Category Technology/Electronics

Tightly guided atoms could enable low power quantum navigation when GPS fails

Jongmin Lee adjusts a machine that produces optical nanofibers.
Sandia National Laboratories scientist Jongmin Lee adjusts a machine that produces optical nanofibers 200 times thinner than a human hair. When laser beams travel through the nanofiber, halos of light form very close to it, guiding atoms along its length for quantum sensing. Credit: Photo by Craig Fritz

Within tiny halos of light clinging to a vanishingly thin wisp of optical fiber, scientist Jongmin Lee guides atoms like marbles through a narrow pipe. Rock the fiber and the atoms shift side by side; they just don’t fall off. But don’t be deceived by the seemingly delicate nature of his experiment. Lee is exploring how to measure motion precisely in rough-and-tumble environments.

A quantum sensing scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, Lee is an expert in a type of motion sensor...

Read More

Long AI conversations reveal misinformation vulnerabilities across seven leading chatbots

chatbots
Credit: Pavel Danilyuk from Pexels

The results are in: Which AI model is the most fallible? Persuadable? Correctible? University of Arizona researchers assessed seven different generative AI large language models, or LLMs, for these three qualities during lengthy conversations. Their work, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, reveals intrinsic limitations that might go undetected during one-off interactions.

Among the seven LLMs tested—ChatGPT (GPT-3.5, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini), Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama-3-70B and DeepSeek-R1—they found that:

ChatGPT 3.5 was most vulnerable to reaffirming misinformation during a conversation containing repeated false statements; Claude 3.5 Sonnet was the least.
All seven were more susceptible to misinformation on obscure top...

Read More

A new kind of AI that does its thinking cheaply without words

A new kind of AI that does its thinking cheaply without words
Representative held-out examples from the four controlled generalization families. From top to bottom: extend a seed to the boundary, copy a motif to every gray anchor, order bar colors from shortest to tallest, and recolor only cells inside every nested frame. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2608.09888

There may soon be a new kind of artificial intelligence in town, one that uses a novel approach to thinking that could save massive amounts of computing power and money.

The AI that most people use every day, like ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini, relies on large language models that can work through difficult problems step by step. While this may ultimately give us the answers we are searching for, the process can increase response times and use a lot of computing power.

Read More

New transistor brings high voltage to microchip scale

New transistor brings high voltage to microchip scale
The POWERlab’s intrinsic polarization superjunction (iPSJ). Credit: 2026 Alain Herzog/EPFL CC BY SA 4.0

Inside every electronic device, the flow of electricity is controlled by a switch called a transistor. For decades, these switches were made from silicon. More recently, engineers have turned to a material called gallium nitride (GaN), which enables small, efficient devices like smartphone chargers.

However, at very high voltages, electric fields inside these transistors can concentrate at specific points, causing them to fail prematurely. As a result, today’s GaN devices still struggle to perform at the highest voltage levels achieved by silicon.

To overcome this limitation, researchers in the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Lab (POWERlab) in EPFL’s School of Engi...

Read More