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AI designs new underwater gliders with shapes inspired by marine animals

Marine scientists have long marveled at how animals like fish and seals swim so efficiently despite having different shapes. Their bodies are optimized for efficient aquatic navigation (or hydrodynamics), so they can exert minimal energy when traveling long distances.

Autonomous vehicles can drift through the ocean in a similar way, collecting data about vast underwater environments. However, the shapes of these gliding machines are less diverse than what we find in marine life—the go-to designs often resemble tubes or torpedoes, since they’re fairly hydrodynamic. Plus, testing new builds requires lots of real-world trial-and-error.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison propose that AI could help us explore uncharted glider designs more conveniently. The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Scientists use lightning to make ammonia out of thin air

University of Sydney researchers have harnessed human-made lightning to develop a more efficient method of generating ammonia—one of the world’s most important chemicals. Ammonia is also the main ingredient of fertilizers that account for almost half of all global food production.

The research was published in Angewandte Chemie International edition.

The team have successfully developed a more straightforward method to produce (NH3) in gas form. Previous efforts by other laboratories produced ammonia in a solution (ammonium, NH4+), which requires more energy and processes to transform it into the final gas product.

Playing games with robots makes people see them as more humanlike

The more we interact with robots, the more human we perceive them to become—according to new research from the University of East Anglia, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

It may sound like a scene from Blade Runner, but psychologists have been investigating exactly what makes interactions feel more human.

The paper reveals that playing games with robots to “break the ice” can help bring out their human side.

The Solar System’s Greatest Mystery May Finally Be Solved!

Scientists are using a new approach to find the mysterious — if it exists — Planet Nine by hunting for its heat signature instead of reflected light. Using data from Japan’s AKARI space telescope, a team of researchers identified two promising candidates using their thermal detection method which is more effective than optical searches alone. But could these distant heat sources finally prove the existence of our Solar System’s most elusive world, or will they turn out to be yet another false alarm in the decades long search?

New Horizons conducts first-ever successful deep space stellar navigation test

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation.

A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. The pre-print is available on the server arXiv.

As a proof-of-concept test, the researchers took advantage of the spacecraft’s unique vantage point as it traveled toward to image two of our nearest stellar neighbors, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, and Wolf 359, which is 7.86 light-years away.

Incurable blood cancer tied to gene mutation in new lab model

Researchers working on an incurable blood cancer can now use a new lab model that could make testing potential new treatments and diagnostics easier and quicker, new research has found.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham has studied from patients with a blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome disease (MDS). This disease often develops into a highly aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

Working with this new model has led to confirmation that a mutation in the gene CEBPA causes progression from MDS to AML.

Quantum equivalent of thermodynamics’ second law discovered for entanglement manipulation

Just over 200 years after French engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law of thermodynamics, an international team of researchers has unveiled an analogous law for the quantum world. This second law of entanglement manipulation proves that, just like heat or energy in an idealized thermodynamics regime, entanglement can be reversibly manipulated, a statement which until now had been heavily contested.

Record-breaking material emits infrared light better than it absorbs it, without violating the laws of physics

New results published in the journal Physical Review Letters detail how a specially designed metamaterial was able to tip the normally equal balance between thermal absorption and emission, enabling the material to better emit infrared light than absorb it.

At first glance, these findings appear to violate Kirchhoff’s law of , which states that—under specific conditions—an object will absorb (absorptivity) in one direction and emit it (emissivity) with equal intensity in another, a phenomenon known as reciprocity.

Over the past decade, however, scientists have begun exploring theoretical designs that, under the right conditions, could allow materials to break reciprocity. Understanding how a material absorbs and emits infrared light (heat) is central to many fields of science and engineering. Controlling how a material absorbs and emits infrared light could pave the way for advances in harvesting, thermal cloaking devices, and other technologies.

TaIrTe₄ photodetectors show promise for highly sensitive room-temperature THz sensing

Terahertz radiation (THz), electromagnetic radiation with frequencies ranging between 0.1 and 10 THz, could be leveraged to develop various new technologies, including imaging and communication systems. So far, however, a lack of fast and sensitive detectors that can detect radiation across a wide range of frequencies has limited the development of these THz-sensing technologies.

In a recent paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Tennessee and other institutes have introduced new photodetectors made of tantalum iridium telluride (TaIrTe₄), a 2D-correlated topological semimetal that exhibits advantageous properties. Most notably, this material exhibits a strong nonlinear Hall effect, a physical effect that entails a transverse voltage in the absence of an external magnetic field, which is nonlinearly proportional to an applied electric field or current.

“THz technology is critical in and biomedical sensing because its frequency resonates with low-energy collective excitations in quantum materials and molecular vibrations in biological matters,” Jun Xiao, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org.

Quantum machine learning improves semiconductor manufacturing for first time

Semiconductor processing is notoriously challenging. It is one of the most intricate feats of modern engineering due to the extreme precision required and the hundreds of steps involved, such as etching and layering, to make even a single chip.