The droplet perched on a surface is more than a pretty drop of water in a science fair. Its edge, the contact line where liquid meets solid and air, encodes a negotiation between molecules: a quiet vote about how much a surface wants to be kissed or ignored by a liquid. In industry, that tiny…
Unlocking the Hidden Stories in Hospital Data Hospitals generate mountains of data every day—vital signs, lab results, medication lists, and, crucially, the notes doctors scribble down about each patient’s condition and care. These electronic health records (EHRs) hold the promise of predicting who might be at risk of complications or readmission, enabling doctors to intervene…
Why rounding numbers is just the start We all know that computers can’t store numbers with infinite precision. They round, truncate, and approximate. But what happens when the object we want to store isn’t a single number but a whole probability distribution? This is the challenge tackled by March T. Boedihardjo at Michigan State University…
The world of graph neural networks (GNNs) has become a playground for machines that learn from relationships—the way friends influence each other, the way molecules connect, the way papers cite one another. But teaching a machine to aggregate all those neighborhood signals is not just a math problem; it’s a memory problem. Training GNNs requires…
Imagine a world where robots don’t just assemble your gadgets, but also obsessively check their own work, catching tiny defects before they become big problems. That’s the promise of a new AI system called Self-Navigated Residual Mamba (SNARM), developed by researchers at Jiangxi Normal University and several other institutions. The Problem: Spotting Tiny Flaws in…
The electricity you pay for is more than volts and watts; it’s a living system threading wind, sun, pipelines, and policy into a price that changes by the hour. When the Russian gas pipeline saga jolted Europe in 2022, it didn’t just raise bills — it tested the resilience of an interconnected power market that…
Interactive segmentation sits at a curious crossroads: it asks humans to nudge a machine toward a precise outline, and the machine tries to translate those tiny signals into clean boundaries. The Segment Anything Model, or SAM, became a kind of celebrity in this space by showing how far a single, promptable brain could go with…
In the heart of CERN’s sprawling accelerator complex, protons collide with ferocity, and the universe reveals its tiniest secrets in flashes of light and spray of particles. The LHCb experiment isn’t chasing the famous Higgs particle this time; it’s listening for whispers from quarks—the fundamental building blocks of matter—that rarely survive long enough to become…
What goofy transformations are and why they matter Highlights: A newly explored idea in quantum field theory challenges what counts as a symmetry. Instead of a traditional symmetry that mirrors a faithful, unbroken pattern in the equations, goofy transformations flirt with sign flips in the kinetic terms. Yet they can lock in stable relationships between…
Rethinking AI Serving at a Massive Scale Large language models (LLMs) like GPT and its successors have dazzled us with their ability to generate text, answer questions, and even write code. But behind the scenes, running these models at scale is a monumental engineering challenge. The latest research from Huawei’s xDeepServe team, published in 2025,…
The Dawn of Flexible Intelligent Metasurfaces Imagine a world where wireless networks aren’t just passively receiving signals, but actively shaping their environment. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the promise of flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIMs), a revolutionary technology poised to transform how we communicate and sense the world around us. Researchers at Constructor University (formerly Jacobs…
What the paper is really about Mathematicians love to think with pictures. The authors of this work, Jordi Delgado, Marco Linton, Jone Lopez de Gamiz Zearra, Mallika Roy, and Pascal Weil, bring that instinct to a very old idea in group theory: viewing complex algebraic objects as geometric or combinatorial gadgets you can twist, fold,…
Why Feeling Matters More Than Seeing for Robots Robots opening doors, pulling drawers, or twisting knobs might sound like a mundane chore, but it’s a surprisingly complex dance of touch, prediction, and adaptation. At the heart of this challenge is the robot’s ability to understand and manipulate objects that aren’t rigid or fixed — things…
The forecasting world loves a clean score. A single number, a neat SMAPE or MAPE, and we feel like we understand a model’s performance. But in the messy real world, data behave like weather: they shift, surprise, and reveal different strengths and weaknesses at different moments. The new study behind ModelRadar argues that this hunger…
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…
Why Picking the Right Tools Matters More Than You Think Bayesian optimization (BO) is like a savvy explorer navigating a vast, unknown landscape with limited resources. It’s a method beloved by scientists and engineers who face expensive, time-consuming experiments or complex machine learning tasks. Instead of blindly wandering, BO uses a smart combination of a…
The University of York may not be a household name in every kitchen-table health debate, but it sits at the center of a quietly important twist in how we think about cancer screening. A team there, led by Sofia Dias with colleagues Yiwen Liu, Stephen Palmer and Marta O Soares, asked a deceptively simple question:…
The idea of a GCD is as familiar as a clock on the wall: you look at two numbers and you notice what they share. But the paper by Projesh Nath Choudhury and Krushnachandra Panigrahy from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar takes that simple arithmetic idea and stretches it into a new shape, a…
Forget faster speeds; 6G is about something far more radical: re-engineering the very fabric of wireless communication. Imagine a world where the walls, buildings, and even the air around you actively participate in sending and receiving signals, transforming the cityscape into a giant, responsive antenna. That’s the promise of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), a revolutionary…
In causal claims, the chain from cause to effect is only as strong as what we leave out. Economists have long wrestled with omitted-variable bias, the dreaded specter that lurks when a relevant factor isn’t observed or controlled. Across dozens, then hundreds, of studies, researchers have relied on sensitivity analyses to ask: how robust are…