A new sensing system called SonicBoom could help agricultural robots navigate cluttered environments where visual sensors struggle.
Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, SonicBoom uses tiny contact microphones to sense sound and localize objects that a robotic arm touches.
Interestingly, these robots could help farmers harvest crops even in increasingly challenging conditions, such as rising temperatures.
Understanding how the universe transitioned from darkness to light with the formation of the first stars and galaxies is a key turning point in the universe’s development, known as the Cosmic Dawn. However, even with the most powerful telescopes, we can’t directly observe these earliest stars, so determining their properties is one of the biggest challenges in astronomy.
Now, an international group of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge has shown that we will be able to learn about the masses of the earliest stars by studying a specific radio signal—created by hydrogen atoms filling the gaps between star-forming regions—originating just a hundred million years after the Big Bang.
By studying how the first stars and their remnants affected this signal, called the 21-centimeter signal, the researchers have shown that future radio telescopes will help us understand the very early universe, and how it transformed from a nearly homogeneous mass of mostly hydrogen to the incredible complexity we see today. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Chances are that you have unknowingly encountered compelling online content that was created, either wholly or in part, by some version of a Large Language Model (LLM). As these AI resources, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, become more proficient at generating near-human-quality writing, it has become more difficult to distinguish between purely human writing from content that was either modified or entirely generated by LLMs.
This spike in questionable authorship has raised concerns in the academic community that AI-generated content has been quietly creeping into peer-reviewed publications.
To shed light on just how widespread LLM content is in academic writing, a team of U.S. and German researchers analyzed more than 15 million biomedical abstracts on PubMed to determine if LLMs have had a detectable impact on specific word choices in journal articles.
D.P. Kroese, Z.I. Botev, T. Taimre, R. Vaisman. Data Science and Machine Learning: Mathematical and Statistical Methods, Chapman and Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, 2019.
The purpose of this book is to provide an accessible, yet comprehensive textbook intended for students interested in gaining a better understanding of the mathematics and statistics that underpin the rich variety of ideas and machine learning algorithms in data science.
Trained on multi-hospital data, iSeg spots moving tumors doctors sometimes miss, edging radiation treatment toward pinpoint perfection.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting about 10% of people over the age of 65 and one third of people aged 85 and above. Besides environmental factors, the genes have a strong influence on whether or not a person develops AD during their lifetime.
Through genome sequencing of DNA from large groups of healthy people and people with AD, some naturally occurring small changes in the DNA, known as genetic variants, were found to be more frequent in AD patients than in healthy people.
As more and more of these AD-associated genetic “risk” variants are discovered, it is now possible to calculate a person’s individual polygenic risk score (PRS), meaning the likelihood of the person developing AD, with high accuracy.
New research has revealed alarming coral mortality rates of 92% after last year’s bleaching event at Lizard Island on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, marking one of the highest coral mortality rates ever documented globally.
The study Coral bleaching and mass mortality at Lizard Island revealed by drone imagery’ has been published in Coral Reefs.
The team assessed the impact of the Fourth Global Coral Bleaching Event, declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in April 2024, which caused extensive bleaching and mortality across the reef system.
Inspired by the “Harry Potter” stories and the Disney Channel show “Wizards of Waverly Place,” 7-year-old Sabrina Corsetti emphatically declared to her parents one afternoon that she was, in fact, a wizard.
“My dad turned to me and said that, if I really wanted to be a wizard, then I should become a physicist. Physicists are the real wizards of the world,” she recalls.
That conversation stuck with Corsetti throughout her childhood, all the way up to her decision to double-major in physics and math in college, which set her on a path to MIT, where she is now a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
While her work may not involve incantations or magic wands, Corsetti’s research centers on an area that often produces astonishing results: integrated photonics. A relatively young field, integrated photonics involves building computer chips that route light instead of electricity, enabling compact and scalable solutions for applications ranging from communications to sensing.
MIT graduate student Sabrina Corsetti is exploring the cutting edge of integrated photonics, which involves building computer chips that route light instead of electricity. Her projects have included a chip-sized 3D printer and miniaturized optical systems for quantum computing.