Category Physics

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...

Why is it that artificial intelligence systems can outperform humans on some visual tasks, like facial recognition, but make egregious errors on others—such as classifying an image of an astronaut as a shovel?

Like the human brain, AI systems rely on strategies for processing and classifying images. And like the human brain, little is known about the precise nature of those processes. Scientists at Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science are making strides in understanding both systems, publishing a recent paper that helps to explain computer vision in a way the researchers say is accessible as well as more useful than previous models.

“Both the human brain and the deep neural networks that power AI systems are referred to as black boxes because we don’t know exa...

Computers possess two remarkable capabilities with respect to images: They can both identify them and generate them anew. Historically, these functions have stood separate, akin to the disparate acts of a chef who is good at creating dishes (generation), and a connoisseur who is good at tasting dishes (recognition).

Yet, one can’t help but wonder: What would it take to orchestrate a harmonious union between these t...