Carlo D’Eramo is new at the University of Würzburg. The computer science professor works in the field of artificial intelligence. He is an expert in a special form of machine learning called reinforcement learning. An intelligent camera surveillance system is supposed to autonomously detect stray pieces of luggage or other suspicious objects at a railway station. To do this, it has to know what suitcases and bags look like. To achieve this, humans have to feed the system with training…

Astronomers have observed an explosion 180 million light years away which challenges our current understanding of explosions in space, that appeared much flatter than ever thought possible. Astronomers have observed an explosion 180 million light years away which challenges our current understanding of explosions in space, that appeared much flatter than ever thought possible Explosions are almost always expected to be spherical, as the stars themselves are spherical, but this one is the flattest ever seen The explosion observed was…

… could lead to exciting developments in nanotechnology. Cambridge researchers have discovered a new topological phase in a two-dimensional system, which could be used as a new platform for exploring topological physics in nanoscale devices. Two-dimensional materials such as graphene have served as a playground for the experimental discovery and theoretical understanding of a wide range of phenomena in physics and materials science. Beyond graphene, there are a large number 2D materials, all with different physical properties. This is promising…

Researchers create a trajectory-planning system that enables drones working together in the same airspace to always choose a safe path forward. When multiple drones are working together in the same airspace, perhaps spraying pesticide over a field of corn, there’s a risk they might crash into each other. To help avoid these costly crashes, MIT researchers presented a system called MADER in 2020. This multiagent trajectory-planner enables a group of drones to formulate optimal, collision-free trajectories. Each agent broadcasts its…

Will enable powerful AI in your portable devices. Everyone is talking about the newest AI and the power of neural networks, forgetting that software is limited by the hardware on which it runs. But it is hardware, says USC Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Joshua Yang, that has become “the bottleneck.” Now, Yang’s new research with collaborators might change that. They believe that they have developed a new type of chip with the best memory of any chip thus…

Assessing how energy-generating synthetic organelles could sustain artificial cells. Energy production in nature is the responsibility of chloroplasts and mitochondria and is crucial for fabricating sustainable, synthetic cells in the lab. Mitochondria are not only “the powerhouses of the cell,” as the middle school biology adage goes, but also one of the most complex intracellular components to replicate artificially. In Biophysics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Sogang University in South Korea and the Harbin Institute of Technology in China…

“Seven, one, nine, …”: A human voice pronounces digits, a physical material recognizes them with about 97 percent accuracy. This pattern recognition system was developed by physicists at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in collaboration with Ghent University (Belgium). The development enables multidimensional problems to be solved quickly and without energy-consuming training. The scientific journal Advanced Intelligent Systems published the results. Is it possible for an inanimate material to recognize patterns quickly and efficiently? That was the question asked by…

Scientists at the Universities of Würzburg and Ottawa have solved the decades-old problem of distinguishing between single and multiple light excitations. They present their new method in the journal Nature. The construction of the first laser in 1960 ushered in commercial applications with light that have become an integral part of our everyday lives. At the same time, this development opened up the scientific field of laser spectroscopy – a technique that is central to the analysis of materials and…

Plasma physicists from Ukraine, Germany and Japan collaborate to spark fusion power. Lead author Yurii Victorovich Kovtun, despite being forced to evacuate the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology amid the current Russia-Ukraine war, has continued to work with Kyoto University to create stable plasmas using microwaves. Getting plasma just right is one of the hurdles to harnessing the massive amounts of energy promised by nuclear fusion. Plasmas — soups of ions and electrons — must be held at the right density, temperature,…

A new SISSA study proposes an array of interferometers in space to detect subtle fluctuations in the background gravitational signals that may reveal the secrets of black hole mergers. Every year, hundreds of thousands of pairs of black holes merge in a cosmic dance that emits gravitational waves in every direction. Since 2015, the large ground-based LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA interferometers have made it possible to detect these signals, although only about a hundred such events, an infinitesimal fraction of…

LMS instrument will study electrical conductivity of the Moon’s interior. Southwest Research Institute recently delivered the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) to Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, Texas, for integration into the Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander scheduled to arrive at the Moon in 2024. The sounder will determine the electrical conductivity of the interior of the Moon by measuring low-frequency electric and magnetic fields. “For more than 50 years, scientists have used magnetotelluric techniques, which use natural characteristics of the…

… in an important step for the quantum internet. Researchers have discovered a way to “translate” quantum information between different kinds of quantum technologies, with significant implications for quantum computing, communication, and networking. The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, was funded by the Army Research Office (ARO), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (HQAN), which is led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It represents…

Quantum interference between dissimilar particles offers new approach for mapping gluons in nuclei, and potentially harnessing entanglement. The Science Nuclear physicists have found a new way to see details inside atomic nuclei. They do so by tracking interactions between particles of light and gluons—the gluelike particles that hold together the building blocks of protons and neutrons. The method relies on harnessing a new type of quantum interference between two dissimilar particles. Tracking how these entangled particles emerge from the interactions lets…

Hannover Messe 2023: At the booth of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Hall 16, A12) at Hannover Messe (April 17–23, 2023), Fraunhofer FIT will provide insights into the Industrial Metaverse. The demonstrator for remote maintenance and training in mechanical engineering and production uses high-speed wireless Internet, remote rendering of CAD data, and mobile mixed reality / virtual reality headsets. The system is being implemented and tested in a real-life setting in the 5G Troisdorf IndustrieStadtpark project. The Industrial Metaverse promises a range of benefits…

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth. After seven years in space, including a nail-biting touchdown on Bennu to gather dust and rocks, this intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: deliver the asteroid sample to Earth…

Researcher awarded for the development of compact high-power EUV source. The future has a color: it is extreme ultraviolet. With the help of EUV light it is possible, for example, to produce smaller and more powerful microchips than ever before. But further research faces a problem: Experiments with laser-like EUV light can usually only be conducted at expensive large-scale research facilities. Jena scientist Robert Klas wants to change that. He has developed a compact EUV laser module that can be…