Category Physics

A bioinformatics boot camp for high schoolers at Skoltech turned into a venue for the latest chapter in the ongoing contest between humans and artificial intelligence in science. Having earlier resolved a key 50-year-old problem of structural bioinformatics, the breakthrough AI program AlphaFold proved inapplicable to another challenge researchers in this field are faced with.

This finding is reported in a PLOS ONE study, whose authors refute the claims by some AlphaFold enthusiasts that DeepMind’s AI has mastered the ultimate protein physics and is the be-all and end-all of structural bioinformatics.

Structural bioinfor...

An international group of researchers has created a mixed magnon state in an organic hybrid perovskite material by utilizing the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya-Interaction (DMI). The resulting material has potential for processing and storing quantum computing information. The work also expands the number of potential materials that can be used to create hybrid magnonic systems.

In magnetic materials, quasi-particles called magnons direct the electron spin within the material. There are two types of magnons — optical and acoustic — which refer to the direction of their spin.

“Both optical and acoustic magnons propagate spin waves in antiferromagnets,” says Dali Sun, associate professor of physics and member of the Organic and Car...

Erasing data perfectly and reaching the lowest possible temperature — those two things seem to be completely different, but they are closely intertwined. The absolute lowest temperature possible is -273.15 degrees Celsius. It is never possible to cool any object exactly to this temperature — one can only approach absolute zero. This is the third law of thermodynamics.

A research team at TU Wien (Vienna) has now investigated the question: How can this law be reconciled with the rules of quantum physics? They succeeded in developing a “quantum version” of the third law of thermodynamics: Theoretically, absolute ze...

The three-fingered robotic gripper can ‘feel’ with great sensitivity along the full length of each finger — not just at the tips

Inspired by the human finger, MIT researchers have developed a robotic hand that uses high-resolution touch sensing to accurately identify an object after grasping it just one time.

Many robotic hands pack all their powerful sensors into the fingertips, so an object must be in full contact with those fingertips to be identified, which can take multiple grasps...