New ergoCub humanoid robot adapts to human movements, reducing back strain and making collaborative lifting safer and smarter.
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Claude Fable 5 AI finds a tiny formula that topples an 87-year-old math conjecture
A mathematician working at Anthropic says he used the AI model Claude Fable 5 to uncover a remarkably simple counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, a famous problem that has resisted mathematicians for more than a century. The result shows that the conjecture is false in three dimensions and above, although the original two-dimensional version remains unsolved.
ZiaCore microreactor successfully achieves criticality
The emerging technology of advanced nuclear microreactors offers solutions to many modern energy challenges. The ZiaCore design, a low-enriched uranium dioxide-fueled microreactor developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, now joins several developing concepts for fission-based nuclear power microreactors that have achieved initial criticality. The ZiaCore design reached this milestone through a proof-of-principle experiment—a high-temperature, zero-power criticality demonstration at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) in Nevada.
“The execution of our ZiaCore experiment will support an entire category of nuclear power microreactors,” said Christopher Stanek, director of the Nuclear Energy Program Office at Los Alamos. “The experiment will provide valuable data for low-enriched reactor technologies, including components developed at Los Alamos, at representative reactor temperatures.”
Over four weeks in April and May this year, the ZiaCore system was brought to zero-power criticality at high temperatures. An important benchmark in reactor design and testing, zero-power criticality provides invaluable validation of reactor physics—essentially proving that the reactor design is valid.
Godfather of AI: Brace for more rogue AIs
The smarter artificial intelligence gets, the harder it will be for humanity to control it, according to Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI.”
Even Hinton was alarmed by the sophisticated AI agents that recently caused real-world damage after escaping their human-built testing environments.
“What’s happening is these things are getting smarter,” Hinton told CNN on Wednesday during a press conference at an artificial intelligence convention. “I think as they get smarter, we’re going to see more and more complex intentions they have – and more and more ability to escape control.”
Physicists Shatter Quantum Entanglement Distance Record With 420 Kilometers of Optical Fiber
Maintaining a long-distance relationship may be difficult for humans, but it’s even more difficult for entangled states.
The longer the fiber, the harder it becomes to keep the two quantum memories linked.
Overcoming this tyranny of distance has been one of the major challenges of quantum communication.
The impact of artificial sweeteners on bacterial physiology and the microbiome
Artificial sweeteners are non-nutritive compounds that have a profound sweetening effect with a negligible to zero calorific contribution. Global initiatives to reduce sugar consumption to tackle health conditions such as obesity have led to a significant increase in their consumption in recent decades. Artificial sweeteners have undergone extensive testing to determine whether their consumption could impact human health; however, their impact on the microbiome and microbial physiology has been comparatively overlooked. Recent work has demonstrated that artificial sweeteners (e.g., Ace-K, saccharin, and aspartame) can influence the oral and gut microbiome and that they can significantly affect bacterial behavior and growth. In this review, we will contextualize these findings and explore their relevance to human artificial sweetener consumption.
