Category Physics

In an empty parking lot, a car ‘thinks’ it is on a real road.

Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed new software to aid in the development, evaluation and demonstration of safer autonomous, or driverless, vehicles.

Called the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method, it allows the testing of driverless cars in a perfectly safe environment, said Bilin Aksun-Guvenc, co-author of the study and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

Imagine a driverless car is placed in the middle of an empty parking lot...

In the field of superconductivity—the phenomenon in which electrons can flow through a material with essentially zero resistance—the “holy grail” of discovery is a superconductor that can perform under everyday temperatures and pressures. Such a material could revolutionize modern life. But currently, even the “high-temperature” (high-Tc) superconductors that have been discovered must be kept very cold to function—too cold for most applications.

Scientists still have much to learn before room-temperature superconductivity can...

A new type of ferroelectric polymer that is exceptionally good at converting electrical energy into mechanical strain holds promise as a high-performance motion controller or “actuator” with great potential for applications in medical devices, advanced robotics, and precision positioning systems, according to a team of international researchers led by Penn State.

Mechanical strain, how a material changes shape when force is applied, is an important property for an actuator, which is any material that will change or deform when an external force such as electrical energy is applied...

The new photonic chip enables exponentially faster and more energy-efficient artificial intelligence. Scientists have developed a fast and extremely efficient method for transferring huge amounts of data. The technique uses dozens of frequencies of light to transfer several streams of information over a fiber optic cable simultaneously.

The data centers and high-performance computers that run artificial intelligence programs, such as large language models, aren’t limited by the sheer computational power of their individual nodes...