Just days after Elon Musk shared the progress of Tesla’s Optimus robot, Figure AI has released an image of its own humanoid robot at work.
Called “Figure 01,” this humanoid robot is seen being put to work in a warehouse.
Continue reading “Future AI’s Figure 01 seen at work in a warehouse rivaling Optimus” »
As other automakers fret over demand, Hyundai Motor Group is ahead of schedule on its Savannah, Georgia EV factory.
“They are the GPU cartel and they control all supply” Scott Herkelman, former AMD Radeon chief, has something to say about NVIDIA practices. Scott Herkelman & Jensen Huang, Source: AMD/NVIDIA According to the article on Wall Street Journal (via Tom’s Hardware), NVIDIA might be delaying data center GPU orders if customers start eyeing other options. […].
Collisions of heavy ions briefly produced a magnetic field times stronger than Earth’s, and it left observable effects.
Researchers reveal how water striders survive collisions with raindrops that are much larger than the insects—a result that could help in understanding how microplastics are transported in water.
A proposed recipe for quantum error correction removes the need for time-consuming measurements of qubits, replacing them with copying and feedback steps instead.
New theoretical work establishes an analogy between systems that are dynamically frustrated, such as glasses, and thermodynamic systems whose members have conflicting goals, such as predator–prey ecosystems.
A system is geometrically frustrated when its members cannot find a configuration that simultaneously minimizes all their interaction energies, as is the case for a two-dimensional antiferromagnet on a triangular lattice. A nonreciprocal system is one whose members have conflicting, asymmetric goals, as exemplified by an ecosystem of predators and prey. New work by Ryo Hanai of Kyoto University, Japan, has identified a powerful mathematical analogy between those two types of dynamical systems [1]. Nonreciprocity alters collective behavior, yet its technological potential is largely untapped. The new link to geometrical frustration will open new prospects for applications.
To appreciate Hanai’s feat, consider how different geometric frustration and nonreciprocity appear at first. Frustration defies the approach that physics students are taught in their introductory classes, based on looking at the world through Hamiltonian dynamics. In this approach, energy is to be minimized and states of matter characterized by their degree of order. Some of the most notable accomplishments in statistical physics have entailed describing changes between states—that is, phase transitions. Glasses challenge that framework. These are systems whose interactions are so spatially frustrated that they cannot find an equilibrium spatial order. But they can find an order that’s “frozen” in time. Even at a nonzero temperature, everything is stuck—and not just in one state. Many different configurations coexist whose energies are nearly the same.
Researchers have characterized the thermodynamic properties of a model that uses cold atoms to simulate condensed-matter phenomena.
Molecules that are induced by light to rotate bulky groups around central bonds could be developed into photo-activated bioactive systems, molecular switches, and more.
Researchers at Hokkaido University, led by Assistant Professor Akira Katsuyama and Professor Satoshi Ichikawa at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, have extended the toolkit of synthetic chemistry by making a new category of molecules that can be induced to undergo an internal rotation on interaction with light. Similar processes are believed to be important in some natural biological systems.
Synthetic versions might be exploited to perform photochemical switching functions in molecular computing and sensing technologies or in bioactive molecules, including drugs. Their report is pending in Nature Chemistry.
The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.
According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant,’ unpleasant sounding.
But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.
