Listening to the Heart Without Touching It What if your heart could be monitored without a single electrode stuck to your skin or a smartwatch strapped to your wrist? Researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and their collaborators have been exploring a fascinating frontier: using radar waves to eavesdrop on the subtle vibrations of your heartbeat…
In the vast theater of the cosmos, a peculiar class of active galaxies sits at a crossroads of mass and light. Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies, or NLS1s, host relatively small black holes that gulp material at or near the Eddington limit. That makes them bright in X-rays, jittery in brightness, and oddly informative about how…
Robotics has long carried two visions at once: a scientist’s dream of learning from data, and an engineer’s wish to respect the stubborn reality of hardware. For humanoid robots, that hardware often looks like a tangle of joints, cables, and belts rather than a clean line from motor to foot. In practice, many learning systems…
Networks are the hidden scaffolding of modern life, from the neurons that spark our thoughts to the social webs we scroll every day. When those networks host opposing forces, the tension doesn’t just slow things down; it reshapes the very possible futures the system can inhabit. A team of physicists led by Giulio Iannelli and…
Across the globe, natural-language processing has remixed language into vectors and tokens, but breakthroughs in AI have largely been trained on English and a handful of dominant tongues. In Saarbrücken, Germany, a researcher named David Ifeoluwa Adelani led a project that rethinks how machines understand Sub-Saharan languages. Working with Saarland University’s Institute for Computational Linguistics…
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…
Medical imaging has become the nervous system of modern medicine. From a patient’s chest x-ray to a biopsy’s tissue slide, doctors build a map of what’s happening inside the body. Yet the tools that help interpret these images are often siloed by modality (the kind of image) and by specialty (radiology, ophthalmology, pathology, dermatology, and…
Prostate cancer remains a major health issue, and MRI is a powerful lens for spotting it. But turning those images into reliable, actionable maps—the kind a clinician can trust at a glance—has always been a human-scale challenge. Segmentation, the act of drawing the exact boundaries of the prostate on an image, is slow when done…
The world isn’t made of isolated particles; it’s a dizzying dance of interactions. We tend to think in terms of pairs: two molecules attracting, two magnets repelling. But what happens when a third body waltzes into the scene? A new study from Auburn University reveals a surprising truth about these so-called “three-body effects,” specifically on…
Mathematicians spend a lot of time counting symmetries. In the world of field theory, symmetries are captured by automorphisms — structure-preserving jumblings of the elements inside a field that leave its base numbers alone. If you bundle a field extension K over a base field F, the automorphisms that fix F form a group Aut(K/F)….
From the sky, the world collapses into a mosaic of roads, rooftops, and moving silhouettes. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, promise a kind of overhead commonsense: see more, cover more ground, react faster. Yet teaching a fleet of drones to understand a scene together while talking a language that doesn’t drown in data is a…
Massive stars rarely lead solitary lives. In the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy with a tiny metal content, astronomers have a natural laboratory where stellar duets can be studied in exquisite detail. The environment’s metal paucity means winds are weaker and the life stories of giant stars are written in binary ink. A…
When we dream about machines that can read minds, the conversation often skims the surface of science fiction. Yet a new paper from an international team dares to step into that territory with unusual clarity and a wink of provocation. The authors claim to have built an AI that passes two classic tests of Theory…
The Robot Morphology Revolution Forget broad strokes like “humanoid” or “animal-like.” A groundbreaking new framework from the University of Bremen, called METAMORPH, is poised to revolutionize how we understand and classify robot appearance. Led by researchers Rachel Ringe, Robin Nolte, Nima Zargham, Robert Porzel, and Rainer Malaka, this approach moves beyond simple categories to a…
Imagine a world where the limitations of cheap, low-resolution sensors are a thing of the past. That future might be closer than we think, thanks to a groundbreaking approach developed by researchers at Rutgers University. Led by Morriel Kasher, Michael Tinston, and Predrag Spasojevic, their work focuses on a clever technique to drastically improve the…
Unlocking Genetic Clues from Ordinary Tissue Slides In the fight against lung cancer, knowing the enemy’s genetic makeup can be the difference between life and death. Certain mutations in cancer cells—called driver mutations—act like switches that fuel tumor growth. Targeted therapies that shut off these switches have revolutionized treatment, turning what was once a grim…
Rule systems have a certain quiet magic. They let computers reason about complex relationships—who trusts whom, who depends on whom, which paths connect a network, or how a policy chain flows through a maze of constraints. At their heart lies a deceptively simple question: can you express the connections as rules and then let a…
In the wake of recent whispers from the cosmos, a chorus of pulsars has begun to reveal a faint, pervasive hum: a stochastic gravitational wave background that permeates the universe in the nanohertz range. It’s not a single loud note but a whole orchestra of gravitational waves, each source lending its subtle tremor to the…
In a field where numbers are used to justify policy, a team led by Melody Huang at Yale University and including colleagues from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pennsylvania asks a sharper question: do hospitals with Magnet Nursing recognition actually improve outcomes for patients who arrive at the ER in crisis? The study blends…
Imagine searching through hours of video footage, not by painstakingly scrubbing through every second, but by simply typing a question. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the rapidly evolving world of video temporal grounding (VTG), and a team of researchers from Zhejiang University and Bytedance have just pushed its boundaries significantly. The Challenge of Finding the…