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All-optical chip achieves 100-fold speed boost over top-tier NVIDIA chips

Scientists in China have unveiled a new AI chip called LightGen that is 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient than NVIDIA chips, the leading supplier of AI chips worldwide. Instead of using electricity to move information, this new optical chip relies on light to perform complex generative tasks.

Traditional general AI models, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, run on everyday silicon chips and require massive amounts of computing power and electricity, which can generate significant heat. For particularly complex tasks, these chips can struggle with the workload, resulting in slow processing times.

Feral AI gossip with the potential to spread damage and shame will become more frequent, researchers warn

“Feral” gossip spread via AI bots is likely to become more frequent and pervasive, causing reputational damage and shame, humiliation, anxiety, and distress, researchers have warned.

Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini don’t just make things up—they generate and spread gossip, complete with negative evaluations and juicy rumors that can cause real-world harm, according to new analysis by philosophers Joel Krueger and Lucy Osler from the University of Exeter.

The research is published in the journal Ethics and Information Technology.

Helping AI agents search to get the best results out of large language models

Whether you’re a scientist brainstorming research ideas or a CEO hoping to automate a task in human resources or finance, you’ll find that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming the assistants you didn’t know you needed. In particular, many professionals are tapping into the talents of semi-autonomous software systems called AI agents, which can call on AI at specific points to solve problems and complete tasks.

AI agents are particularly effective when they use large language models (LLMs) because those systems are powerful, efficient, and adaptable. One way to program such technology is by describing in code what you want your system to do (the “workflow”), including when it should use an LLM. If you were a software company trying to revamp your old codebase to use a more modern programming language for better optimizations and safety, you might build a system that uses an LLM to translate the codebase one file at a time, testing each file as you go.

But what happens when LLMs make mistakes? You’ll want the agent to backtrack to make another attempt, incorporating lessons it learned from previous mistakes.

New computer vision method links photos to floor plans with pixel-level accuracy

For people, matching what they see on the ground to a map is second nature. For computers, it has been a major challenge. A Cornell research team has introduced a new method that helps machines make these connections—an advance that could improve robotics, navigation systems, and 3D modeling.

The work, presented at the 2025 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and published on the arXiv preprint server, tackles a major weakness in today’s computer vision tools. Current systems perform well when comparing similar images, but they falter when the views differ dramatically, such as linking a street-level photo to a simple map or architectural drawing.

The new approach teaches machines to find pixel-level matches between a photo and a floor plan, even when the two look completely different. Kuan Wei Huang, a doctoral student in computer science, is the first author; the co-authors are Noah Snavely, a professor at Cornell Tech; Bharath Hariharan, an associate professor at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science; and undergraduate Brandon Li, a computer science student.

More eyes on the skies can help planes reduce climate-warming contrails

Aviation’s climate impact is partly due to contrails—condensation that a plane streaks across the sky when it flies through icy and humid layers of the atmosphere. Contrails trap heat that radiates from the planet’s surface, and while the magnitude of this impact is uncertain, several studies suggest contrails may be responsible for about half of aviation’s climate impact.

Pilots could conceivably reduce their planes’ climate impact by avoiding contrail-prone regions, similarly to making altitude adjustments to avoid turbulence. But to do so requires knowing where in the sky contrails are likely to form.

To make these predictions, scientists are studying images of contrails that have formed in the past. Images taken by geostationary satellites are one of the main tools scientists use to develop contrail identification and avoidance systems.

Anything-goes ‘anyons’ may be at the root of surprising quantum experiments

“When you have anyons in the system, what happens is each anyon may try to move, but it’s frustrated by the presence of other anyons,” Todadri explains. “This frustration happens even if the anyons are extremely far away from each other. And that’s a purely quantum mechanical effect.”

Even so, the team looked for conditions in which anyons might break out of this frustration and move as one macroscopic fluid. Anyons are formed when electrons splinter into fractions of themselves under certain conditions in two-dimensional, single-atom-thin materials, such as MoTe2. Scientists had previously observed that MoTe2 exhibits the FQAH, in which electrons fractionalize, without the help of an external magnetic field.

AI uncovers double-strangeness: A new double-Lambda hypernucleus

Researchers from the High Energy Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute (PRI) in Japan and their international collaborators have made a discovery that bridges artificial intelligence and nuclear physics. By applying deep learning techniques to a vast amount of unexamined nuclear emulsion data from the J-PARC E07 experiment, the team identified, for the first time in 25 years, a new double-Lambda hypernucleus.

This marks the world’s first AI-assisted observation of such an exotic nucleus—an atomic nucleus containing two strange quarks. The finding, published in Nature Communications, represents a major advance in experimental nuclear physics and provides new insight into the composition of neutron star cores, one of the most extreme environments in the universe.

Quantum entanglement could connect drones for disaster relief, bypassing traditional networks

Any time you use a device to communicate information—an email, a text message, any data transfer—the information in that transmission crosses the open internet, where it could be intercepted. Such communications are also reliant on internet connectivity, often including wireless signal on either or both ends of a transmission.

But what if two—or 10, or 100, or 1,000—entities could be connected in such a way that they could communicate information without any of those security or connectivity concerns?

That’s the challenge that Alexander DeRieux, a Virginia Tech Ph.D. student and Bradley Fellow in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the advisement of Professor Walid Saad, set out to tackle using quantum entanglement. In short, they used the unique properties of quantum bits, or qubits, as a method of transmitting information.

This Brain Discovery Could Change How ADHD Is Treated

Attention disorders such as ADHD arise when the brain struggles to separate important signals from irrelevant noise. At any moment, the brain is flooded with information, and staying focused depends on filtering out distractions while responding to what matters most. Most current treatments address

Scientists Extract Metabolic Molecules From Million-Year-Old Fossils for the First Time

Fossils can reveal far more than the shapes of ancient creatures. Molecules preserved inside old animal bones provide clues about past diseases, what those animals ate, and the climates they lived in. For the first time, researchers have examined metabolism-related molecules preserved in fossiliz

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