Category Physics

Responsive material changes its behavior based on earlier conditions
Inspired by living systems, researchers at Aalto University have developed a new material that changes its electrical behaviour based on previous experience, effectively giving it a basic form of adaptive memory. Such adaptive materials could play a vital role in the next generation of medical and environmental sensors, as well as in soft robots or active surfaces.

Responsive materials have become common in a range of applications, from glasses that darken in sunlight to drug delivery systems...

Solving the riddle can reduce electric car battery consumption and make life tougher for currency speculators in the future. The discovery has just won the award for best research article and was honored at the field’s most prestigious conference in the United States.

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been struggling with an algorithmic problem known as “the single source shortest path problem.” The problem is essentially about how to devise a mathematical recipe that best finds the shortest route between a node and all other nodes in a network, where there may be connections with negative weights.

Sound complicated? Possibly...

Transforming bacterial cells into living artificial neural circuits; applications include biomanufacturing and therapeutics. Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions – “biocomputers” of sorts. Graduate students and researchers from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits...

Imperial privacy experts have created an AI algorithm that automatically tests privacy-preserving systems for potential data leaks.

This is the first time AI has been used to automatically discover vulnerabilities in this type of system, examples of which are used by Google Maps and Facebook.

The experts, from Imperial’s Computational Privacy Group, looked at attacks on query-based systems (QBS)—controlled interfaces through which analysts can query data to extract useful aggregate information about the world. They then developed a new AI-enabled method called QuerySnout to detect attacks on QBS.

QBS give analysts access to collections of statistics gathered from individual-level data like location and demographics...