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A recent discovery by William & Mary and University of Michigan researchers transforms our understanding of one of the most important laws of modern physics. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, has broad implications for science, impacting everything from nanotechnology to our understanding of the solar system.

“This changes everything, even our ideas about planetary formation,” said Mumtaz Qazilbash, associate professor of physics at William & Mary and co-author on the paper. “The full extent of what this means is an important question and, frankly, one I will be continuing to think about.”

Qazilbash and two W&M graduate students, Zhen Xing and Patrick McArdle, were asked by a team of engineers from the University of Michigan to help them test whether Planck’s radiation law, a foundational scientific principle grounded in quantum mechanics, applies at the smallest length scales.

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MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Intelligence and Decision Technologies Group yesterday unveiled a neural network capable of explaining its reasoning. It’s the latest attack on the black box problem, and a new tool for combating biased AI.

Dubbed the Transparency by Design Network (TbD-net), MIT’s latest machine learning marvel is a neural network designed to answer complex questions about images. The network parses a query by breaking it down into subtasks that are handled by individual modules.

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An incurable affliction that gradually destroys a person’s ability to walk, speak, and eventually breathe can also deteriorate the mind, new research suggests. People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are more likely to have other mental and behavioral health problems than people without the condition, the study found.

ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neurologic condition that affects some 20,000 Americans at any one time. In ALS, a person’s motor neurons throughout their body and brain steadily die off. These neurons are responsible for helping us carry out voluntary movement.

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Graphene — an ultrathin material consisting of a single layer of interlinked carbon atoms — is considered a promising candidate for the nanoelectronics of the future. In theory, it should allow clock rates up to a thousand times faster than today’s silicon-based electronics. Scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), have now shown for the first time that graphene can actually convert electronic signals with frequencies in the gigahertz range — which correspond to today’s clock rates — extremely efficiently into signals with several times higher frequency. The researchers present their results in the scientific journal Nature.

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Of all the problems facing humanity, which should we focus on solving first?

In a compelling talk about how to make the world better, moral philosopher Will MacAskill provides a framework for answering this question based on the philosophy of “effective altruism” — and shares ideas for taking on three pressing global issues.

Of all the problems facing humanity, which should we focus on solving first? In a compelling talk about how to make the world better, moral philosopher Will MacAskill provides a framework for answering this question based on the philosophy of.

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