Mimicking animals is a proven strategy in robot design. Take, for example, Haibo Dong’s seminal studies on how fins propel fish by churning the water in a vortex.
Researchers from Skoltech, Universitat Politècnica de València, Institute of Spectroscopy of RAS, University of Warsaw, and University of Iceland have demonstrated the spontaneous formation and synchronization of multiple quantum vortices in optically excited semiconductor microcavities.
Upon ultrafast photoexcitation, an all-dielectric nonlocal metasurface enables giant dichroism and birefringence modulations, working as a quarter-waveplate actively reconfigurable over picoseconds.
Thousands of light particles can merge into a type of “super photon” under certain conditions. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now been able to use “tiny nano molds” to influence the design of this so-called Bose-Einstein condensate. This enables them to shape the speck of light into a simple lattice structure consisting of four points of light arranged in quadratic form. Such structures could potentially be used in the future to make the exchange of information between multiple participants tap-proof.
The results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters (“Bose-Einstein Condensation of Photons in a Four-Site Quantum Ring”).
By creating indents on the reflective surfaces (shown on the left in an exaggerated form; the reflective surfaceis facing upwards), the researchers were able to imprint a structure ontothe photon condensate (right). (Image: IAP, Universität Bonn)
Advances in generative AI mean fake images, videos, audio and bots are now everywhere. But studies have revealed the best ways to tell if something is real.
By Jeremy Hsu
Diamonds are forever 💎 A team of scientists from UniMelb, RMIT University and The City College of New York were able to observe lightning in a diamond ⚡️ Diamond chips can potentially be used in electronics and are more powerful than silicon. Tap to learn more ➡️
We also don’t yet fully understand how charges flow inside diamond, and how unavoidable impurities and defects affect these electrical properties.
In a recent study with colleagues from the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and the City College of New York, we sought to combine electrical measurements of a diamond optoelectronic device with 3D optical microscopy.
Continue reading “Lightning in a diamond to power the quantum revolution” »
Young Consulting has confirmed it lost sensitive data on almost a million people in a ransomware attack that happened earlier in 2024.
The company confirmed the news by sending out data breach notification letters to exactly 954,177 customers, which said it became aware of “technical difficulties” in its computer environment in mid-April 2024.
SpaceX satellite internet service Starlink said it will comply with court orders to block social network X in Brazil.
Billions of dollars worth of investment rounds later, the Financial Times is now reporting that the company is finally looking to shed its nonprofit status once and for all.
The company is reportedly in talks to raise further new funds, giving it a valuation of north of $100 billion and potentially making it one of the most valuable Silicon Valley firms ever.
OpenAI has since denied the reporting, arguing in a statement to the FT that “the nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist.”
Prefatory Note: Our usual policy at The Threepenny Review is to assign one book to one author. But in this case two of our longtime writers—P. N. Furbank, an essayist, critic, and biographer who lives in London, and Louis B. Jones, a novelist and essayist who lives in the Sierra foothills—both wanted to review the same book. So we let them. We think the results are instructive: not oppositional, not mutually contradictory, but very different approaches to the same subject. We are also pleased that neither Jones nor Furbank trained as a professional philosopher. (After all, philosophical theories, if they bear on reality, should be meaningful to the rest of us.) So here they are—first Jones, then Furbank—commenting on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, out in the fall of 2012 in both America and England from Oxford University Press.
My stranded trailer in the woods looks onto a clearing where wild sweet pea vies with starthistle, fescue with blue-eye grass and miner’s lettuce, all competing as they’ve done, possibly, since the Sierra first crumbled into soil and started inviting plants to colonize. It is a patch of ground, then, that existed through the geologic ages in the peculiar twilight oblivion of being unwitnessed—until the first Maidu people came along, probably climbing up from the creek below. Before the Maidu, the witnesses of the place were the animals. And now these days I’m here, to substantiate this little clearing’s existence. It’s almost a weary old joke in philosophy, but still a surefire, hard-to-retire joke—that I’m necessary to this clearing’s existence. My mind. The joke, however, is making a serious, small comeback in this century.
