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AI agents develop their own ‘artificial natural language’ to communicate about complex data

Researchers from the VUB’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and the University of Namur (UNamur) demonstrate in a new large-scale study how autonomous AI systems can spontaneously develop a functional, shared language without human intervention.

Unlike large language models such as ChatGPT, which memorize existing human language, these AI agents construct their own communication system, directly rooted in their specific sensors and environment.

This discovery represents a breakthrough for communication between autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, robots and industrial sensors.

Chemical fine-tuning lifts perovskite LEDs to 37% efficiency

Chemists developed a way to significantly improve the performance of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) made with perovskite. The journal Nature published the advancement in these hybrid LEDs, which hold potential for a range of uses, including biomedical sensing, low-light imaging and automated facial recognition.

Most previous work in perovskite LEDs has yielded rates of quantum efficiency—the ability to convert electricity to light—within a range of 20–30%.

“Our discovery leads to an efficiency rate closer to 40%. That’s a big jump,” says Letian Dou, senior author of the paper and professor of chemistry at Emory University.

Tiny chip uses ultrasound-powered microbubbles to steer fluid flow in real time

Bubbles can be useful tools for microscopic robots, helping them move, steer, create flows of liquid and perform other functions. But designs based on trapping a bubble, a common approach, are unwieldy and unpredictable because bubbles can be hard to catch and control.

“Why are we trying to trap these bubbles?” said Itai Cohen, the Josephson Family Professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “Let’s just make them where we want them, when we want them.”

Researchers in Cohen’s lab have developed a way to create and direct microbubbles on demand, without requiring trapping. Set within a 3-millimeter area on a chip, the device produces hydrogen gas bubbles on a grid of electrodes, then powers the bubbles up with acoustic energy through ultrasound. Bubbles resonating on the electrodes can work alone, in pairs or in larger groups to create and direct flows of fluid.

Molecular snapshots reveal how viral enzymes switch between inserting and removing DNA

Bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, have a fiendishly simple purpose in life: attach to a bacterial cell, inject their DNA and then use the host’s genetic machinery to reproduce. In doing so, they may have evolved some of the most efficient gene-editing tools ever seen in nature.

New research by scientists at the University of Chicago shows how bacteriophages (“phages” for short) use a special class of enzymes to recognize specific DNA sequences in their host and insert large stretches of their own DNA with remarkable precision.

The study also shows how these enzymes can switch directions and remove the phage DNA without a trace, offering new insights that could help scientists develop more precise tools for genome engineering and synthetic biology.

In plants, sense of time is connected with sense of danger

Salty soil is a growing threat to crops worldwide. Hotter, drier weather has increased evaporation rates, drawing moisture from the soil and leaving behind concentrated mineral salts. At the same time, water shortages are forcing farmers to irrigate using water from lower-quality, saline or recycled sources. Scientists estimate that around half of the world’s irrigated farmland is now affected by salinity to some degree.

A new study from Washington University in St. Louis reveals how a plant’s internal clock helps it to respond to dangerous salts in its environment. Understanding how plants time their defenses against salt could eventually help scientists develop crops that hold up better against salt stress.

The research, published Oct. 14 in Science Advances, was led by biologist Xuehua Zhong, the Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar in WashU Arts & Sciences, and WashU postdoctoral fellow Wenwen Tian, an expert in circadian biology.

Laser pulses bring order to a quantum material’s tiny electrical regions

Physicists at Auburn University have used flashes of laser light to bring order to tiny electrically charged “islands” inside a crystal. The discovery helps answer a decades-old question about how the material organizes itself and shows how light could be used to control its behavior—a step toward exploring new technologies for processing and storing information.

The research was led by Wencan Jin, the Thomas and Jean Walter endowed associate professor in Auburn’s Department of Physics, and graduate student Mohamed Kandil.

Their study, “Optical Poling of a Quantum Ferroelectric Metal across the Order-Disorder Phase Transition,” was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review Letters. Collaborators at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology grew the crystals used in the experiments.

New spectroscopy method enables direct comparisons of nuclear sizes across heavy elements

The size of a nucleus (nuclear charge radius) is an important physical quantity that reflects the arrangement of protons and neutrons within the nucleus. Particularly in deformed nuclei, such as those of rare-earth elements, examining changes in the charge radius can deepen our understanding of nuclear structure and nuclear deformation.

Until now, electron scattering experiments, muon atomic spectroscopy and laser spectroscopy of neutral atoms and singly charged ions have been used to measure nuclear radii; however, it has not been easy to directly compare different elements.

For lutetium (Lu) and ytterbium (Yb), evaluations based on past experiments had presented an anomalous trend not observed in other rare-earth elements: The nucleus of lutetium, which has an odd number of protons, is larger than that of the adjacent even-proton nucleus. This had remained an unsolved problem for many years.

Quantum calculations reveal how spin defects lose energy

When light hits a tiny defect embedded in a solid material like diamond or silicon carbide, it can kick the defect’s electrons into an excited state. These spin defects have the potential to be used as stable, readable qubits for quantum technologies, for example, quantum sensing. But modeling the full physics of their energetics over time—a key step in developing spin defects into new technologies—is a challenging task.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have built a computational framework that captures the full optical cycle of such spin defects, including the prediction of internal conversion, a process particularly hard to model.

Their results, published in Physical Review Letters, shed light on how to use the defects in the design of quantum materials and could also be applied to a different class of systems used in renewable energy conversion and storage.

MIT Astronomers Catch a Star Slowly Eating Its Companion 300 Light-Years Away

Astronomers have discovered a star slowly eating its companion in an extraordinary cosmic feast that could last billions of years.

A small star about 300 light-years from Earth is feeding on a companion that circles it every 87 minutes. The two objects are remarkably close, yet the star is drawing away material slowly enough that the feeding could continue for hundreds of thousands or even billions of years.

The pair, named ZTF J0440+2325, lies within the Milky Way. Its smaller member is a brown dwarf, a planetlike object that falls between planets and stars in mass. The brown dwarf has about 25 times Jupiter’s mass, while the star has about 85 times Jupiter’s mass. Both are small by stellar standards, and the brown dwarf’s entire orbit could fit within the Sun’s diameter.

Android gets AI defenses against messaging scams, fake calls

Google announced new AI-powered defenses against scam messages and call-forwarding abuse on Android, currently rolling out to eligible devices.

The new measures aim to address the increased sophistication of scams targeting mobile users, including fraudulent bank alerts and voice-cloning attacks.

“Mobile scams have evolved far beyond basic robocalls and phishing texts, turning into sophisticated operations that use spoofed numbers, fake bank alerts, and AI voice cloning,” Google says.