OpenAI claims that GPT-5.4 Thinking can do professional tasks, but I'm not so sure if that's fully accurate. [...]

When NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, it did more than change the asteroid’s local orbit — it slightly shifted the path of the entire asteroid pair around the Sun. The impact blasted debris into space, doubling the force of the spacecraft’s hit and nudging the [...]

If you're looking for the safest way to browse on your Android phone, consider the Tor Browser over more popular options. [...]

Magnetoelectric nanoparticles embedded in a hydrogel and delivered by a threaded acupuncture needle activate mast cells under magnetic fields, producing controllable, sustained pain relief without electrodes. [...]

Study of 250 European firms finds organisational bottlenecks, not weak science, are the main barrier to turning nanotechnology discoveries into real-world products. [...]

Scientists have found a way to significantly boost “blue energy,” which generates electricity from the mixing of saltwater and freshwater. By coating nanopores with lipid molecules that create a friction-reducing water layer, they enabled ions to pass through much more efficiently while keeping the process highly selective. Their prototype membrane [...]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. “Anyone wanna host a get together in SF and pull this up on a 100 inch TV?”  The author of that post on X was referring to an online [...]

In high-stakes settings like medical diagnostics, users often want to know what led a computer vision model to make a certain prediction, so they can determine whether to trust its output.Concept bottleneck modeling is one method that enables artificial intelligence systems to explain their decision-making process. These methods force a [...]

Engineers have discovered an unexpected link between two very different realms of physics: the behavior of electrons in graphene and magnetic waves in specially engineered materials. By designing a thin magnetic film with a hexagonal pattern of holes—similar to graphene’s structure—the researchers showed that magnetic “spin waves” can follow the [...]

Looking for a simple way to protect your electronics from power surges and tracking software? These tiny gadgets can make a big difference. [...]

A gel held together entirely by interlocking DNA rings exhibits mechanical properties unlike any conventional gel, driven purely by topology. [...]

After a three-year hiatus and considerable anticipation, Sony's latest flagship headphones impress on nearly every front. [...]

Physicists have discovered a surprising new “Island of Inversion” in a place no one expected: among nuclei where the number of protons equals the number of neutrons. For decades, these strange regions—where atomic nuclei abandon their usual orderly structure and become strongly deformed—were thought to exist only in highly neutron-rich [...]

An autonomous platform uses machine learning and patterned light to detect and terminate cardiac arrhythmias in real time without electrical shocks. [...]

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and the AI company Anthropic has raised a deep and still unanswered question: Does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the [...]

Scott Shambaugh didn’t think twice when he denied an AI agent’s request to contribute to matplotlib, a software library that he helps manage. Like many open-source projects, matplotlib has been overwhelmed by a glut of AI code contributions, and so Shambaugh and his fellow maintainers have instituted a policy that [...]

The transformational potential of AI is already well established. Enterprise use cases are building momentum and organizations are transitioning from pilot projects to AI in production. Companies are no longer just talking about AI; they are redirecting budgets and resources to make it happen. Many are already experimenting with agentic [...]

Many engineering challenges come down to the same headache — too many knobs to turn and too few chances to test them. Whether tuning a power grid or designing a safer vehicle, each evaluation can be costly, and there may be hundreds of variables that could matter.Consider car safety design. [...]

Advanced AI tools fail to find a link between the physical structure of the brain and navigation ability, challenging decades of neuroscientific assumptions. [...]

As millions turn to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots for therapy-style advice, new research from Brown University raises a serious red flag: even when instructed to act like trained therapists, these systems routinely break core ethical standards of mental health care. In side-by-side evaluations with peer counselors and licensed psychologists, [...]

During a summer internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate student of robotics engineering at Olin College of Engineering, took a hands-on approach to testing algorithms for underwater navigation. She first discovered her love for working with underwater robotics as an intern at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution [...]

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) are designed to solve complex problems by breaking them down into a series of smaller steps. These powerful models are particularly good at challenging tasks like advanced programming and multistep planning.But developing reasoning models demands an enormous amount of computation and energy due to inefficiencies [...]

Qubits, the heart of quantum computers, can change performance in fractions of a second — but until now, scientists couldn’t see it happening. Researchers at NBI have built a real-time monitoring system that tracks these rapid fluctuations about 100 times faster than previous methods. Using fast FPGA-based control hardware, they [...]

Neuromorphic computers modeled after the human brain can now solve the complex equations behind physics simulations — something once thought possible only with energy-hungry supercomputers. The breakthrough could lead to powerful, low-energy supercomputers while revealing new secrets about how our brains process information. [...]

Researchers developed an advanced AI system named YORU that can identify specific animal behaviors with over 90% accuracy across multiple species. By combining this high-speed recognition with optogenetics, the team successfully demonstrated the ability to shut down specific brain circuits in real-time using targeted light. [...]