In the gilded era of billion-parameter neural networks, researchers chase surprises the way astronomers chase novas. Some of those surprises look glamorous on a slide, but they vanish when you bring the model into the messy glow of real world tasks. A recent position paper from the University of Cambridge argues that many of the…
Smartphones have quietly become the first line of personal health sensing for millions. A quick glance at the data stream from your pocket can feel almost magical: a graph of heartbeats captured simply by placing a finger on the back camera. Yet behind the promise lies a stubborn problem: different phone models, camera sensors, lighting,…
Revolutionizing the Design of Optoelectronic Devices The world of electronics is on the brink of a revolution. We’re not just talking incremental improvements, but a fundamental shift in how we design and build the devices that power our lives. At the heart of this transformation lies the fascinating realm of two-dimensional (2D) materials, ultrathin substances…
Moiré materials, where two atomic lattices slide past one another with a tiny twist, have become laboratories for exotic quantum behavior. In systems like twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) and twisted bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), electrons don’t just move through a static landscape; they wander through a textured, shimmering tapestry that remixes their quantum states…
Fermilab’s computing grid is more than a tech stack. It’s a living artery that pumps data, software, and collaboration across continents, fueling experiments that probe the mysteries of matter, energy, and the cosmos. For decades, the grid trusted users and machines through X.509 certificates—digital passports that could be shared and extended, but eventually grew unwieldy…
Artificial intelligence that can reason about actions and change is a hunter for real-world autonomy. From robots gripping objects to delivery fleets plotting routes, the ability to plan is what keeps AI from merely reacting to the present and instead shaping a reliable path toward the future. A team at IBM Research—Harsha Kokel, Michael Katz,…
Building the Future One Layer at a Time 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, has revolutionized how we create objects—from intricate aerospace parts to custom medical implants. But beneath the surface of this seemingly magical layering process lies a complex dance of physics and mathematics. How do you design a structure that not only performs well…
Our digital lives are increasingly interwoven with 5G networks, the backbone of modern communication. Yet, beneath the surface of seamless connectivity lies a critical vulnerability. A new study from CSIRO’s Data61 in Australia, led by researchers Nazatul H. Sultan and Xinlong Guan, exposes a significant flaw in the 5G-Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol –…
Imagine a tangled fishing line, a chaotic mess of loops and crossings. Now, imagine that same line, but in four dimensions. This seemingly abstract scenario is the heart of a new mathematical breakthrough that’s upending our understanding of knots and the very fabric of higher-dimensional space. Researchers at North Carolina State University, Swarthmore College, and…
Geometry loves a hinge moment. When two curves touch, something feels suspended between rivalry and romance, a moment that reveals deeper rules about shape, motion, and possibility. The old tale of the Poncelet porism is exactly that kind hinge: if you can draw a polygon that sits on the inside of one conic and nudges…
In the endless maze of real‑world decision making, some puzzles are simple to state but brutally hard to solve. You want to assign 0s and 1s to a set of items — binary decisions — while also obeying a handful of rules that link those choices together. Think facility location, scheduling, or even how to…
The most powerful beams in science come with their own critics—their interactions with the world can ruin sensitive measurements. So researchers have long sought ways to study charged particle beams without tipping the scales. A recent experiment led by Rob Behary at William & Mary points the way toward a new kind of eye for…
Imagine a world where medical image analysis is not a laborious, specialized task, but a swift, reliable process. That’s the promise of UniSegDiff, a groundbreaking new model developed by researchers at Dalian University of Technology, led by Lihe Zhang. This advanced AI system utilizes a ‘diffusion model’—a type of artificial intelligence that learns by adding…
In the era of data deluges and thousands, even millions, of statistical tests, a single line can decide what counts as a discovery and what stays in the quiet corners of the data. The Benjamini–Hochberg procedure, BH, is a trusted workhorse for controlling the false discovery rate, the expected proportion of false alarms among all…
In a world of parallel machines and shared resources, scheduling feels like directing a chorus where some singers simply can’t be on stage at the same moment. The challenge isn’t just about speed; it’s about respecting the social dance of dependencies, exclusivities, and timing. When you scale up to hundreds or thousands of tasks, the…
In the quiet world of fluids, mixing is one of the oldest, messiest problems. Diffusion — the slow, patient random jiggle of molecules — loves to drag its feet. Advection, the grand stirring motion of a flow, can speed things up, but engineers and mathematicians have long faced a stubborn question: can we make mixing…
In a fusion reactor, magnetic fields are both the choreographers and the stagehands. They guide hot plasma into neat, almost musical configurations, keeping the fuel from touching the walls while dictating how energy leaks, twists, and can suddenly surge. The study we’re about to dive into is about one of the trickier acts in that…
Across modern factories, fleets of tiny sensors monitor temperature, vibration, and machine health, often powered by harvested energy rather than batteries. These battery-free backscatter tags don’t generate their own signals; they reflect the reader’s excitation and ride along on the same airwaves. It’s a quiet enabler of pervasive sensing on the factory floor, but once…
Disorder and waves have an uneasy relationship. In everyday life, a muddy room muffles sound and makes it hard for a whisper to travel. In quantum materials, randomness can trap electrons, a phenomenon known as Anderson localization. For a long time, physicists have understood that in one- and two-dimensional systems, any amount of uncorrelated disorder…
The eyes of self driving cars are many and varied: LiDARs that sweep the road like invisible bats, cameras that catch color and motion, radar that can see through rain, and a thousand tiny sensors that whisper data to a computer brain. But eyes plus ears don’t work well unless they’re aligned. In the right…