Category Physics

Long before researchers discovered the electron and its role in generating electrical current, they knew about electricity and were exploring its potential. One thing they learned early on was that metals were great conductors of both electricity and heat.

And in 1853, two scientists showed that those two admirable properties of metals were somehow related: At any given temperature, the ratio of electronic conductivity to thermal conductivity was roughly the same in any metal they tested.

This so-called Wiedemann-Franz law has held ever since — except in quantum materials, where electrons stop behaving as individual particles and glom together into a sort of electron soup.

Experimental measurements have indicated that the 170-year-old law breaks down in these quantum material...

A common truism among statisticians is that “the data don’t lie.” However, recent findings by Italian researchers may make those who study data think twice before making such assumptions.

Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy, reports that ChatGPT has conjured reams of persuasive phony data to support one surgical eye procedure over another.

“GPT-4 created a fake dataset of hundreds of patients in a matter of minutes,” Giannaccare said. “This was a surprising—yet frightening—experience.”

There have been countless stories of ChatGPT’s great achievements and potential since the model was unveiled to the world a year ago...

Recent technological advancements have opened invaluable opportunities for assisting people who are experiencing impairments or disabilities. For instance, they have enabled the creation of tools to support physical rehabilitation, to practice social skills, and to provide daily assistance with specific tasks.

Researchers at Meta AI recently developed a promising and non-invasive method to decode speech from a person’s brain activity, which could allow people who are unable to speak to relay their thoughts via a computer interface. Their proposed method, presented in Nature Machine Intelligence, merges the use of an imaging technique and machine learning.

“After a stroke, or a brain disease, many patients lose their ability to speak,” Jean Remi King, Research Scientist at Meta, ...

Researchers report that they have developed a new composite material designed to change behaviors depending on temperature in order to perform specific tasks. These materials are poised to be part of the next generation of autonomous robotics that will interact with the environment.

The new study conducted by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Shelly Zhang and graduate student Weichen Li, in collaboration with professor Tian Chen and graduate student Yue Wang from the University of Houston, uses computer algorith...