A team of researchers has developed tiny 10-gram robots that are inspired by ants: they can communicate with each other, assign roles among themselves and complete complex tasks together. These reconfigurable robots are simple in structure, yet they can jump and crawl to explore uneven surfaces. Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies to complete sophisticated tasks and evade larger predators.

At EPFL, robotics researchers in Professor Jamie Paik’s Laboratory have reproduced this phenomenon, developing tiny robots that display minimal physical intelligence on an individual level but t...

Astrophysicists are closing in on the Hubble constant. The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a a team of astrophysicists to calculate a more precise value for the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe’s expansion. Previous estimates put the value between 66 and 90 km/s/Mpc, which this team refined to between 65.3 and 75.6 km/s/Mpc.

Exactly how fast is the universe e...

Cosmochemists have found that interstellar iron and carbon form a kind of linked molecule that cloaks the iron – and helps stabilize large carbon molecules. Astrophysicists know that iron is one of the most abundant elements in the universe, after lightweight elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Iron is most commonly found in gaseous form in stars such as the Sun, and in more condensed form in planets such as Earth.

Iron in interstellar environments should also be common...

Team identifies dark trions as the next carrier of quantum information. Move aside, electrons; it’s time to make way for the trion. A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside, has observed, characterized, and controlled dark trions in a semiconductor – ultraclean single-layer tungsten diselenide (WSe2) – a feat that could increase the capacity and alter the form of information transmission.

In a semiconductor, such as WSe2, a trion is a quantum bound state of three charged particles. A negative trion contains two electrons and one hole; a positive trion contains two holes and one electron...