Category Physics

A new technology that can generate electricity from vibrations or even small body movements means you could charge your laptop by typing or power your smartphone’s battery on your morning run.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a tiny, wearable generator in response to the urgent need for sustainable, clean energy. It is also scalable for larger machines. Their paper, “Breaking Dielectric Dilemma: Polymer Functionalized Perovskite Piezocomposite with Large Current Density Output,” is published in the November edition of Nature Communications.

“This is a real game changer,” said Dr...

A small team of AI researchers at Adobe Inc., working with a colleague from Auburn University and another from Georgia Tech, has developed a small language model (SLM) that they claim can be run locally on a smart phone with no access to the cloud. The group has written a paper describing their new app, which they call SlimLM, and have posted it to the arXiv preprint server.

As LLM technology continues to mature, researchers across the globe continue to find new ways to improve it. In this new effort, the research team has found a way to cut the cord for a specific type of AI application—processing documents locally.

As LLMs such as ChatGPT become more popular, users have become more worried about privacy...

Researchers at University of Limerick in Ireland have developed a new method of growing organic crystals that can be used for energy-harvesting applications.

The energy that is being harvested as part of this research is being generated by squeezing amino acid molecules, the building blocks of proteins that exist in the human body.

Piezoelectricity, which translates from Greek to mean pressing electricity, usually found in ceramics or polymers, is also present in human biomolecules.

The research team from the Actuate Lab in the Department of Chemical Sciences and Bernal Institute at UL has previously utilized predictive computer models that allow them to identify how much electricity a biological material will generate when you squeeze it—maki...

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly automating tasks like translation, text classification and customer service. But tapping into an LLM’s power typically requires users to send their requests to a centralized server—a process that’s expensive, energy-intensive and often slow.

Now, researchers have introduced a technique for compressing an LLM’s reams of data, which could increase privacy, save energy and lower costs. Their findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

The new algorithm, developed by engineers at Princeton and Stanford Engineering, works by trimming redundancies and reducing the precision of an LLM’s layers of information...