Category Physics

A small international team of nanotechnologists, engineers and physicists has developed a way to force laser light into becoming a supersolid. Their paper is published in the journal Nature. The editors at Nature have published a Research Briefing in the same issue summarizing the work.

Supersolids are entities that exist only in the quantum world, and, up until now, they have all been made using atoms. Prior research has shown that they have zero viscosity and are formed in crystal-like structures similar to the way atoms are arranged in salt crystals.

Because of their nature, supersolids have been created in extremely cold environments where the quantum effects can be seen...

Johns Hopkins University engineers have developed a pioneering prosthetic hand that can grip plush toys, water bottles, and other everyday objects like a human, carefully conforming and adjusting its grasp to avoid damaging or mishandling whatever it holds.

The system’s hybrid design is a first for robotic hands, which have typically been too rigid or too soft to replicate a human’s touch when handling objects of varying textures and materials. The innovation offers a promising solution for people with hand loss and could improve how robotic arms interact with their environment.

Details abou...

A small team of AI engineers at Zoom Communications has developed a new approach to training AI systems that uses far fewer resources than the standard approach now in use. The team has published their results on the arXiv preprint server.

The new approach developed at Zoom is called Chain of Draft (CoD), an update of the traditional approach now in use called Chain of Thought (CoT). CoT uses a step-by-step approach to solving a problem, similar in many ways to human problem-solving...

Zuchongzhi-3, a superconducting quantum computing prototype with 105 qubits and 182 couplers, has made significant advancements in random quantum circuit sampling. This prototype was successfully developed by a research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

This prototype operates at a speed that is 1015 times faster than the fastest supercomputer currently available and one million times faster than the latest results published by Google. This achievement marks a milestone in enhancing the performance of quantum computation, following the success of Zuchongzhi-2...