Category Physics

Scientists successfully develop half metal material that conducts single-spin electrons

The world's first 2D half metal created at Forschungszentrum Jülich
Two atoms thick layer of iron and palladium (left, yellow/red): Experiments with spin-resolved momentum microscopy show that only electrons with a specific spin direction (indicated as red/blue) can be found on the so-called Fermi surface and thus actively contribute to charge transport. Credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich / Xin Liang Tan

Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich have successfully created the world’s first experimentally verified two-dimensional half metal—a material that conducts electricity using electrons of just one spin type: either “spin-up” or “spin-down.” Their findings, now published as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review Letters, mark a milestone in the quest for materials enabling energy-efficient spintronic that go beyond conventional electronics.

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AI tool spots hidden heart disease using routine electrocardiogram data

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), an inexpensive test found in many doctors’ offices may soon be used to screen for hidden heart disease.

Structural heart disease, including valve disease, congenital heart disease, and other issues that impair heart function, affects millions of people worldwide. Yet in the absence of a routine, affordable screening test, many structural heart problems go undetected until significant function has been lost.

“We have colonoscopies, we have mammograms, but we have no equivalents for most forms of heart disease,” says Pierre Elias, assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and medical director for artificial intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian.

Elias...

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NVIDIA’s new AI tool enables precise editing of 3D scenes and photorealistic images

NVIDIA develops new AI tool to infer attributes of 3D scenes and generate photorealistic images based on specific inputs
Image showing examples of DiffusionRenderer’s geometry estimates and photorealistic images with specific lighting conditions generated by the model. Credit: Liang et al, NVIDIA

Over the past years, computer scientists have introduced increasingly sophisticated generative AI models that can produce personalized content following specific inputs or instructions. While image generation models are now widely used, many of them are unpredictable and precisely controlling the images they create remains a challenge.

In a recent paper presented at this year’s Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2025), held in Nashville, June 11–15, researchers at NVIDIA introduced DiffusionRenderer, a new machine learning approach that could advance the generation and editing of imag...

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Approach improves how new skills are taught to large language models

ChatGPT
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Researchers have developed a technique that significantly improves the performance of large language models without increasing the computational power necessary to fine-tune the models. The researchers demonstrated that their technique improves the performance of these models over previous techniques in tasks including commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, instruction following, code generation, and visual recognition.

Large language models are artificial intelligence systems that are pretrained on huge data sets. After pretraining, these models predict which words should follow each other in order to respond to user queries...

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