invisible rails that carry a program from start to finish. Every time a computer runs a compiled program, it hides its function boundaries in a tangle of bytes, calls and jumps, and crafty padding between blocks. For security researchers—malware analysts, vulnerability researchers, and anyone…
AI’s ‘Aha!’ Moment: Can We Teach Machines to Be Safe? The quest to create truly safe and reliable artificial intelligence is a bit like taming a dragon. The power is breathtaking, but the potential for destruction is equally immense. For years, researchers have focused on aligning AI with human values, a process that often feels…
The study that follows comes from the kind of data treasure you rarely see in public with nine years of monthly records from a large civilian workforce, covering more than 70 000 people. Conducted by a team at George Mason University led by Bryan Adams, Valentín Vergara Hidd, and Eduardo López, the work builds a…
Introduction to a curious grid of fractions If you’ve ever looked at the orderly ladder of fractions known as the Farey sequence, you’ve brushed against a surprisingly rich playground. The Farey sequence of order Q is just all fractions a/q between 0 and 1 with 1 ≤ a ≤ q ≤ Q and gcd(a, q)…