Category Physics

For the first time, new algorithms may be able to automatically explain why some self-driving cars crash—a question crucial to answer as more autonomous vehicles take to the roads. This new approach, developed by researchers at King’s College London, reviews past events to explain why specific instances of failure happened, in the hope that this can be used to make improvements in the future.

The research was presented at the 2026 IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation.

Self-driving vehicles are increasingly being rolled out across the globe, in cities like London and San Francisco, but collisions and serious breaches of road safety have put pressure on manufacturers to explain why they make the mistakes they do...

To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.

But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.

To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to effectively interpret charts.

They used a novel data gen...

A Japan–U.S. collaborative research team has demonstrated the world’s first integrated spintronic probabilistic bit, or p-bit, fabricated on a silicon chip using semiconductor manufacturing processes. The team, consisting of researchers from Tohoku University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, experimentally verified the operation of the p-bit, a key building block for probabilistic, or p-, computers. The achievement provides a pathway toward large-scale spintronic p-computers for applications such as AI and machine learning.

Many emerging computational problems require efficient exploratio...

Osteoporosis is a silent disease where bone loss develops gradually before fractures occur. Current clinical screening recommendations mainly focus on older women and selected high-risk groups, leaving some men, younger adults, and individuals with normal body weight completely outside routine screening pathways.

To close this care gap, researchers from St. Paul’s Hospital and National Taiwan University have demonstrated how AI can leverage routine chest X-rays to detect asymptomatic bone loss, closing critical gaps in screening healthy Asian populations. Their paper is published in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Strikingly, the study found that more than half of the confirmed abnormal bone-density cases...