Author: Melissa Lee, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics, Monash University Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90, has […]
How can scientists see the intricate details inside cells far too small for regular light microscopes? A powerful technique called expansion microscopy is revolutionizing how researchers study tiny organisms from plankton to developing embryos. Making the invisible visible Expansion microscopy works by doing the opposite to what we had been doing until now: instead of […]
Light can do more than illuminate matter. In some metal complexes, it can break chemical bonds in a highly controlled way, releasing specific molecules only when and where light is applied. This idea lies behind photoactivated chemotherapy, a strategy in which relatively inactive compounds become chemically reactive after irradiation. Ruthenium complexes are among the most […]
Artificial Intelligence • Biology • Computer science • Genetics
Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor. It’s the first language model designed for […]
In recent years, “twistronics” has shown that simply changing how two crystal layers sit on top of each other can completely transform their electronic behavior. When two lattices are slightly mismatched in size or rotated by a small angle, they create a larger repeating interference pattern called a moiré superlattice. This long-wavelength pattern acts like […]
DELTA is a 1.5-GeV synchrotron radiation source operated by the TU Dortmund University. This singular university-based facility with emphasis on research and education, offers high degree of flexibility both for user experiments and accelerator physics and technology. Most of the world’s synchrotrons are designed to provide a continuous supply of radiation to users in a […]
Earth’s atmosphere is a vast, swirling engine of weather and climate. Jet streams race across continents, storms spin into hurricanes, and invisible eddies churn the air at every scale. For decades, scientists have struggled to understand exactly how energy and swirling motion flow through these turbulent systems, especially in the layered zones where the air […]
New research numerically demonstrates how carefully structured materials can control light in ways that are both precise and robust. It brings together ideas from photonics and topology to show how a laser can emerge from the boundary between two distinct optical regimes. The physical system considered in the study is a bilayer photonic crystal. A […]
Korean researchers have confirmed that underground wireless communication is possible, moving beyond the terrestrial wireless communication they have primarily focused on until now. This opened up a new wireless channel for confirming the survival of buried people in the event of a collapse of an underground facility such as a mine, conducting underground rescue operations […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
Every time a computer processes information, electrons shuttle through circuits carrying electric charge, and much of the energy they carry is wasted as heat. Spintronics proposes a different approach: instead of relying solely on the charge of electrons, exploit another of their properties called spin, a quantum-mechanical quantity that can be thought of as a […]