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A new study has revealed that people prefer artificial intelligence (AI) over humans when it comes to redistributive decisions.

Plastic microbeads, those tiny troublemakers found in the personal care products of the early 1990s to the late 2010s, wreak havoc on the environment. These minuscule bits, smaller than a sesame seed, escape the clutches of wastewater treatment plants, accumulating in oceans and rivers where they pose a threat to marine life.

A team of engineers and roboticists at EPFL in Switzerland has designed and built a gliding drone that can use its wings as a gripping tool to perch on a vertical object. In their project, reported in the journal Communications Engineering, the group created a drone inspired by animals such as bats that can land on vertical poles and tree limbs.

Helicopters draw a lot of attention with their almost magical ability to hover, fly in any direction and operate without runways. They also help save many lives, often dramatically, with their extensive use in all-weather military missions, ambulance duties and search-and-rescue roles.

Large language models (LLMs) can complete abstract reasoning tasks, but they are susceptible to many of the same types of mistakes made by humans. Andrew Lampinen, Ishita Dasgupta, and colleagues tested state-of-the-art LLMs and humans on three kinds of reasoning tasks: natural language inference, judging the logical validity of syllogisms, and the Wason selection task.

Advances in electrochromic coatings may bring us closer to environmentally friendly ways to keep inside spaces cool. Like eyeglasses that darken to provide sun protection, the optical properties of these transparent films can be tuned with electricity to block out solar heat and light.

Researchers from RWTH, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, and ETH Zurich have made considerable advancements in synthetic fuels. Their study, which has the potential to revolutionize clean transportation, has been published in Nature Energy, titled "Towards Carbon-Neutral and Clean Propulsion in Heavy-Duty Transportation with Hydroformylated Fischer-Tropsch Fuels."

Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered that mycelium composites, biobased materials made from fungi and agricultural residues, can have a greater environmental impact than conventional fossil fuel–based materials due to the high amount of electricity involved in their production.

Foundation models are massive deep-learning models that have been pretrained on an enormous amount of general-purpose, unlabeled data. They can be applied to a variety of tasks, like generating images or answering customer questions.

Researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed low-cost, micro-sized silicon anodes from recycled photovoltaic waste using a novel electrolyte design.

Imagine being able not only to detect a fault in a complex system but also to receive a clear, understandable explanation of its cause. Just like having a seasoned expert by your side. This is the promise of combining a large language model (LLM) such as GPT-4 with advanced diagnostic tools.

Humans can guess how someone on the other end of a phone call is feeling based on how they speak as well as what they say. Speech emotion recognition is the artificial intelligence version of this ability. Seeking to address the issue of channel alignment in downstream speech emotion recognition applications, a research group at East China Normal University in Shanghai developed a temporal shift module that outperforms state-of-the-art methods in fine-tuning and feature-extraction scenarios.

Advances in 3D printing have enabled many applications across a variety of disciplines, including medicine, manufacturing, and energy. A range of different materials can be used to print both simple foundations and fine details, allowing for the creation of structures with tailored geometries.

Just like your smartphone navigation app can instantly analyze information from many sources to suggest the best route to follow, a NASA-developed resource is now making data available to help the aviation industry do the same thing.

After creating the world's first self-organizing drone flock, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary have now also demonstrated the first large-scale autonomous drone traffic solution. This fascinating new system is capable of far more than what could be executed with human pilots.

The emergence of so-called deepfake technology, which commonly involves the generation of fake images, video, and sound that seem so authentic as to confuse even expert viewers and listeners, is at the point where it can influence important aspects of our lives, such as politics, finance, and beyond.

Humans make nearly 35,000 decisions every day, from whether it's safe to cross the road to what to have for lunch. Every decision involves weighing the options, remembering similar past scenarios, and feeling reasonably confident about the right choice. What may seem like a snap decision actually comes from gathering evidence from the surrounding environment. And often the same person makes different decisions in the same scenarios at different times.

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence like OpenAI's GPT-4 has brought remarkable advancements, but it also presents significant risks.

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Physical AI (PAI) Lab, led by Dr. Aslan Miriyev, have developed multifunctional material-sensors that emulate the complex capabilities of natural systems, advancing the field of physical AI.

A combined team of roboticists from MIT and the University of California, San Diego, has developed a new type of remote control for robots called Open-TeleVision that allows for VR-type control. The team has posted a paper describing their robot system on the arXiv preprint server. They also posted videos on YouTube showing the robot and its pilot in action.