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Researchers discovered ferroelectricity in 2D vermiculite, boosting electric field responsivity in liquid crystals and paving the way for innovative large-scale displays.

Electro-optical liquid crystal (LC) device with wide applications is a cornerstone of the information society, which can continuously and dynamically modulate the light intensity, polarization, and phase retardation. An ancient theoretical insight proposes that a LC material with both an extremely large geometrical anisotropy and an inherent electric dipole is highly expected to improve the electric field responsivity of LCs.

However, neither commercial organic LC molecules nor R&D LC nanomaterials meet both aforementioned perquisites, while such LCs have not been reported so far. As for now, they are open questions for LC community about whether such an LC exists and the upper limit of its electric field responsivity.

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Researchers utilizing the European Gaia spacecraft have discovered a black hole in a binary system, located 1,500 light-years away and weighing 33 times the mass of the sun, making it the heaviest known in the Milky Way.

The black hole, discovered using data from the European Gaia spacecraft, is more than three times heavier than the known black holes in our galaxy.

An international team of researchers, with the participation of researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) led by Prof. Tsevi Mazeh, discovered a star that orbits a black hole 33 times heavier than the sun’s mass, and lies 1,500 light-years away from Earth. The black hole, discovered using data from the European Gaia spacecraft, is more than three times heavier than the other known black holes in our galaxy.

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Peptides can form on cosmic dust despite water presence, challenging previous beliefs and suggesting a possible extraterrestrial origin for life’s building blocks.

Peptides are organic compounds that play a crucial role in many biological processes, for example, as enzymes. A research team led by Dr. Serge Krasnokutski from the Astrophysics Laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy at the University of Jena had already demonstrated that simple peptides can form on cosmic dust particles. However, it was previously assumed that this would not be possible if molecular ice, which covers the dust particle, contains water – which is usually the case.

Now, the team, in collaboration with the University of Poitiers, France, has discovered that the presence of water molecules is not a major obstacle for the formation of peptides on such dust particles. The researchers report on their findings in the journal Science Advances.

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Meta presents AdvPrompter Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs.

Meta presents AdvPrompter.

Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

While recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes, they are vulnerable to certain jailbreaking attacks that lead to generation of inappropriate or harmful…

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Taxonomy of principal distances and divergences v/ Frank Nielsen.

We define duo Bregman divergences, duo Fenchel-Young divergences, duo Jensen divergences. We show how those divergences occur naturally when calculating the Kullback-Leibler divergence and skew Bhattacharyya distances between densities belonging to nested exponential families. We report the KLD between truncated normal distributions as a duo Bregman divergence. Demo code:

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