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Is violent AI-human conflict inevitable?

Are you worried that artificial intelligence and humans will go to war? AI experts are. In 2023, a group of elite thinkers signed onto the Center for AI Safety’s statement that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

In a survey published in 2024, 38% to 51% of top-tier AI researchers assigned a probability of at least 10% to the statement “advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction.”

The worry is not about the Large Language Models (LLMs) of today, which are essentially huge autocomplete machines, but about Advanced General Intelligence (AGI)—still hypothetical long-term planning agents that can substitute for human labor across a wide range of society’s economic systems.

Scientists discover 63 new young asteroid families—more than doubling the previous number

Young asteroids—which formed much later than those that were created during the formation of our solar system—are typically created when larger asteroids, planetesimals, or comets collide and break up into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces form “asteroid families” that share certain properties, like their semimajor axis, eccentricity, and inclination—all of which describe their orbital paths.

Scientists generally describe young asteroid families as being less than around 10–15 million years old and consisting of at least three members. New research, published in the journal Icarus, just revealed 63 newly discovered young asteroid families less than around 10 million years old. While many of these young families are likely to exist in our solar system, only 43 had been previously documented. The new study used a five-dimensional Hierarchical Clustering Method (HCM) with a catalog of 1.25 million asteroid orbits, which enabled the team to bring the total number of known young asteroid families to 106.

The team searched for clustering in proper orbital elements (semimajor axis, eccentricity, inclination, nodal and perihelion longitudes) at various times in the past 10 million years to find groups with similar elements.

Sensor platform uses nanopore ‘speed cameras’ to pinpoint gases in complex mixtures

From breath analysis to explosive detection, many applications require reliable electronic “noses.” Unfortunately, current technology often falls short. That is why researchers at KU Leuven have developed a flexible sensor platform that not only detects gases, but also records their speed—like a speed camera.

Improved models of heavy ion collisions reveal new details of early universe nuclear matter

A researcher, Heikki Mäntysaari from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), has been part of an international research group that has made significant advances in modeling heavy ion collisions. New computer models provide additional information about the matter in the early universe and improve our understanding of the extremely hot and dense nuclear matter. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Physicists realize time-varying strong coupling in a magnonic system

Time-varying systems, materials with properties that change over time, have opened new possibilities for the experimental manipulation of waves. Contrarily to static systems, which exhibit the same properties over time, these materials break so-called temporal translation symmetry. This in turn prompts the emergence of various fascinating phenomena, including time reflection, refraction and diffraction.

New method enables simultaneous synthesis of all 21 types of tRNA in vitro

Collaborative research by the University of Tokyo and RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research has led to the development of a new method for simultaneously synthesizing all transfer RNA (tRNA) required for protein synthesis in a reconstituted translation system in vitro.

Quantum error correction codes enable efficient scaling to hundreds of thousands of qubits

A new class of highly efficient and scalable quantum low-density parity-check error correction codes, capable of performance approaching the theoretical hashing bound, has been developed by scientists at the Institute of Science, Tokyo, Japan. These novel error correction codes can handle quantum codes with hundreds of thousands of qubits, potentially enabling large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing, with applications in diverse fields, including quantum chemistry and optimization problems.

Steel production could get a makeover: Study captures real-time iron formation at the nanoscale

A research team at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has investigated a new method to produce iron, the main component of steel. For the first time, the researchers were able to observe chemical reactions and iron formation in real-time at the nanometer scale.

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