Category Technology/Electronics

On Thursday, NASA issued a Request for Proposal (RFP), seeking industry collaboration for the Mars Telecommunications Network.

Reliable, high bandwidth communications are necessary to relay science data, high-definition imagery, and critical information during Mars missions. The network will use high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiters at the red planet to support future surface, orbital, and human exploration.

This RFP builds on a draft released April 2, as well as insights gathered during the accompanying industry day at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where commercial partners provided feedback on agency objectives for the Mars Telecommunications Network.

The request seeks responses that address both current and future operational missio...

New work explaining the inner workings of artificial intelligence could provide a way around the threat of AI “model collapse,” potentially averting growing numbers of AI hallucinations in the future.

First coined in 2024, “model collapse” refers to a scenario where an AI model trained on AI-produced data ceases to provide accurate results, instead producing inaccurate “gibberish” because of the poor quality of its training data.

Some have warned that high-quality text data to train systems like Large Language Models (LLMs) is set to run out as early as this year, and so data produced by models themselves has taken a larger training role—inviting the threat of model collapse.

Simple statistical models reveal a fix
Through analysis of a simple yet powerful set of statistical ...

Imagine a car whose windows and sunroof can help top up its battery while parked under the sun, or a pair of smart glasses whose lenses can harvest light to power built-in electronics.

Such applications could become more feasible with a new type of ultrathin transparent solar cell developed by scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore).

Led by Associate Professor Annalisa Bruno, the NTU researchers created perovskite solar cells that are about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair and around 50 times thinner than conventional perovskite solar cells.

Despite their thinness, the devices ...

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated, for the first time, a single quantum of vibrational energy interacting with a single atomic spin, seeding a pathway to quantum technologies that use sound as an information carrier, instead of light or electricity. The results are published in Nature.

Led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, the researchers engineered a nanometer-scale mechanical resonator around a single color-center spin qubit in diamond...