A team of astronomers has claimed that observations of a sun-like star orbiting a small black hole might actually be the indication of something far more exotic—the existence of a boson star, a star composed entirely of dark matter.

The Gaia survey, led by the European Space Agency, provided detailed maps of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. While almost all of those stars behaved as expected, there were some surprises. For example, one star in particular was seen orbiting a dark companion.

The star itself was fairly typical, weighing in at 0.93 solar masses and with roughly the same chemical abundance as our own sun...

Minimally invasive surgery and automated robot-guided surgery are likely to be performed under extreme conditions, which require new demands on intraoperative information acquisition capabilities. Three-dimensional (3D) brain point cloud generation plays an essential role in overcoming the visual limitations of these surgeries.

One of the applications of generative AI is in the field of 3D brain point cloud generation. By using deeplearning algorithms, the 3D point cloud of the patient’s brain can be generated for reconstruction during minimally invasive surgery. However, some conventional existing point cloud reconstruction methods still have limitations when applied directly to real surgical scenarios.

Now, a research team led by Prof...

Cornell University researchers have developed a robot, called ReMotion, that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is — in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of “ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment,” which he prese...

Physicists measured the flux of interplanetary dust around Saturn. The researchers concluded that the planet’s rings formed less than 400 million years ago, making them much younger than Saturn itself.

A new study led by physicist Sascha Kempf at the University of Colorado Boulder has delivered the strongest evidence yet that Saturn’s rings are remarkably young — potentially answering a question that has boggled scientists for well over a century.

The research, to be published May 12 in the journal Science Advances, pegs the age of Saturn’s rings at no more than 400 million years old. That makes the rings much younger than Saturn itself, which is about 4...