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Researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have gained important insights into photons, the elementary particles that make up light. They ‘behave’ in an amazingly greater variety than electrons surrounding atoms, while also being much easier to control.

These new insights have broad applications from smart LED lighting to new photonic bits of information controlled with quantum circuits, to sensitive nanosensors. Their results are published in Physical Review B.

In atoms, minuscule elementary particles called electrons occupy regions around the nucleus in shapes called orbitals. These orbitals give the probability of finding an electron in a particular region of space. Quantum mechanics determines the shape and energy of these orbitals. Similarly to electrons, researchers describe the region of space where a photon is most likely found with orbitals too.

Headworn tech from a University of Michigan startup could protect agricultural and industrial workers from airborne pathogens.

Taza Aya has created a hard hat with an air curtain that prevents nearly all aerosols from reaching the face, using nonthermal plasma to ensure air purity. Proven effective in tests, this innovative device is designed for industries needing strong respiratory protection and will be available by 2025.

Continue reading “Invisible Shield: Wearable Air Curtain Blocks 99.8% of Aerosol Viruses” »

Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have created a new type of glass with unique and even contradictory properties, such as being a strong adhesive (sticky) and incredibly transparent at the same time. The glass, which forms spontaneously when comes in contact with water at room temperature, could bring about a revolution in an array of different and diverse industries such as optics and electro-optics, satellite communication, remote sensing and biomedicine.

The glass was discovered by a team of researchers from Israel and the world, led by PhD student Gal Finkelstein-Zuta and Prof. Ehud Gazit from the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at TAU. The results of the research were recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

High temperatures continued to break records in June.

El mes de junio fue el sexto mes del año más caluroso registrado en la historia y el decimotercer mes consecutivo en establecer un récord de temperatura mensual, informó este lunes la Organización Meteorológica Mundial (OMM).

Los datos del Servicio de Cambio Climático Copernicus de la Unión Europea revelaron que la temperatura global promedio ha estado 1,5°C por encima del nivel preindustrial durante doce meses consecutivos, pese a que ese aumento marca la meta del Acuerdo de París para fin de siglo.

Continue reading “Las altas temperaturas siguieron rompiendo récord en junio” »

Vending machines are an old charming piece of technology that supposedly makes the lives of people easier by making water, snacks and food in general readily available.

American Rounds says that it aims to redefine convenience in ammunition purchasing, as its ammo dispensers can be accessed round the clock.

Continue reading “Ammo ATM? AI-powered bullet vending machines introduced in US” »

Pushback on self service check out due to higher theft and increased discontent from customers.

Scientists run into a lot of tradeoffs trying to build and scale up brain-like systems that can perform machine learning. For instance, artificial neural networks are capable of learning complex language and vision tasks, but the process of training computers to perform these tasks is slow and requires a lot of power.

Training machines to learn digitally but perform tasks in analog—meaning the input varies with a physical quantity, such as voltage—can reduce time and power, but small errors can rapidly compound.

An electrical network that physics and engineering researchers from the University of Pennsylvania previously designed is more scalable because errors don’t compound in the same way as the size of the system grows, but it is severely limited as it can only learn linear tasks, ones with a simple relationship between the input and output.

1/ Chinese AI company SenseTime introduced its new multimodal AI model SenseNova 5o at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which SenseTime claims is China’s first GPT-4o-level multimodal real-time model.

2/ It processes audio, text, image and video data to interact with users as if they…

Chinese AI company SenseTime introduced its new multimodal AI model SenseNova 5o and the improved language model SenseNova 5.5 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Continue reading “SenseTime unveils SenseNova 5o, China’s first real-time multimodal AI model to rival GPT-4o” »

Find out how the recent discovery of a bacterial molecular oddity known as bridge RNA, has led to the creation of a novel gene editing tool.