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Led by researchers from Université de Montréal’s Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx), a team of astronomers has harnessed the power of the revolutionary James Webb Space Webb Telescope (JWST) to study the “hot Saturn” exoplanet HAT-P-18 b.

Their findings, published last month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, paint a complete picture of the HAT-P-18 b’s atmosphere while exploring the great challenge of distinguishing its atmospheric signals from the activity of its star.

HAT-P-18 b is located over 500 light-years away with a mass similar to Saturn’s but a size closer to that the larger planet Jupiter. As a result, the exoplanet has a “puffed-up” atmosphere that is especially ideal for analysis.

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The article repeats itself a bit but there’s some good parts about an exoskeleton, advanced algorithm and bipedal robots and prosthetics. It’ll basically apply to those future industries.

We typically don’t think about it whilst doing it, but walking is a complicated task. Controlled by our nervous system, our bones, joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments and other connective tissues (i.e., the musculoskeletal system) must move in coordination and respond to unexpected changes or disturbances at varying speeds in a highly efficient manner. Replicating this in robotic technologies is no small feat.

Now, a research group from Tohoku University Graduate School of Engineering has replicated human-like variable speed walking using a musculoskeletal model – one steered by a reflex control method reflective of the human nervous system. This breakthrough in biomechanics and robotics sets a new benchmark in understanding human movement and paves the way for innovative robotic technologies.

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Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’s going to purchase hundreds of thousands of expensive AI processing chips — and experts are mighty worried about what he plans to use them for.

In the same Instagram post announcing his planned purchase of 350,000 Nvidia’s H100 graphics chips, which average about $30,000 apiece and are considered the gold standard for powering AI models, Zuckerberg said that he wants to build an open-source artificial AGI, the industry term for the point at which AI reaches or even surpasses human-level intelligence.

While there’s still an open debate about whether AGI is even possible, the prospect itself is enough to give some researchers pause.

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Researchers at HZB have created an innovative technique to precisely measure minuscule temperature variations as small as 100 microkelvin in the thermal Hall effect, overcoming previous limitations caused by thermal noise. By applying this technique to terbium titanate, the team showcased its effectiveness in producing consistent and dependable outcomes. This advancement in measuring the thermal Hall effect sheds light on the behavior of coherent multi-particle states in quantum materials, particularly their interactions with lattice vibrations, known as phonons.

The laws of quantum physics apply to all materials. However, in so-called quantum materials, these laws give rise to particularly unusual properties. For example, magnetic fields or changes in temperature can cause excitations, collective states, or quasiparticles that are accompanied by phase transitions to exotic states. This can be utilised in a variety of ways, provided it can be understood, managed, and controlled: For example, in future information technologies that can store or process data with minimal energy requirements.

The thermal Hall effect (THE) plays a key role in identifying exotic states in condensed matter. The effect is based on tiny transverse temperature differences that occur when a thermal current is passed through a sample and a perpendicular magnetic field is applied (see Figure 2). In particular, the quantitative measurement of the thermal Hall effect allows us to separate the exotic excitations from conventional behavior.

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Terahertz waves can penetrate opaque materials and provide unique spectral signatures of various chemicals, but their adoption for real-world applications has been limited by the slow speed, large size, high cost and complexity of terahertz imaging systems. The problem arises from the lack of suitable focal-plane array detectors, components that contain radiation detectors used by the imaging system.

A research team led by Mona Jarrahi, and Aydogan Ozcan, both electrical and computer engineering professors at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has invented a new terahertz focal-plane to solve this problem.

By eliminating the need for raster scanning, which captures and displays an image point by point, the research team is able to expedite imaging more than 1,000 times faster than current systems. The new array constitutes the first known terahertz that is fast enough to capture videos and provide real-time, 3D multi-spectral images while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio.

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