Scientists are monitoring a city of Chicago-sized swath of rising ground at the northern volcanic rim of the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park. Scientists say the area has risen an inch since July.
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Can Science Explain Everything? — Sean Carroll
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VIDEO NOTES
Sean Carroll is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science.
AI House Davos
Embodied AI refers to AI integrated into physical systems that can perceive, reason, and act in the real world through sensors and actuators, like robots and autonomous vehicles. This fireside conversation explores how advances in AI like vision–language–action models are redefining what machines can understand and do, especially as we move from navigation to mobile manipulation. The speakers discuss how quickly today’s rapid progress in AI might transfer to robotics and embodied systems, and how soon we can expect to see these technologies making a tangible impact on our daily lives.
Speakers.
Yann LeCun (Advanced Machine Intelligence, Founder and Executive Chairman)
Marc Pollefeys (ETH Zürich and Faculty, ETH AI Center, Professor)
© AI House Davos 2026
Founders & Strategic Partners:
ETH AI Center, Merantix, G42, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, EPFL AI Center, The University of Tokyo.
Presenting Partners:
KPMG.
Scientists Discover a New “Cleanup Hub” Inside the Human Brain
How does the brain clear away waste? This task is handled by the brain’s lymphatic drainage system, and attempts to understand how it operates have driven major advances in brain imaging.
A new study published in iScience by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina reports the first human evidence of a previously unrecognized center of lymphatic drainage in the brain, the middle meningeal artery (MMA).
Using a NASA collaboration that gave them access to real-time MRI tools originally designed to study how spaceflight alters fluid movement in the brain, the MUSC team, led by Onder Albayram, Ph.D., followed the movement of cerebrospinal and interstitial fluids along the MMA in five healthy volunteers over six hours. Their observations showed that cerebrospinal fluid moved slowly and passively, a pattern consistent with lymphatic drainage rather than blood circulation, which would be faster and more pulsatile.
Breakthrough laser technique holds quantum matter in stable packets
For the first time, physicists have generated and observed stable bright matter-wave solitons with attractive interactions within a grid of laser light.
In the quantum world, atoms usually travel as waves that spread out, but solitons stay concentrated in one spot. They have been created before in open space, but this is the first time they have been stabilized inside a repeating laser structure using attractive forces. This development gives scientists a new way to hold and guide clusters of atoms, a key requirement for developing future quantum technologies.
The research is published in a paper in Physical Review Letters.
Hydrogen’s role in generating free electrons in silicon finally explained
Researchers announced that they have achieved the world’s first elucidation of how hydrogen produces free electrons through the interaction with certain defects in silicon. The achievement has the potential to improve how insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) are designed and manufactured, making them more efficient and reducing their power loss. It is also expected to open up possibilities for future devices using ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) materials.
In the global drive toward carbon neutrality, efforts to make power electronics more efficient and energy-saving are accelerating worldwide. IGBTs are key components responsible for power conversion, so improving their efficiency is a major priority. While hydrogen ion implantation has been used for about half a century to control electron concentration in silicon, the underlying mechanism has remained unclear until now.
In 2023, Mitsubishi Electric and University of Tsukuba jointly discovered a defect complex in silicon that contributes to increasing electron concentration. They confirmed that this complex is formed when an interstitial silicon pair and hydrogen bind, but the reason why free electrons are newly generated in this process was still unclear.