Category Physics

Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth or even in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—it happens in the interiors of ice giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressures and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside these planets. For the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates this phenomenon.

A new paper by physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves the 20-year-old scientific mystery and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output.

Let’s talk about the actual experiment first...

Inside every electronic device, the flow of electricity is controlled by a switch called a transistor. For decades, these switches were made from silicon. More recently, engineers have turned to a material called gallium nitride (GaN), which enables small, efficient devices like smartphone chargers.

However, at very high voltages, electric fields inside these transistors can concentrate at specific points, causing them to fail prematurely. As a result, today’s GaN devices still struggle to perform at the highest voltage levels achieved by silicon.

To overcome this limitation, researchers in the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Lab (POWERlab) in EPFL’s School of Engi...

Before you prompt AI to answer another question or perform another task, a Wake Forest computer scientist wants you to know it could expose your sensitive data.

Ying Zhang, an assistant professor in Wake Forest University’s Department of Computer Science, studies security in software engineering. Her latest research, “How Your Credentials Are Leaked by LLM Agent Skills,” explores how large language model (LLM) agents make data vulnerable to attacks.

LLM agents are autonomous AI systems that analyze circum...

A new imaging breakthrough could let scientists watch a molecule’s quantum wavefunction change in 3D on femtosecond timescales.

Researchers have found a way to create a complete 3D image of a molecule’s wavefunction, one of quantum mechanics’ most fundamental yet elusive features...