Science News

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have furthered a new type of soft material that can change shape in response to light, a discovery that could advance "soft machines" for a variety of fields, from robotics to medicine.

As you scroll through any social media feed, you are likely to be prompted to follow or friend another person, expanding your personal network and contributing to the growth of the app itself. The person suggested to you is a result of link prediction: a widespread machine learning (ML) task that evaluates the links in a network—your friends and everyone else's—and tries to predict what the next links will be.

On the morning of Dec. 21, 1999, William Fyfe went to a clothing drop-off at Trinity Church in Toronto and left three pairs of running shoes. An undercover Ontario Provincial Police officer was tailing him, and retrieved the shoes for forensic analysis.

You've probably experienced the dread of a suddenly dead phone that is glacially slow to recharge. Add to that earbuds or laptops that die at the most inconvenient times. And perhaps you've delayed shopping for an electric car because of limited cruise range (or high price). These battery breakdowns and charge collapses are because of shortcomings in the lithium-ion batteries powering today's technology.

Four Horsemen showed off new figures and sets during a recent in-person meeting.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere. Right now, generative AI in particular—tools like Midjourney, ChatGPT, Gemini (previously Bard) and others—is at the peak of hype.

Hot water tanks, washing machines, kettles: limescale forms in every domestic appliance that comes into contact with (hot) water—especially in areas where the water is hard, meaning high in calcium. Often the only thing that helps is to use vinegar or a special descaler to dissolve the rock-hard deposits and restore the appliance's functionality.

With a brain the size of a pinhead, insects perform fantastic navigational feats. They avoid obstacles and move through small openings. How do they do this with their limited brain power? Understanding the inner workings of an insect's brain can help us in our search towards energy-efficient computing; physicist Elisabetta Chicca of the University of Groningen demonstrates with her most recent result: a robot that acts like an insect.

An international team of scientists has made a new discovery that may help to unlock the microscopic mystery of high-temperature superconductivity and address the world's energy problems.

Solar panels and photovoltaics (PVs) are becoming increasingly widespread, contributing to ongoing efforts aimed at decarbonizing electricity production. Solar cells based on perovskites, a class of minerals that can leverage parts of the solar spectrum, have recently achieved highly promising energy conversion efficiencies and stabilities.

The landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has traditionally been dominated by the use of resource-intensive servers centralized in industrialized nations. However, recent years have witnessed the emergence of small, energy-efficient devices for AI applications, a concept known as tiny machine learning (TinyML).

If realized using solar energy or other renewable energy, water splitting could be a promising way of sustainably producing hydrogen (H2) on a large-scale. Most photoelectrochemical water splitting systems proposed so far, however, have been found to be either inefficient, unstable, or difficult to implement on a large-scale.

Soft robotics is the study of creating robots from soft materials, which has the advantage of flexibility and safety in human interactions. These robots are well-suited for applications ranging from medical devices to enhancing efficiency in various tasks. Additionally, using different forms of robotic movement may also serve us well in exploring the ocean or space, or doing certain jobs in those environments.

Finnish airline Finnair this week instituted a new voluntary policy whereby it is now weighing passengers in addition to their luggage.

Textiles account for 10% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, while 85% of textile waste is simply sent to landfill or incinerated. Buildings in Hong Kong generate 60% of CO2 emissions and air conditioners consume 30% of energy. Therefore, providing an attractive technology to recycle textile waste and save building energy simultaneously holds high promise for carbon reduction.

A new, independent field investigation into the aftermath of the Turkey–Syria earthquakes has found that a drive for profit has pushed all players within the construction industry to take shortcuts, with building stock primarily made of Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures, being the main cause of the casualties.

A new glass-ceramic composite shows great promise for the safer storage of nuclear waste. "Simply put, we want to find the best candidate for containing nuclear waste," explains Mehrnaz Mikhchian, a University of Saskatchewan Ph.D. student who has published findings following a year-long study.

In several applications of computer vision, such as augmented reality and self-driving cars, estimating the distance between objects and the camera is an essential task. Depth from focus/defocus is one of the techniques that achieve such a process using the blur in the images as a clue. Depth from focus/defocus usually requires a stack of images of the same scene taken with different focus distances, a technique known as "focal stack."

ESA's very latest laboratory extension is portable in nature: Hosted within a standard shipping container, this ESA Transportable Optical Ground Station, ETOGS, can be transported all across Europe as needed, to perform laser-based optical communications with satellites—including NASA's Psyche mission, millions of kilometers away in space.

A team of AI researchers at Google's DeepMind project, working with a colleague from the University of Southern California, has developed a vehicle for allowing large language models (LLMs) to find and use task-intrinsic reasoning structures as a means for improving returned results.