The work was published in Nature Photonics and received the cover of the magazine’s April issue. Artificial intelligence algorithms are based on mathematical models called neural networks, inspired by the biological structure of the human brain, which is made up of interconnected nodes (neurons). Just as in our brain the learning process is based on the rearrangement of the connections between neurons, artificial neural networks can be “trained” on a set of known data that modify its internal structure, making…

Interactions between alternating layers of exotic, 2D material create ‘entropy-driven order’ in a structured system of magnets at equilibrium. Extremely small arrays of magnets with strange and unusual properties can order themselves by increasing entropy, or the tendency of physical systems to disorder, a behavior that appears to contradict standard thermodynamics — but doesn’t. “Paradoxically, the system orders because it wants to be more disordered,” said Cristiano Nisoli, a physicist at Los Alamos and coauthor of a paper about the…

Coalescing supermassive black holes in the centers of merging galaxies fill the universe with low-frequency gravitational waves. Large radio telescopes have already looked for the subtle effect of these spacetime ripples on radio waves emitted by pulsars within our Galaxy. Now, an international team of scientists including Aditya Parthasarathy and Michael Kramer from the MPIfR (Bonn, Germany) has shown that the high-energy light collected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can also be used in the search. Using gamma rays…

An international team of astronomers, including researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has spotted the most distant astronomical object ever: a galaxy. Named HD1, the galaxy candidate is some 13.5 billion light-years away and is described Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal. In an accompanying paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, scientists have begun to speculate exactly what the galaxy is. The team proposes two ideas: HD1 may be forming stars at an astounding rate…

Sensors are a pillar of the Internet of Things, providing the data to control all sorts of objects. Here, precision is essential, and this is where quantum technologies could make a difference. Researchers in Innsbruck and Zurich are now demonstrating how nanoparticles in tiny optical resonators can be transferred into quantum regime and used as high-precision sensors. Advances in quantum physics offer new opportunities to significantly improve the precision of sensors and thus enable new technologies. A team led by…

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a pollen-based ‘paper’ that, after being printed on, can be ‘erased’ and reused multiple times without any damage to the paper. In a research paper published online in Advanced Materials on 5 April, the NTU Singapore scientists demonstrated how high-resolution colour images could be printed on the non-allergenic pollen paper with a laser printer, and then ‘unprinted’ – by completely removing the toner without damaging the paper – with an…

Bristol scientists put finger on key to improving robot dexterity and performance of prosthetic hands. Machines can beat the world’s best chess player, but they cannot handle a chess piece as well as an infant. This lack of robot dexterity is partly because artificial grippers lack the fine tactile sense of the human fingertip, which is used to guide our hands as we pick up and handle objects. Two papers published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface give…

NASA’s airborne Lunar Spectral Irradiance, or air-LUSI, flew aboard NASA’s ER-2 aircraft from March 12 to 16 to accurately measure the amount of light reflected off the Moon. Reflected moonlight is a steady source of light that researchers are taking advantage of to improve the accuracy and consistency of measurements among Earth-observing satellites. “The Moon is extremely stable and not influenced by factors on Earth like climate to any large degree. It becomes a very good calibration reference, an independent…

A step closer towards high-performance organic thermoelectrics. Researchers from TU Dresden introduce a new path towards superior organic thermoelectric devices: highly efficient modulation doping of highly ordered organic semiconductors under high doping concentrations. The results have now been published in the renowned journal “Science Advances”. Can you image charging your mobile phone by simply using your body heat? It may still sound rather futuristic, but thermoelectrics certainly can do. Thermoelectrics is all about transforming heat into useful energy, mostly using…

For 50 years, interplanetary probes have returned thousands of striking images of the surface of Mars, but never a single sound. Now, NASA’s Perseverance mission has put an end to this deafening silence by recording the first ever Martian sounds. The scientific team1 for the French-US SuperCam2 instrument installed on Perseverance was convinced that the study of the soundscape of Mars could advance our understanding of the planet. This scientific challenge led them to design a microphone dedicated to the…

A new technique could enable a robot to manipulate squishy objects like pizza dough or soft materials like clothing. Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is tricky because the shape of dough…

Even in our cosmic backyard, the Solar System, many questions remain open. On Venus there are formations similar to volcanoes, but it is not known if they are active. The surface of Mars suggests that there was once a vast ocean, but how it disappeared remains unclear. On the other hand, recent detections of chemical compounds that may indicate the presence of biological activity on Mars and Venus, the so-called biosignatures, keep the search for life outside Earth alive. The…

Artificial intelligence is regularly applied in areas such as image analysis and speech recognition. However, in the industrial production sector its potential is still scarcely used. Several Fraunhofer institutes have recently developed a solution as part of the lighthouse project “ML4P — Machine Learning for Production”, which aims to make industrial manufacturing much more efficient through the use of machine learning. The software suite is very flexible and can be easily applied in existing production processes. The production industry is…

Harnessing the properties of materials so that technology can continue to move forward means getting to grips with increasingly more challenging systems. A team led by a researcher from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo has turned its focus to chiral molecular and colloidal crystals, revealing the role of emergent elastic fields in their behavior. Their findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is easy for most people to picture the properties of…

International collaboration, led by DIPC and Princeton, creates a catalogue of materials that could impact quantum technologies. The world’s first catalogue of flat band materials, published this week in Nature journal, could reduce the serendipity in the search for new materials with exotic quantum properties, such as magnetism and superconductivity, with applications in memory devices or in long-range dissipationless transport of power. Finding the right ingredients to create materials with exotic quantum properties has been a chimera for experimental scientists,…

Studying impact craters to uncover the secrets of the solar system. While for humans the constants might be death and taxes, for planets the constants are gravity and collisions. Brandon Johnson studies the latter, using information about impacts to understand the history and the composition of planets, moons, asteroids and meteorites throughout the solar system. “Impact cratering is the most ubiquitous surface process shaping planetary bodies,” Johnson said. “Craters are found on almost every solid body we’ve ever seen. They…