Category Technology/Electronics

The humble pocket calculator may not be able to keep up with the mathematical capabilities of new technology, but it will never hallucinate.

The device’s enduring reliability equates to millions of sales each year for Japan’s Casio, which is even eyeing expansion in certain regions.

Despite lightning-speed advances in artificial intelligence, chatbots still sometimes stumble on basic addition.

In contrast, “calculators always give the correct answer,” Casio executive Tomoaki Sato told AFP.

But he conceded that calculators could one day go the way of the abacus.

“It’s undeniable that the market for personal calculators used in business is on a...

Cornell researchers have developed a new transistor architecture that could reshape how high-power wireless electronics are engineered, while also addressing supply chain vulnerabilities for a critical semiconductor material.

The device, called an XHEMT, includes an ultra-thin layer of gallium nitride built on bulk single-crystal aluminum nitride, a semiconductor material with low defect densities and an ultrawide bandgap—properties that allow it to withstand higher temperatures and voltages while reducing electrical losses.

The device was detailed in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials and the research was co-led by Huili Grace Xing, the William L...

Addressing the staggering power and energy demands of artificial intelligence, engineers at the University of Houston have developed a revolutionary new thin-film material that promises to make AI devices significantly faster while dramatically cutting energy consumption.

The breakthrough, detailed in the journal ACS Nano, introduces a specialized two-dimensional (2D) thin film dielectric—or an electric insulator—designed to replace traditional, heat generating components in integrated circuit chips...

When large language models (LLMs) make decisions about networking and friendship, the models tend to act like people, across both synthetic simulations and real-world network contexts.

Marios Papachristou and Yuan Yuan developed a framework to study network formation behaviors of multiple LLM agents and compared these behaviors against human behaviors. The paper is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

How LLMs form network connections
The authors conducted simulations using several large language models placed in a network, which were asked to choose which other nodes to connect with, given their number of connections, common neighbors, and shared attributes, like arbitrarily assigned “hobbies” or “location.”

The authors varied the network context, including simulations of fri...