Category Physics

For years, the guiding assumption of artificial intelligence has been simple: an AI is only as good as the data it has seen. Feed it more, train it longer, and it performs better. Feed it less, and it stumbles. A new study from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering was accepted at the IEEE SoutheastCon 2026, taking place March 12–15. It suggests something far more surprising: with the right method in place, an AI model can dramatically improve its performance in territory it was barely trained on, pushing well past what its training data alone would ever allow.

The method was developed by Minda Li, a USC Viterbi undergraduate who has been pursuing research since her freshman year, working alongside her advisor Bhaskar Krishnamachari, a Faculty Fellow and S...

Northwestern University engineers have developed the first modular robots with athletic intelligence. They can be combined and recombined in the wild, recover from injury and keep moving no matter what’s thrown at them.

Called “legged metamachines,” the creations are made from autonomous, Lego-like modules that snap together into an endless number of configurations. Each module by itself is a complete robot with its own motor, battery and computer. Alone, a module can roll, turn and jump. But the real agility and indestructibility emerges when the modules combine.

The study was published i...

You’re probably used to the sight of smartwatches on people’s wrists. But what about smart clothes? Researchers at the University of Georgia are exploring how the clothes people wear can potentially track and protect their health. Smart textiles are fabrics that can monitor the body’s vitals and movement in real time. They’re flexible and lightweight, making them more comfortable to wear while moving.

The present publication focuses on MXenes, a class of two-dimensional, microscopic materials made from metals that can be coated or printed onto fabrics...

Most materials we use in everyday life expand slightly when heated and return to their original size when cooled. In addition to such thermal properties, materials can also have electrical properties or magnetic properties, and traditionally we have used these characteristics separately. However, some materials allow multiple properties to coexist within a single substance.

Research on such materials is expected to contribute to the development of next-generation memory devices that can store and retain information while consuming far less energy.

How multiferroics could transform memory
A representative example is a class of materials known as multiferroics, which combine the properties of a capacitor (the ability to store electric charge) and a magnet...