Three high schoolers and their mentor revisited a century-old theorem to prove that all knots can be found in a fractal called the Menger sponge.
Icebergs float on water because the underlying liquid water has a higher density than the iceberg. Liquid water itself has its highest density at 4°C—one of the so-called anomalies of water, i.e. properties of liquids that are rarely observed for other liquids.
The origins of these anomalies have long been the subject of scientific research. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research have now discovered another piece to the puzzle to explain the special behavior of water.
Many of the anomalous properties of water can be traced to the special interactions between the individual water molecules —the so-called hydrogen bonds. Each water molecule can donate two of these bonds—one from each hydrogen atom—and accept two of them from other, neighboring molecules.
The Netherlands Cancer Institute has found that the estrous cycle stage significantly influences mammary tumors’ sensitivity to chemotherapy. In mouse models of breast cancer, treatment initiated during the diestrus stage resulted in reduced responses to chemotherapy compared to initiation during the estrus stage.
The human body contains internal timekeeping clocks to adapt to environmental changes, including infradian rhythms like the menstrual cycle. Fluctuating hormone levels during these cycles regulate physiological adaptations, which may impact responses to therapies.
Understanding factors that contribute to the heterogeneity in chemotherapy responses is crucial for improving treatment outcomes in breast cancer.
PRESS RELEASE — Physicists have discovered a simpler way to create quantum entanglement between two distant photons — without starting with entanglement, without resorting to Bell-state measurements, and even without detecting all ancillary photons — an advance that challenges long-held assumptions in quantum networking.
And all it took was a friendly nudge from an artificial intelligence tool.
An international team of scientists led by researchers from Nanjing University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light described their method in Physical Review Letters — accessed for this article through arXiv — that demonstrated entanglement can emerge from the indistinguishability of photon paths alone. Instead of relying on standard procedures that start from prepared entangled pairs and complex joint measurements, their technique leverages a basic quantum principle: when multiple photons could have come from several possible sources, erasing the clues to their origins can produce entanglement where none existed before.
Cooler stars may consciously alter their speed through self-directed jet emissions, researchers suggest.
Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) and spontaneous four-wave mixing are powerful nonlinear optical processes that can produce multi-photon beams of light with unique quantum properties. These processes could be leveraged to create various quantum technologies, including computer processors and sensors that leverage quantum mechanical effects.
Researchers at the National Research Council of Canada and École Polytechnique de Montréal recently carried out a study observing the effects emerging in the SPDC process. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, reports the observation of a gain-induced group delay in multi-photon pulses generated in SPDC.
“The inspiration for this paper came from studying a process called SPDC,” Nicolás Quesada, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “This is a mouthful to say that certain materials are able to take a violet photon (the particle light is made of) and transform it into two red photons.
Siddarth Kara’s bestseller, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of Congo Powers Our Lives,” focuses on problems surrounding the sourcing of cobalt, a critical component of lithium-ion batteries that power many technologies central to modern life, from mobile phones and pacemakers to electric vehicles.
“Perhaps many of us have read how lithium-ion batteries are vital for energy storage technologies,” says Eric Schelter, the Hirschmann-Makineni Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. “But how materials that make up such batteries are sourced can be concerning and problematic, both ethically and environmentally.”
Schelter says that cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies about 70% of the world’s cobalt, raises concerns due to environmental degradation and unsafe working conditions, and that large-scale mining disrupts ecosystems and can contaminate water supplies, leaving lasting environmental damage. In addition, he notes that a looming cobalt shortage threatens to strain global supply chains as demand for battery technologies continues to grow.
Large language models can be squeezed onto your phone — rather than needing 1000s of servers to run — after breakthrough
Posted in information science, mobile phones, robotics/AI | Leave a Comment on Large language models can be squeezed onto your phone — rather than needing 1000s of servers to run — after breakthrough
Running massive AI models locally on smartphones or laptops may be possible after a new compression algorithm trims down their size — meaning your data never leaves your device. The catch is that it might drain your battery in an hour.
OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to “think” about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1’s reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive human users at a higher rate than GPT-4o — or, for that matter, leading AI models from Meta, Anthropic, and Google.
That’s according to red team research published by OpenAI and Apollo Research on Thursday: “While we find it exciting that reasoning can significantly improve the enforcement of our safety policies, we are mindful that these new capabilities could form the basis for dangerous applications,” said OpenAI in the paper.
OpenAI released these results in its system card for o1 on Thursday after giving third party red teamers at Apollo Research early access to o1, which released its own paper as well.
