A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Notre Dame has broken the world record for optical switching speed in quantum well LEDs. The gallium nitride micro-LED device has an optical modulation bandwidth of 2.75 gigahertz while consuming just 25 milliwatts of power. Its design was optimized […]
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Claude, are increasingly being used to provide health information to the public. Although this is beneficial for improving access to treatment information, their limitations were revealed by a new study that found LLMs were biased in their treatment choices and using these outputs in practice could drive […]
Scientists have discovered a class of metal that can unexpectedly resist extreme cold using an unusual mechanism. Normally such temperatures would make similar materials brittle and vulnerable to breaking. The findings point to new principles for designing materials for cryogenic environments. An international team led by University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and […]
Scientists have developed remarkably long, precisely patterned molecular threads that could open new possibilities for designing advanced materials. The scientists also discovered these threads — called supramolecular polymers — can dramatically enhance brain cell activity. Built from self-assembling molecules, the longest threads reach dimensions greater than the diameter of a cell. By molecular standards, they […]
When light or sound bounces around inside an oddly shaped room, its reflections can quickly become difficult to predict. But new research led by scientists at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) shows that waves can behave very differently when they travel through a special class of materials. The […]
Somewhere between the microscopic realm of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of human beings, something strange happens: The rules of quantum physics, which work so exquisitely for tiny atoms, seem to lose their grip as objects grow larger. Pondering where and how this shift from small-scale quantum fuzziness to everyday sharp certainty happens gives […]
A giant volcanic eruption acted a little like Vesuvius, but across an entire landscape in the Andes, burying the terrain beneath it and preserving information that would otherwise have been lost to erosion and deformation. Recently, the researchers looked at this vast expanse of volcanic rock that erupted from the Lauca Caldera in northern Chile […]
Researchers at Nagoya University have built a graphene nanoribbon that can switch which way it twists using a natural solvent. Graphene nanoribbons are thin ribbon-shaped structures made of fused carbon rings. Twisted or helical versions of these ribbons show promise for advanced light and electronic devices. However, no graphene nanoribbon could switch that twist on […]
The kind of technology that can deliver sound to a single listener—like something out of a spy film—may soon become a reality. Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have developed a speaker system that can direct speech to a specific person. Light and sound behave differently. Light from a flashlight or laser […]
At the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions to billions of times that of our sun and some of the most extreme gravity in the universe. Some stars that venture too close to such black holes live to tell the tale. Rather than being completely destroyed, they survive […]