Category Physics

Wireless sensors can monitor how temperature, humidity or other environmental conditions vary across large swaths of land, such as farms or forests.

These tools could provide unique insights for a variety of applications, including digital agriculture and monitoring climate change. One problem, however, is that it is currently time-consuming and expensive to physically place hundreds of sensors across a large area.

Inspired by how dandelions use the wind to distribute their seeds, a University of Washington team has developed a tiny sensor-carrying device that can be blown by the wind as it tumbles toward the ground...

Huge amounts of data are needed to train machine-learning models to perform image classification tasks, such as identifying damage in satellite photos following a natural disaster. However, these data are not always easy to come by. Datasets may cost millions of dollars to generate, if usable data exist in the first place, and even the best datasets often contain biases that negatively impact a model’s performance.

To circumvent some of the problems presented by datasets, M...

A physicist’s discovery could lead to the engineering of high-temp superconducting properties into materials useful for quantum computing, medical imaging.

Superconductors — metals in which electricity flows without resistance — hold promise as the defining material of the near future, according to physicist Brad Ramshaw, and are already used in medical imaging machines, drug discovery research and quantum computers being built by Google and IBM.

However, the super-...

A research team has discovered a Heisenberg-limited metrology via weak-value amplification without using entangled resources. Most quantum information technologies including quantum computers – considered a step above supercomputers – and quantum communication that cannot be hacked are based on the principle of quantum entanglement. However, entangled systems exist in a small microscopic world and are pretty fragile. Quantum metrology, which provides enhanced sensitivity over conventional measurements in precision metrology, has also mainly relied on quantum entanglement, so that it is hard to implement in real life applications. Recently, a Korean research team has proposed a method to achieve the quantum metrology precision without using entangled resources.

A POSTECH research te...