Category Physics

As drones survey forests, robots navigate warehouses and sensors monitor city streets, more of the world’s decision-making is occurring autonomously on the edge—on the small devices that gather information at the ends of much larger networks.

But making that shift to edge computing is harder than it seems. Although artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to grow larger and smarter, the hardware inside these devices remains tiny.

Engineers typically have two options, neither are ideal. Storing an entire AI model on the device requires significant memory, data movement and computing power that drains batteries. Offloading the model to the cloud avoids those hardware constraints, but the back-and-forth introduces lag, burns energy and presents security risks.

Researchers ...

Scientists have built a quantum “wire” where atoms collide endlessly—but energy and motion never slow down. Researchers at TU Wien have discovered a quantum system where energy and mass move with perfect efficiency. In an ultracold gas of atoms confined to a single line, countless collisions occur—but nothing slows down. Instead of diffusing like heat in metal, motion travels cleanly and undiminished, much like a Newton’s cradle. The finding reveals a striking form of transport that breaks the usual rules of resistance.

In everyday physics, transport describes how things move from one place to another. Electric charge flows through wires, heat spreads through metal, and water travels through pipes...

Researchers at Leipzig University and the University of Gothenburg have developed a novel approach to assessing an individual’s risk of metabolic diseases such as diabetes or fatty liver disease more precisely. Instead of relying solely on the widely used body mass index (BMI), the team developed an AI-based computational model using metabolic measurements. This so-called metabolic BMI shows that people of normal weight with a high metabolic BMI have up to a fivefold higher risk of metabolic disease. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

The conventional body mass index, calculated using height and weight, may indicate overweight but does not reflect how healthy or unhealthy body fat actually is...

AI might know where you’re going before you do. Researchers at Northeastern University used large language models, the kind of advanced artificial intelligence normally designed to process and generate language, to predict human movement.

How RHYTHM predicts human movement
RHYTHM, their innovative tool, “can revolutionize the forecasting of human movements,” forecasting “where you’re going to be in the next 30 minutes or the next 25 hours,” said Ryan Wang, an associate professor and vice chair of research in civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern.

The hope is that RHYTHM will improve domains like transportation and traffic planning to make our lives easier, but in extreme cases, RHYTHM could even be deployed to respond to natural dis...